As I can remember, as a schoolboy in south London, there was no dismay among my family and their friends at the sight of contorted vapour trails high… - Correlli Barnett

Of course I entirely agree...that the British plight consists in a low-wage, low-investment, low-productivity economy. I suggest...that the peculiar structure, history and attitudes of British trades union is—and has been for a century—largely, although not wholly, responsible for this dismal cycle. You cannot pay high wages unless you have already achieved high productivity. You cannot achieve high productivity unless the workforce is prepared to operate modern machines to the utmost of the machines' capacity. Yet for all the glib talk by trades union leaders about improving productivity, everyone knows that British industry is fettered by demarcations and other restrictive practices aimed at preserving somebody's "property right" in a particular task. This in turn must affect British industry's attitude to investment; for what, it may well think, is the point of investing vast sums in advanced processes if it is not to be permitted to work them to their full potential. Surely, therefore, the necessary switch to a high-wage economy cannot be achieved in isolation, by the process of "free collective bargaining" (ie, extortion of money by menaces or force), but only in step with a parallel switch to high productivity and investment. Are Mr Scanlon's members—and other British workers—prepared to match the efficiency, flexibility, cooperativeness and zeal of German workers—or do they really simply want more money for going on as they are?

Noble though the wartime aspirations of the liberal Establishment might be, New Jerusalem nevertheless constituted – just like the postwar illusion of Britain as a present and future world and Commonwealth power, or the pre-war faith in the League of Nations as a preserver of world law and order – a piece of romantic fantasising, rather like some gigantic palace in an engraving by Piranesi. And just as Piranse's imagination defied the laws of physics and geometry, so did the dreamers of New Jerusalem disregard the real-life problem of funding its construction out of what was now a bankrupt and backward industrial economy instead of the richest in the world that it had been in their youth.

The French, in their attitude to making peace, were...preoccupied with the question of Germany's power in the future; a future which they saw as one of continued rivalry between nations.
The British and the Americans, on the other hand, had no such hard, clear-cut policy; felt no such overriding concern with German power. In the first place they shared the liberal assumption that the normal human condition was what they called "peace"; a natural harmony in which "war" was simply a meaningless and regrettable breakdown. They did not agree with the Clausewitzian view that "peace" and "war" were alternating aspects of a perpetual conflict of interest between organised human groups, a conflict which can express itself in mere economic and diplomatic rivalry; in threats of force; in covert violence or open pressure; in local use of force; in limited war; or finally, in total war. The notion that the Allied victory in the Great War was just one episode in a continuing struggle, from which the maximum advantage must be derived for the next episode, was therefore alien and repellent to them.