It must be left to Cunningham himself to sum up the success of "Operation Judgment": "Taranto, and the night of November 11th–12th, 1940, should be r… - Correlli Barnett

Except in rare cases such as Robert Owen's paternalistic management at New Lanark, the brutality of indoctrination into the life of a coolie in a vast camp for coolies, performing coolie work in service to machines, was unsoftened by positive care and control by the state. Not until the great uprooting and resettlement had been largely completed did Parliament belatedly begin to mitigate the squalor, chaos and exploitation by reforms in local government and public health, and by regulating working conditions by successive Factory Acts... This was the environment, then, which moulded the character of the new British working class: a home life in a mean brick hovel without piped water in an unpaved street with open drains, much like the townships in which the Bantu coolies of South Africa still live today; a working life at the mercy of a "practical-man" master who believed that the profitability of his business depended on low wages and long hours. It was, after all, from the study of the British working class that Marx and Engels principally derived their conception of the alienated proletariat.

Now...came a further threat to the power of employers (no longer "masters"): the arrival of national trade unions or federations of unions. So the employers too began to organise themselves on an industry-wide scale. Their purpose was well expressed by Colonel Dyer, the American leader of the Federation of Engineering Employers (founded in 1896), in respect of his own industry. It was "to obtain the freedom to manage their own affairs which has proved so beneficial to the American manufacturers as to enable them to compete...in what was formally an English monopoly..." Just how far that freedom had been cumulatively shackled by the past step-by-step gains of the trade unions was revealed by books and newspaper campaigns urging Britain to "wake up" to German and American competition. In 1894 appeared the bestselling British Industries and Foreign Competition. In 1896 followed a "Made in Germany" press panic, on publication of a book under that title. In 1901 the Daily Mail followed a Daily Express series entitled "Wake up England!" with its own on "American Invaders". In 1900–1901 The Times, governing-class opinion incarnate, ran major articles on "The Crisis in British Industry" and "American Competition and Progress". Technical journals critically examined the efficiency of particular industries. All exposed British owners and managers as now widely old-fashioned in outlook, lethargic in action, and smug. But also fully explored was the opposition of the unions to new machines and new methods; the shackling effect of union restrictive practices on efficiency and productivity.

There are of course the neo-Puginites or neo-Morrisites who like to think of Britain as leading the world into a post-industrial phase where this form of capability will be obsolete, and who despise so material a matter as GNP as unethical or—the trendy version—unecological. Yet these high-minded escapists are among the first to howl about the need for more resources to be invested in hospitals, schools, good works, prison improvement, subsidies for the arts and what not. A country of static or declining GNP will not be an 'Erewhon' but a pinched and increasingly bitter place. Poverty may be noble as a concept; it is rarely so in in the flesh.