Britain came out of the Second World War as an obsolescent industrial economy with grievous weaknesses. Instead of first devoting all possible resour… - Correlli Barnett

Industrialisation in Britain had been a "bottom-upwards" grass-roots transformation brought about by the initiative of the individual "practical man", and without benefit of state guidance or intervention. This was in accordance with British political and commercial attitudes already deeply ingrained by the time that the Industrial Revolution got under way. For the British had come to prize individualism and localism, as against a strong and effective state, which they saw as the essential feature of the European despotisms they feared and hated... This traditional British dislike of the state was sharpened and given fresh doctrinal justification during the Industrial Revolution by the laissez-faire political economists, laissez-faire becoming, by 1850, a universal article of political faith. Even with regard to education, all must be left to private enterprise or private charity. In any case, it was thought, state intervention in education could lead towards tyranny. A national education system devised and directed by the state was therefore unthinkable.

[T]he Victorian public school is one of the keys to our decline, turning out by means of curriculum and the moulding influence of school life alike a governing class ignorant of, and antipathetic towards, science, technology and industry, and which despised the qualities needed for success in a competitive industrialised world as those of the cad and the bounder. I would suggest that it is a matter for concern rather than self-congratulation that the broad strategy of contemporary British state education, from primary school to higher education, perpetuates under new guises the Arnoldian, Thringian and Newmanian ideals of a "liberal education"; and that it can be argued that even now we are not sufficiently directing our education towards preparing young people to make their way—and their country's way—in the world.

For full employment also execrated a by-product highly poisonous to the health of the nation's economy as a whole: the so-called "wage-price" spiral of inflation. This weakened the cost-competitiveness of British exports, so in turn menacing the balance of payments, the international standing of the pound, the survival of the Sterling Area, and ultimately the grandiose but wobbly facade of Britain as a world power. Moreover, even full employment's comforting warm milk of abundant pay-packets and easy profits only served to render the British economy at home fat and flabby, so that even dud companies (especially in older technologies) found it easy to keep bumbling along.