The war embraced infinitely complex elements and motives. The most important single one of those elements was the struggle for power in Europe, and t… - Correlli Barnett

In late January 1941...formal staff conversations were held in Washington at which the British delegation pressed again the key importance (as they saw it) of Singapore, and urged that America should base there as strong a detachment of her Pacific Fleet (including battleships) as possible. An American battlefleet to Singapore! It was a solution to the imperial dilemma that would have astonished and dismayed Beatty and Amery. It marked a tacit acknowledgment that after two decades Britain's imperial bluff had at last been called by events; and that she had reached the point of bankruptcy in terms of world maritime power.

[I]t was the young pilots of Fighter Command who passed into British myth as "The Few" who outfought vast German airfleets. Today, 70 years on, we can acknowledge that the young men in the Messerschmitts were just as gallant, high-spirited and skilful. But whereas the German pilots were fighting for a hideous tyrant in the delusion that they were patriotically defending the Fatherland, the pilots of Fighter Command were modern-day Spartans, holding the pass for the free world against the barbarian. They included volunteers from the British Dominions overseas, from countries under Nazi occupation such as Czechoslovakia and Poland, and even a handful from neutral America.

Industrialisation in Britain had been a "bottom-upwards" grass-roots transformation brought about by the initiative of the individual "practical man", and without benefit of state guidance or intervention. This was in accordance with British political and commercial attitudes already deeply ingrained by the time that the Industrial Revolution got under way. For the British had come to prize individualism and localism, as against a strong and effective state, which they saw as the essential feature of the European despotisms they feared and hated... This traditional British dislike of the state was sharpened and given fresh doctrinal justification during the Industrial Revolution by the laissez-faire political economists, laissez-faire becoming, by 1850, a universal article of political faith. Even with regard to education, all must be left to private enterprise or private charity. In any case, it was thought, state intervention in education could lead towards tyranny. A national education system devised and directed by the state was therefore unthinkable.