Britain in particular was again paying the penalty for a hundred years of Free Trade policy. This had rendered her dependent on enormous quantities o… - Correlli Barnett

The war embraced infinitely complex elements and motives. The most important single one of those elements was the struggle for power in Europe, and the world. Between 1870 and 1914 Britain and France had been stagnant and declining in comparative industrial vigour. They nevertheless owned great territories and enjoyed vast traditional overseas markets. Germany...had been comfortably and steadily taking over the markets before 1914; she would have liked the possessions as well. No wonder France and Britain had been so much in favour of defending the political status quo. Yet, as the endless surges and recessions of power throughout history indicate, a fixed status quo is an absurdity because static. The problem of the world of nation states before 1914 was the eternal problem of continually adjusting political structure so that it always fits and expresses the reality of power.

Does not Mr E. P. Thompson see any connexion between the internal nature of the Soviet empire as an oligarchic tyranny and its external policies? As a former communist he must know that the Soviet regime is of its very nature and from earliest origins a minority conspiracy that has gained and maintained power by force and trickery; that because of this inherent nature it always has been and remains terrified of independent centres of thought or power, whether within the Russian empire or beyond its present reach. It is the conjunction of such a regime, and its manifested wish to dominate others, with armed forces powerful beyond the needs of mere defence that is the engine of the present "armaments race". Who believes that Nato and its armaments would exist if Russia had been a Western-style open society for these last 60 years? The first requirement for large-scale nuclear or any other kind of disarmament is the withering away of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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.