[G]iven that we are today a country that would be as bankrupt as British Steel if it were not for the lucky strike of North Sea oil, and that our gro… - Correlli Barnett

It was the grimmest legacy ever inherited by an English Prime Minister; a situation probably beyond remedy even by statesmanship of the most far-sighted and cool-headed genius. The first and urgent question, the question which filled the minds of War Cabinet and nation alike, was whether the United Kingdom itself could for long survive in the face of the immensely powerful forces, elated with victory, which were gathering just across the narrow seas; or whether the swastika would fly above the Houses of Parliament and on the church towers of the English countryside, and the boots of a foreign conqueror stand on the soil of England for the first time since the Middle Ages.
It was a time for former moralising internationalists either to repent, or skulk behind the armed forces they had sought so devotedly to dismantle. For this was the hour, an hour too long delayed, when England returned to herself; when English policy once again spoke in broadsides instead of sermons. To the world's astonishment, the nation which had allowed itself to be represented by – which had even seen itself mirrored in – men like Baldwin, MacDonald, Henderson, Simon, Chamberlain, reverted of a sudden to its eighteenth-century character, hard as a cannon.

From 30 January 1933 onwards the English had had to deal with a German government whose leader poured public scorn of the utmost brutality on the fundamental beliefs by which the English had come to live. In Nazi Germany and post-evangelical England the utterly incompatible products of two different strains of romanticism now confronted one another – the German, with its mystical and atavistic outlook on race and nationhood, its obsession with power and domination, its neurotic love of violence; and the English, with its faith in the moral law, its vision of the brotherhood of man, its trust in the essential goodness of human nature, its pacific gentleness and compassion. Such a confrontation could only end in a tragedy of misunderstanding.

Britain came out of the Second World War as an obsolescent industrial economy with grievous weaknesses. Instead of first devoting all possible resources and effort to remedying this, she chose to load this economy with the vast and potentially limitless cost of the welfare state; current expenditure before capital investment; the patterns of the next thirty years.