Now...came a further threat to the power of employers (no longer "masters"): the arrival of national trade unions or federations of unions. So the em… - Correlli Barnett

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 enough; that France, by capitulating, had left them to carry on the war alone against overwhelming odds. These were complaints which the British, who had been hardly more than spectators of the battle, were singularly ill-qualified to make. For it was, after all, only the logical, if not the inevitable, consequences of the entire course of British policy towards France in the previous twenty years, and of the whole pattern of British grand strategy and re-armament in the 1930s, that France should virtually alone have to fight the decisive land battle against Germany, a nation twice her size; and that she should therefore lose that battle.
Now the British were face to face with the doom which, step by step, illusion by illusion, they had brought down on themselves – a war without an ally against two great powers, possibly three; their own island in danger; an ill-defended and immensely vulnerable empire; and an inadequate industrial machine; and insufficient and fast-dwindling national wealth.

[A]fter all the arguments and lobbyings of 1934–5, the proposal to make friends with Japan in order to free English resources to meet the German menace petered out.
It had indeed really been foredoomed from the start, for while its proponents had been shrewd enough in their object, they had been unrealistic to the point of naïveté in thinking that it might be possible to win Japan's friendship without coming to a deal over China. In any case, even if the Government itself had been willing to conclude such a deal, it would have been vetoed by public opinion. For in 1934–5 the National Government was not in the position of an eighteenth-century administration, looking to a body of opinion composed of solid country squires, with the hardness and realism born of life on the land, and a relish for a shrewd and profitable deal. Instead there was a volatile mass electorate; an urban, rootless and emotional middle class, always ready to get in the fidgets of moral indignation.

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.