Cobden in his boundless mid-Victorian optimism about free trade could no more have imagined such a plight than Adam Smith could have imagined refrige… - Correlli Barnett

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.

The deal between the French and the Israelis was struck in Paris on 1 October 1956. An eighteenth-century British cabinet would not have hesitated to join in... In contrast, Eden's cabinet was riven by moral squeamishness; so too were the house prefects of the Foreign Office.
The irony lay in that the political and psychological shackles which the morally squeamish now found so uncomfortable had been forged by themselves. It was they and their predecessors who since 1918 had brought about the prevailing climate of opinion in which a state's naked pursuit of self-interest, if necessary by armed diplomacy, if necessary by war, was deemed a sin, even a crime. In furtherance of their romantic vision that a "world community" ruled by law could, and would, replace the existing world arena of group struggle, they and their predecessors had first created the League of Nations and its futile Covenant, and then, after the Second World War, the United Nations Organisation and its Charter. Since this document outlawed war except in clear cases of self-defence, it now supplied an peculiarly uncomfortable shackle for Britain, for here she was, a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council and yet secretly plotting to revert to realpolitik.

In his 1982 book On Britain, that Anglophile German, Ralf Dahrendorf, was to opine that Britons lacked that urge for material achievement which drove his fellow countrymen... The consumer boom of the mid-1980s, when the British were to rush to the household super-stores to stuff their houses with new furnishings and electrical kit of every kind (most of it imported), might seem to prove Dahrendorf wrong. Yet in fact this spending was to be mostly done with borrowed money, thanks to the ballooning, soon punctured, of property values. It did not represent the fruits of extra effort and careful saving, as had the German "middle-class" lifestyle to which Dahrendorf referred and which constituted the outward manifestation of a genuine economic miracle. Even after undergoing Margaret Thatcher's strident sermons on the "enterprise culture" in the 1980s, most Britons (according to opinion polls) still aspired to be comfortable rather than rich – an aspiration which, even if morally admirable, hardly compares with greed as a psychological motor of economic growth.