In provoking even the peace-loving and feeble Addington Cabinet into a unanimous decision for war Bonaparte had committed the most catastrophic blund… - Correlli Barnett

In May 1956...a working party of officials submitted a report on "German Competition with particular reference to the Engineering Industries". It made grim reading. Between 1953 and 1954 German exports rose by 40 per cent in volume and her share of world trade in manufactures rose from 13.3 per cent to 15.6 per cent, whereas Britain's share fell from 25.5 per cent to 19.8 per cent. In those same years output per man in manufacturing "improved almost twice as much in Germany as in the United Kingdom".

It remained only for Britain during the war to pour out the rest of the investments and the gold on the purchase of war supplies from the United States, while at the same time cutting visible exports to a third of the 1938 level for the sake of war production, and the basis of Britain's economic existence for the last hundred years had been comprehensively destroyed.
In 1945 Britain was therefore left by this nemesis of free trade with none of the advantages of being highly dependent on foreign trade, and all the vulnerability. In the immediate postwar era, and for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution, she would have to depend almost entirely on visible exports in order to secure the life and work of the nation and to rebuild her old prosperity.

In terms of British society at home, this transformation of national character was wholly beneficent. It was a great achievement of Victorian moralism to have softened British life and manners; to have created British civic virtue and self-discipline, and brought about standards of personal and public honesty unequalled in the world; to have rendered the law virtually self-enforcing; to have given the British their special sense of the dignity and liberty of the individual, and, as a corollary, their sense of the individual's personal responsibility. Yet it was exactly because British life itself was now so orderly, gentle, docile, safe and law-abiding, so decent, so founded on mutual trust that the British were less fitted to survive as a nation than their ancestors, whose characters had been formed in a coarse, tough and brutal society. For the British made the fundamental mistake, catastrophic in all its consequences, of exporting their romantic idealism and their evangelical morality into international relations... And so, in applying the qualities of gentleness, trustfulness, altruism and a strict regard for moral conduct to a sphere of human activity where cunning, cynicism, opportunism, trickery and force, all in the service of national self-interest, still held sway, the twentieth-century British stood disarmed and blinded by their own virtues.