As a consequence of this spiritual revolution English policy ceased to be founded solely on the expedient and opportunist pursuit of English interest… - Correlli Barnett

Growing foreign perils were perceived and promptly and fully reported, first to London and then to ministers. Some permanent officials, such as Crowe in his time and later Vansittart, struggled hard to convince governments of the need for a strong foreign policy, and to puncture the prevailing euphoria with a bodkin of realism. They failed. They failed because there was another, competing influence on politicians, a more congenial and therefore in the end a more effective influence: a constellation of moralising internationalist cliques, each with its ideas-peddlers, its contact-men in high places, and its tame press. These busy romantics – from Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lord Robert Cecil on the Right, through liberals like Smuts and Gilbert Murray in the middle to Kingsley Martin and Clifford Allen on the Left – not only believed, admirably enough, that morality rather than power ought to govern relations between states but acted as though it did... The internationalists successfully imposed on governments their pretension to speak for the inarticulate and unsounded body of the British nation; that is, to represent public opinion at large.

Between 1950 and 1952 the volume of British exports fell by 5 per cent (rearmament again), while German exports rose by over 50 per cent and American exports by about 20 per cent. In just those two years Britain's share of world trade in manufactures dropped from 26 per cent to 22 per cent. By the end of 1954 it was down to just over 20 per cent. In 1955 American exports of manufactured goods rose by about 9 per cent by value, Germany's by 18 per cent, Japan's by 27 per cent – and Britain's by 7 per cent.

In May 1956...a working party of officials submitted a report on "German Competition with particular reference to the Engineering Industries". It made grim reading. Between 1953 and 1954 German exports rose by 40 per cent in volume and her share of world trade in manufactures rose from 13.3 per cent to 15.6 per cent, whereas Britain's share fell from 25.5 per cent to 19.8 per cent. In those same years output per man in manufacturing "improved almost twice as much in Germany as in the United Kingdom".