For the British...Jutland has a much deeper significance, for it was in fact a defeat for British technology. More than that, as with the French at C… - Correlli Barnett

With regard to Blunt, we should remember that the 1920s and 1930s marked a high tide of romantic idealism, or high-minded priggishness, among the public school-educated British élite. Common-room Communism was not the only form of mandarin prize-assery to flourish; there were the League of Nations Union, the Peace Pledge Union, the Anglo-German Group and Anglo-German "Link", and numerous other groups or ad-hoc committees devoted to various "good causes". There was "Bloomsbury"; E. M. Forster as the grand guru of intellectual wetness. A web of personal relationships and inter-connecting memberships linked the different sects into what may fairly be described as "the Establishment". Blunt and co, having pushed romantic idealism to the point of treachery, simply take the cigar as the prizest, or most misguided, asses of them all.

[A]s Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao perceived, the basic concept of war as a continuation of politics by other means can be applied to any form of rivalry between human groups, be they class, racial or ideological. In these contexts "war", or the use of force to compel an opponent to fulfil one's will, has far broader meanings than a traditional punch-up between nation states or alliances, or the kind of "absolute" or "total" war which Clausewitz saw as conceptually the purest form and which we have witnessed twice this century. Thus we saw anti-nuclear protesters employ force at military installations in pursuit of the political aim of persuading Western governments into unilateral nuclear disarmament. We saw Greenpeace employ force against Shell plc over the disposal of the Brent Spar platform. We saw Arthur Scargill's troops attempt by coercion to bring down an elected government, only to be defeated in, quite literally, pitched battles. We may note in these encounters and, for that matter, in the street brawls during the World Cup, another fundamental factor that is unlikely to change in the future – the dark well of aggressiveness that lies within human nature and finds release in the pleasurable adrenalin surge that comes from violence, risk and danger.

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.