In his 1982 book On Britain, that Anglophile German, Ralf Dahrendorf, was to opine that Britons lacked that urge for material achievement which drove… - Correlli Barnett

The 1902 Act led to a major expansion in secondary education, so that by 1914 there were 1,123 such schools, of which 500 were directly run by the local authorities while the remainder was denominational. Unfortunately, the prestige of a "grammar school" education, itself derived from the Arnoldian public school, with its emphasis on the academic approach to both the arts and science, impressed itself on parents, local authorities, and the Board of Education alike, so excluding a system of alternative secondary education of equal standing, like the German Realschule, more related to Britain's existence as a commercial and technical power.

The truth is that the Labour Government, advised by its resident economic pundits, freely chose not to make the re-equipping of Britain as an industrial society the Schwerpunkt of her use of Marshall Aid. Instead, the Government saw Marshall Aid (like the American loan of 1945) primarily as a wad of greenbacks stuffed by a kindly Uncle Sam into the breeches pocket of a nearly bankrupt John Bull who, though diligently seeking future solvency, nevertheless still wished in the meantime to go on playing the squire, beneficent to his family and the poor, and grand among the neighbours.

The importance of war and military institutions has been generally neglected in British historical writing, whose tone has been set by the Whig and liberal emphasis on peaceful constitutional progress. In this liberal view war appears as an aberration, an interruption of a "natural" condition of peace: almost as a form of delinquency unworthy of intellectual attention. The liberal, pacifistic view of history can only be maintained by resolute aversion of the gaze from the facts. For conflict between tribal or social groups and nations constitutes the essential human condition in the absence of a world-state with a monopoly of force. The relations between nation states have always been those of a struggle for advantage and domination, where friendships may indeed burgeon while interests temporarily coincide, but then again languish when those interests diverge. Peace and war in history flow continually in and out of each other, alternative aspects of the single phenomenon of the struggle for power. It is false and unrealistic therefore to divide policy between hard-and-fast categories of "peace" and "war". Policy may shade all the way from trade and diplomatic rivalry through indirect conflict and limited war to total war; the distinctions are of degree, not of kind