The Decline and Fall of the great British nation

I’m surprised that Danny Dorling’s “Rule Britannia – Brexit and the end of empire” which I recently mentioned does not make the connection between Brexit and the first word in the official name of our country – “Great”……Not even America has (so far) dared to try that trick…

So it may be the economic historians – rather than their social brethren or novelists - who hold the clue to the question of British identity?

Narratives about national economic performance certainly impact on our collective mind….I still remember the “What’s wrong with Britain” series of Penguin books in the 1960s as the country wrestled with post-war modernization.

Correlli Barnett became a favourite of Thatcher and her Ministers with his critique of the economic priorities of the Atlee government and its role in the British decline which has been a theme of economic writing for longer than I can remember - Larry Elliot has been a prominent exponent of “declinism” for the past couple of decades

In 1996 one of Britain’s foremost Scientific historians, David Edgerton  gave a critical assessment of one of Barnett’s books and has now published what looks to be a definitive analysis of the Rise and Fall of the British Nation

“Alone” became a word of lusty and emotive power at the core of a central national myth which privileged British destiny over that of other nation states. The glorification of “standing alone” in 1940 continues to pervert the United Kingdom’s sense of its place in the world and of foreigners’ obligations of respect and gratitude to its citizens.

Labour, Edgerton shows, consistently presented itself as a national rather than socialist party. Labour’s 1945 manifesto for the general election of 1945 promised to “put the nation above any sectional interest”. “Socialism” was mentioned once, “socialist” twice, “Britain” fourteen times, “British” twelve times, and “nation” or “national” nearly fifty times. Similarly, Labour presented itself in its general election manifesto of 1950 as “the true party of the nation”. The progressive Left has been more insidious in forming this mindset than the blimpish Right. The wearisome protests of historical exceptionalism and institutional distinctiveness are linked to another governing theme of Edgerton’s book: exaggerations of British inventive genius and the consequent tactical errors in research and development spending. Hark to Margaret Thatcher in her first speech as party leader to the Conservative Party conference in 1975.
 “We are the people who, among other things, invented the computer, refrigerator, electric motor, stethoscope, rayon, steam turbine, stainless steel, the tank, television, penicillin, radar, jet engine, hovercraft, float glass and carbon fibres. Oh, and the best half of Concorde.”

The false pride in supposedly being “the single inventor of . . . key parts of the atomic bomb, not to mention parliamentary democracy and the welfare state” is punctured by Edgerton. Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb and the PLUTO petrol pipeline, long celebrated for triumphant ingenuity, “were technical extravagances rather than necessities”, he judges.

The sorry tale of the Bloodhound, Skybolt, Blue Streak and Trident missile systems is recounted with devastating fairness. The government decision to build numerous advanced gas-cooled nuclear reactors (AGRs) and to persevere with a financially exorbitant but profitless development programme was “the crassest techno-nationalism trumping respect for efficiency”. There was ardent faith that unique British technical genius would renew and invigorate the national economy. Edgerton debunks the myth that the Westminster government failed to support its aircraft manufacturers sufficiently. The Ministries of Supply, Aviation and Technology backed numerous aircraft projects. “Far from the home sales being a springboard for export success, they were often the only sales, to an unwilling customer. The nationalized British airlines had to be forced to take on, or were indeed given, every large British aircraft produced.” Despite the Comet IV, the Britannia, the VC10 and Concorde, the nationalistically named airlines formed under Attlee’s Civil Aviation Act of 1946 preferred US aircraft for most long-haul flights.

No one dared to challenge the insistent propaganda that British high-tech inventiveness would yield lucrative exports. To oppose huge R&D expenditure on first-tier national projects was to hobble the export drive. “But the exports never came – no large hovercraft, no AGR, no Concorde was ever sold abroad”, writes Edgerton. “By the late 1960s, in private, within government, this was already known to be likely, but this truth was too scandalous, too unpatriotic to utter.”

One of my recent finds in second-hand bookshops here was an excoriating analysis of New Labour which came out in 2003 - Pretty Straight Guys. And Edgerton is fairly savage with that legacy too -

…. New Labour devised “a story of British exceptionalism to justify a newly global orientation of British armed force”. The UK was “reinvented . . . as a global contender”. It was implied that 10 million UK citizens living abroad needed to be defended – “presumably from the Americans, French, Australians and Spaniards among whom they lived”. The spin “even claimed dependence on foreign oil, when the UK was still a major oil producer”. Blair’s frenzy to establish global leadership, in alliance with a Republican President in the United States, resulted in the deaths and chaos of British military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. “These extraordinary failures destroyed the last vestiges of a belief that the British state and its agencies told the truth if not the whole truth”, writes Edgerton. “They also showed that the British state machine had lost the capacity for rational and critical examination of policy.”

A Brexit “Lucky Dip”

English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit; M. Wiener 1981

Routledge Handbook on the Politics of Brexit (2018)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/20/pathetic-incoherent-chaotic-europes-verdict-on-brexit-shambles

https://mondediplo.com/2019/02/01brexit

john harris; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/bitain-brexit-crisis-public-schools

https://centreforbrexitstudiesblog.wordpress.com/

OU Course https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=72026

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/01/meeting-our-makers-britain%E2%80%99s-long-industrial-decline

http://www.oecd.org/regreform/regulatory-policy/35258828.pdf (OECD 1997)

http://www.lse.ac.uk/globalGovernance/publications/workingPapers/regulationInAnAgeofAusterity.pdf

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60805/1/Gough_Theories-of-the-welfare-state_1978.pdf

Prisoners of the Past - Nostalgia and the Post-War Labour Party:; Richard Jobson (2018).