With the outbreak of war in 1914 the internationalists in the Liberal and Labour parties, already losing credit, seemed to go into intellectual bankr… - Correlli Barnett

In his 1982 book On Britain, that Anglophile German, Ralf Dahrendorf, was to opine that Britons lacked that urge for material achievement which drove his fellow countrymen... The consumer boom of the mid-1980s, when the British were to rush to the household super-stores to stuff their houses with new furnishings and electrical kit of every kind (most of it imported), might seem to prove Dahrendorf wrong. Yet in fact this spending was to be mostly done with borrowed money, thanks to the ballooning, soon punctured, of property values. It did not represent the fruits of extra effort and careful saving, as had the German "middle-class" lifestyle to which Dahrendorf referred and which constituted the outward manifestation of a genuine economic miracle. Even after undergoing Margaret Thatcher's strident sermons on the "enterprise culture" in the 1980s, most Britons (according to opinion polls) still aspired to be comfortable rather than rich – an aspiration which, even if morally admirable, hardly compares with greed as a psychological motor of economic growth.

Since the Great War was an artillery war, shells for field and medium guns stood at the top of the list. But that list also included motor transport, aircraft and aero-engines, small arms and ammunition, telecommunications kit, drugs, and later, tanks and poison gas. It was here that "the audit of war" (to coin a phrase) in 1914–1916 showed up the British industrial system as widely inadequate or obsolescent... To take the basic industrial sinew, British steel production in 1910 was little more than half the German total... According to the History of the Ministry of Munitions: "British manufacturers were behind other countries in research, plant and method. Many of the iron and steel firms were working on a small scale, old systems and uneconomic plant, their cost of production being so high that competition with the steel works of the United States and Germany was becoming impossible". In fact, this history draws the conclusion that in 1914–1916, "it was only the ability of the Allies to import shell and shell steel from neutral America...that averted the decisive victory of the enemy". More than 50 per cent of shells fired off in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 were American and Canadian.

The evidence also justifies a verdict that the British character in peacetime...lacked not only hardness of mind, but also (except perhaps among the trade union barons and the shop-floor mutineers) hardness of will. In a corruption of the virtue of tolerance into a vice, the British too readily put up with slackness; they shrank from weeding out and discarding the incompetent, whether these wore the executive homburg or the workman's overalls or the teacher's gown. They lacked, moreover, the dynamism powered in America by individual and corporate ambition and in post-war Germany by obsession with Leistung (achievement). For long since out of fashion in Britain was the restless energy displayed by British entrepreneurship in the full momentum of the industrial revolution. Instead, in the shrewd diagnosis of a distinguished economic commentator in 1963 (and fully justified by the historical evidence), "The very niceness of the British, the national desire to do the decent thing...has become an enormous force for immobilisme..."