[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

With regard to Blunt, we should remember that the 1920s and 1930s marked a high tide of romantic idealism, or high-minded priggishness, among the public school-educated British élite. Common-room Communism was not the only form of mandarin prize-assery to flourish; there were the League of Nations Union, the Peace Pledge Union, the Anglo-German Group and Anglo-German "Link", and numerous other groups or ad-hoc committees devoted to various "good causes". There was "Bloomsbury"; E. M. Forster as the grand guru of intellectual wetness. A web of personal relationships and inter-connecting memberships linked the different sects into what may fairly be described as "the Establishment". Blunt and co, having pushed romantic idealism to the point of treachery, simply take the cigar as the prizest, or most misguided, asses of them all.

[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.

Between 1946 and 1950, the most desperate period of the post-war export campaign and of national dependence on American loans and handouts, there were sixteen major strikes in British docks, cumulatively involving nearly 137,000 workers and losing a total of over 1,000,000 worker-days. Between 1950 and 1955...the dockers were out eighteen times playing the big matches and 168 times in instant and short-lived kick-abouts. The big matches drew onto the pitch a cumulative total of nearly 155,000 players, costing nearly 2,000,000 worker-days.
But mere statistics cannot properly record the ramifying harm inflicted on British industry and commerce by these repeated blockades. For they meant export delivery dates missed and foreign customers infuriated; factories held up for want of raw materials and equipment from abroad; wholesalers and retailers running out of imported foodstuffs; transport to and from afflicted ports backing up in standstill and confusion; telegrams and telephone calls crowding an out-of-date and already overloaded telecommunications net as victims of the blockades tried to sort out their troubles; and an immense waste of time and effort by ministers and civil servants in attempting to deal with the strikes and their immediate impact. More insidious still was the moral harm done to Britain at home and abroad by such spectacular mutinies, further helping to convey the impression of a nation without disciplined purpose, and instead blindly intent on self-mutilation.