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British policy was therefore the child of their insemination of the politicians – politicians like Baldwin and MacDonald, the Chamberlains, Simon and… - Correlli Barnett
" "British policy was therefore the child of their insemination of the politicians – politicians like Baldwin and MacDonald, the Chamberlains, Simon and Henderson, Halifax, Eden. It was as if the encumbents of quiet early-nineteenth-century rectories and nonconformist minister's houses had been miraculously transported into the great offices of State of a hundred years later. Instead of the suspicious minds of pre-Victorian statesmen, there was trustfulness; instead of a worldly scepticism, a childlike innocence and optimism. And instead of a toughness, even a ruthlessness, in the pursuit of English interests, there was a yielding readiness to appease the wrath of other nations. For the very bedrock of the national character had been crumbled since the eighteenth century. Whereas the pre-Victorian Englishman had been renowned for his quarrelsome temper and his willingness to back his argument with his fists – or his feet – now the modern British, like the elderly, shrank from conflict or unpleasantness of any kind. In Lord Vansittart's words: "Right or Left, everybody was for a quiet life."
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About Correlli Barnett
Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline".
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Correlli Douglas Barnett
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Additional quotes by Correlli Barnett
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.
[T]he Victorian public school is one of the keys to our decline, turning out by means of curriculum and the moulding influence of school life alike a governing class ignorant of, and antipathetic towards, science, technology and industry, and which despised the qualities needed for success in a competitive industrialised world as those of the cad and the bounder. I would suggest that it is a matter for concern rather than self-congratulation that the broad strategy of contemporary British state education, from primary school to higher education, perpetuates under new guises the Arnoldian, Thringian and Newmanian ideals of a "liberal education"; and that it can be argued that even now we are not sufficiently directing our education towards preparing young people to make their way—and their country's way—in the world.
Cobden in his boundless mid-Victorian optimism about free trade could no more have imagined such a plight than Adam Smith could have imagined refrigerated cargo ships bringing meat from the New World to undercut British livestock farmers. Perhaps their intellectual descendants today are at times too preoccupied with peacetime world trade and the advantages of economic specialisation between nations, to the neglect of the total-strategic implications in wartime of such specialisation. But at least Adam Smith himself recognised that, in his words, "defence, however, is of much greater importance than opulence".
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