The British complained at the time, and were long to complain afterwards, that the French had let them down; that the French army had not fought well… - Correlli Barnett

So the new or re-vamped public schools did not set out to equip their pupils to lead great industrial enterprises or a great industrial nation, but to turn them into Christian gentlemen able to govern the Empire and ornament the ancient professions like the Church and the Law. The eighteenth-century dissenting academy tradition of blending the arts and science into a practical preparation for a working life withered away. The prestige of the public schools as an avenue into gentility and the upper class seduced businessmen and engineers alike into sending their children to them. The public schools not only failed to educate a technical élite, they served to starve industry of the nation's highest available intellectual talent and the socially most prestigious groups. Industry and technology became what modern research confirms it still is in Britain—low in status, and hence, in a continual vicious circle, low in reward and low in human calibre compared with our rivals. By the 1850s an immense gulf had opened, from both sides, between industry and such education as there was—between the "practical man" despising education on the one hand, and the public schools on the other concentrating on the classics, religion and games.

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?

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 per cent; and of Japan by about 27 per cent.