[T]he essential and constant factor common to all three national academies [in Britain, France and America] is the indoctrination with tradition: pot… - Correlli Barnett

In Britain the pattern was early established, and forever continued, whereby at best management and workforce confronted each other in a state of suspended hostilities, like armies of observation: hardly a pattern that encouraged spontaneous zeal at the bench. In 1879 William Morris, himself a romantic and a socialist, could write: "It is true, and very sad to say, that if anyone nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by a gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he gets it well done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men's rights..." It was Hoggart's judgement in the early 1950s that fundamentally nothing had changed since Morris's day. And certainly the cumulative evidence about lacklustre output, absenteeism, stoppages and go-slows during the Second World War in industries ranging from coal and shipbuilding to aircraft manufacture bears this out, as does the appalling record for low productivity, strikes and shoddy workmanship which in the 1970s helped to destroy the British motor-vehicle industry. So the degree of motivation explains the performance; the performance demonstrates the degree of motivation; and the nature of the historical experience of the working class accounts for both.

[A]fter all the arguments and lobbyings of 1934–5, the proposal to make friends with Japan in order to free English resources to meet the German menace petered out.
It had indeed really been foredoomed from the start, for while its proponents had been shrewd enough in their object, they had been unrealistic to the point of naïveté in thinking that it might be possible to win Japan's friendship without coming to a deal over China. In any case, even if the Government itself had been willing to conclude such a deal, it would have been vetoed by public opinion. For in 1934–5 the National Government was not in the position of an eighteenth-century administration, looking to a body of opinion composed of solid country squires, with the hardness and realism born of life on the land, and a relish for a shrewd and profitable deal. Instead there was a volatile mass electorate; an urban, rootless and emotional middle class, always ready to get in the fidgets of moral indignation.

In 1955 British exports of manufactures rose by only 7 per cent by value over 1954; those of the United States by 9 per cent; of Germany, by about 18 per cent; and of Japan by about 27 per cent.