In the eighteenth century the English ruling classes – squirearchy, merchants, aristocracy – were men hard of mind and hard of will. Aggressive and a… - Correlli Barnett

Between the prejudices and the facts therefore the Cabinet could only follow a tortuous course of evasion. England's German policy became one of inherently futile expedients. Underlying these expedients was the illusion, extraordinary in view of Rumbold's and Phipps's reports, that the Nazi leaders would be accessible to reasoned argument and responsive to proofs of goodwill; a failure, per contra, to realise that English policy would carry no weight at all with the Nazis unless backed by English – and French – power and by an evident willingness to use that power.

Machine-tools, ball-bearings, magnetos, internal combustion engines, drugs – it is hard to name a basic necessity of advanced technology in which Britain was self-sufficient in 1915... Thus the audit rendered by the first two years of the war on Britain's own capabilities in newer technologies proved harsh enough. Nonetheless, economic historians might object that Britain's Victorian and Edwardian "total strategy" actually served her well enough in wartime. Thanks to her accumulated wealth and her credit as the centre of a global free trade economy and thanks also to British seapower, she could buy in all the technological imports that she needed – largely from North America. But there are two snags here. First, wealth and credit are wasting assets when spent, while the spending only serves to profit other countries' manufacturers and build up their industries. In contrast, up-to-date export industries of your own are long-term earners. Secondly, the high degree to which free trade had rendered Britain dependent on imports of food and raw materials actually brought her near to complete national defeat in 1917 at the hands of the U-boat... Moreover, even though the U-boat was narrowly beaten, Britain had to devote immense naval resources to the merely defensive purpose of keeping open her sea lifelines. This pattern was to be repeated in the Second World War.

How then was the Admiralty to find a fleet for Singapore, as had been repeatedly promised (though with waning conviction) to Australia and New Zealand before and since the outbreak of war with Germany and Italy? It went far deeper than a mere question of naval strategy and deployment. As Sir Samuel Hoare, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, had remarked to the 1937 Imperial Conference, "the very existence of the British Commonwealth as now constituted" rested on the ability of Britain to send a battlefleet to Singapore. But this in turn posed an even more profound question about Britain's very own existence as the centre of this oceanic empire, the immediate practical implications of which were so starkly confronting her leaders in the summer and autumn of 1941. For in retrospect it can be seen that it was an illusion for the British to believe that the Commonwealth and the Empire made Britain a great world power. Rather the strategic and economic balance sheet in 1941 demonstrates that the Commonwealth and Empire (with the notable exception of Canada and perhaps South Africa) were not an asset, but a net drain on Britain's strength; a predicament. For the imperial pink splashed across the map of the world in British atlases did not represent strength, as the British romantically believed, but one of the most outstanding examples of strategic overstretch in history.