Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

In fact the thirties had seen what amounted to a collapse of prices in the goods that made empire worth the game, and in any case the expense of running empire became prohibitive, especially after the Second World War. In the mid-fifties the imperial trade was still larger than the non-imperial, and there was a last flourishing of old exports and capital investment. But then Europe recovered spectacularly, and these markets counted for more and more, quite soon half of British trade. Governments in the later fifties therefore wanted rid of colonies; a process of decolonization got very rapidly under way. The older colonial hands (and some of the younger officers, who were hard-working and idealistic) knew that problems on the ground were not simple, that decolonization was not a matter to be rushed in case majorities coalesced around expropriation or worse of minorities. That was to be the pattern in many places, from Burma to Cyprus, but by now the British had had enough of these endless insoluble problems, and colonies were abandoned, helter-skelter. There was a formula: identification of least unpalatable power-wielder; minor member of royal family declares country open; Union Jack wobbles down masthead, cock-feathered-hatted governor at the salute; a few tears here and there; old hands stay on, to manage schools; new hands arrive, as advisers; native dances begin; new flag wobbles up; new anthem is sung; parliamentary mace is handed over; mayhem begins. Opinions vary as to why this happened and as to whether the British could have avoided it; but at any rate they were able to walk away with very, very few casualties, and kept bases and markets.

But history was conspiring. As with Holland, the initial and enormous success of industry inspired imitation, competition and overtaking; protected markets did not help, as creativity suffered. The trade unions were in part responsible, but so also was a supine and spoiled management that allowed the unions to get away with it. Then the declining industries were taken over by the State, which turned out to be even worse at management — the story of the sixties and seventies. Economic creativity shifted into banking, to lending abroad, and the City of London on the whole attracted the bright and mobile, not British industry. The same had happened with the Dutch two centuries before: the great yards of Rotterdam, where Peter the Great had worked and learned, rotted, and so did the myriad of small and tiny enterprises in the city’s hinterland, where endless wooden and iron parts had been ingeniously turned out in the past. Much the same now happened to Glasgow and its hinterland, which in 1914 had been responsible for fully one third of all ship-launchings; as Germans, Norwegians, Japanese, Koreans turned out mass-produced shipping of low cost and tolerable quality for the growing trade of the fifties and sixties, the Clyde and the Tyne were no longer able to compete, and the little Coatbridges and Bellshills to the east of Glasgow also went down. Liverpool, one of the grandest Victorian cities, was the worst affected, and its middle classes tended to move out, to Cheshire or the Wirral. These flourished. The comparison with Holland and Zeeland is an interesting one. Curiously enough, Catherine the Great started the extraordinary collection of the Hermitage, in the Winter Palace at St Petersburg, when she bought the collection of the long-term and legendary British Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, with Dutch money. She then failed to pay the Dutch back, and Holland went down.

The details of the British performance were overall dismal, at least if compared with Germany and France. The figures were endlessly repeated in gloomy articles in this period, as British commentators recognized what was happening (it was obvious enough just from a train window). In Germany and France, in the period 1960-73, management and workers just produced more per hour every year. Their productivity rose at 5.7 and 6.6 per cent respectively, as against a British figure of 4.1, and in the 1970s the gap grew. By then, on the official figures, Britain was even worse off than East Germany, and West Germans — especially a Hamburg Anglophile like Helmut Schmidt — shook their heads. The British share of world exports declined — one quarter in 1950, 14 per cent in 1964, under 10 in 1973. German exports rose from 7 per cent to one fifth, and then, in 1973, over 22 per cent. France stood at 10 per cent throughout. But the French direction of trade shifted away from colonies, which had accounted for nearly half of trade in 1952 but only one tenth by 1977. The Common Market accounted for the difference. The American share fell from over one quarter in 1950 to one fifth in 1964 and then one sixth in 1973, but of course the smaller share was quantitatively far larger. Japanese trade rose from almost nothing to 8.3 per cent in 1962 and 13 per cent in 1973. There was always an argument that the British decline was not really a decline at all, that the country had started from an artificially inflated position, that it was bound to lose ground as other countries learned, and therefore that there was nothing to worry about. But there was, and the collapse of British industry in the period after 1950 is a dismal story, in which areas that had been well and truly on the map of civilization shrunk into its edges. In the nineteenth century intelligent Germans asked why they were not British. A century later it would (or should: there was not much informed interest in Germany, and in 1989, when the Wall in Berlin came down, there were only eighty-nine passes in higher-level German in the entire London school area) have been the other way about.

Geoffrey Owen’s account of this is the most illuminating, as it examines various industries in turn to look at the problem in detail. There are various long-term and short-term questions. The longer-term ones are of considerable historical interest, and the quality of history written in the past generation in Great Britain is head and shoulders above that found elsewhere: the National Archives are the best in the world, though reaching them on the British transport system is itself a considerable test for scholarship. England had somehow modernized without ‘modernizing’: the political system consisted of living fossils, and there was not even a written constitution.

In the 1960s, as the country slipped, there was much head-shaking, and a small tidal wave of ink was spilled on reform of this or that part of the historical legacy — especially the matter of class. However, there was one recent inheritance that was hardly challenged at all: that of the Labour government in 1945. It was bathed in a golden glow of togetherness. In 1965 A. J. P. Taylor published his English History 1914-1945 , a brilliant book, and he (strongly Labour) ended it with the characteristic line, ‘Men no longer sang England, Arise! But England had arisen, just the same.’ Fifteen years later, as he looked out over rubbish-strewn streets in a not very fortunate part of London, his savings eaten by inflation, he was not so sure. Was there one single piece of legislation in that brave-dawn era which he would not have repealed? There had been widespread nationalization of industry and transport. They had a captured state market, and they provided employment — the National Health Service, providing medical attention cost-free, the largest non-military employer in Europe. But the record as the sixties and seventies went on was dismal. Nearly £100bn had been invested in the nationalized concerns and the annual return was −1 per cent. By 1982 nationalized industries had cost over £40bn in write-offs. The automobile-making British Leyland cost, in a ten-year period covering the seventies and early eighties, £3bn, and most of the once great British automobile industry became an international joke. In other countries, the failure of nationalized industry was not taken as self-evident. In England, it was a sort of non-violent protection racket, and to have a telephone installed or a piece of gas equipment repaired took the sort of little black-humour epic that Communist countries knew so well. However, the nationalized industries had not appeared for no reason: private concerns were not an advertisement for the alternative. In fact they themselves often appealed for state money, and became in effect nationalized.