[L]ate-Victorian Oxbridge positively harmed the prospects of the British economy by completing the work of the public schools in turning out a govern… - Correlli Barnett

[I]t was the shortage of resources – economic and financial – which posed by far the gravest question of all for the British Government after the fall of France in 1940. For whether or not England escaped defeat at the hands of the enemy, the mere continuance of the war would itself inevitably, inexorably, bring independent British power to an end through national bankruptcy and economic ruin. It was a situation which no British Government had had to face since England first emerged as a great power in the wars against Louis XIV.

Growing foreign perils were perceived and promptly and fully reported, first to London and then to ministers. Some permanent officials, such as Crowe in his time and later Vansittart, struggled hard to convince governments of the need for a strong foreign policy, and to puncture the prevailing euphoria with a bodkin of realism. They failed. They failed because there was another, competing influence on politicians, a more congenial and therefore in the end a more effective influence: a constellation of moralising internationalist cliques, each with its ideas-peddlers, its contact-men in high places, and its tame press. These busy romantics – from Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lord Robert Cecil on the Right, through liberals like Smuts and Gilbert Murray in the middle to Kingsley Martin and Clifford Allen on the Left – not only believed, admirably enough, that morality rather than power ought to govern relations between states but acted as though it did... The internationalists successfully imposed on governments their pretension to speak for the inarticulate and unsounded body of the British nation; that is, to represent public opinion at large.

With the outbreak of war in 1914 the internationalists in the Liberal and Labour parties, already losing credit, seemed to go into intellectual bankruptcy. The moral law was demonstrated to carry less weight than a military railway timetable. A solemn treaty was shown to have the protective power of a magic charm. The natural harmony of human interests was disproved by the spectacle of great nations at each other's throats. The pacifying and unifying effects of modern science and communications were ridiculed by the convenience with which railways launched into battle millions of men equipped with artillery and machine-guns. The liberal-evangelical faith in love, reason and the brotherhood of man was cruelly mocked by the ferocious hatreds bayed by the mobs in the great cities of Europe.