In 1955 British exports of manufactures rose by only 7 per cent by value over 1954; those of the United States by 9 per cent; of Germany, by about 18… - Correlli Barnett

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.

Of course I entirely agree...that the British plight consists in a low-wage, low-investment, low-productivity economy. I suggest...that the peculiar structure, history and attitudes of British trades union is—and has been for a century—largely, although not wholly, responsible for this dismal cycle. You cannot pay high wages unless you have already achieved high productivity. You cannot achieve high productivity unless the workforce is prepared to operate modern machines to the utmost of the machines' capacity. Yet for all the glib talk by trades union leaders about improving productivity, everyone knows that British industry is fettered by demarcations and other restrictive practices aimed at preserving somebody's "property right" in a particular task. This in turn must affect British industry's attitude to investment; for what, it may well think, is the point of investing vast sums in advanced processes if it is not to be permitted to work them to their full potential. Surely, therefore, the necessary switch to a high-wage economy cannot be achieved in isolation, by the process of "free collective bargaining" (ie, extortion of money by menaces or force), but only in step with a parallel switch to high productivity and investment. Are Mr Scanlon's members—and other British workers—prepared to match the efficiency, flexibility, cooperativeness and zeal of German workers—or do they really simply want more money for going on as they are?

As a consequence of this spiritual revolution English policy ceased to be founded solely on the expedient and opportunist pursuit of English interests. International relations were no longer seen as being governed primarily by strategy, but by morality. As Gladstone put it in 1870: "The greatest triumph of our epoch will be the consecration of the idea of a public law as the fundamental principle of European politics."