How Britain ignored the modern world

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Thirty years ago, Correlli Barnett wrote an angry book entitled The Collapse of British Power. It was a coruscating attack on British industrial, educational and strategic failure from Victorian times to the Second World War. At the very height of Britain's supposed power in the late 19th century, he showed that British industry was already flagging. American and German production of machine tools had overtaken our own. The British refused to acknowledge that by the 20th century, their Empire had become a drain and not an asset.

The public schools corroded the spirit of ruthless entrepreneurialism which had made the country great, with their pernicious doctrine that playing the game mattered more than winning. Our respect for culture at the expense of science and technology critically hampered our capacity to generate wealth. Barnett followed his first assault on Britain's record with The Audit of War, a broadside against our industrial record in the Second World War; and The Lost Victory, which pointed out that while other nations spent Marshall Aid on rebuilding their industry and infrastructure after 1945, the Attlee government indulged itself by using the American cash lifeline to create the Welfare State (though that did not prevent the Left from fiercely attacking American loans anyway).

Mrs Thatcher, not surprisingly, was captivated by the Barnett thesis. He became one of the favourite historians of her regime. Some other analysts were more sceptical. Sir Geoffrey Owen, for instance, has written a book on Britain's post-war industrial record which suggests that we did less badly than Barnett says and argues that it is too simplistic to blame our troubles on Etonian and Oxonian dilettantism.

But Barnett himself is not only impenitent, he is still as angry today as he was 30 years ago, about Britain's 20th century decline. His new book, The Verdict of Peace, completes his cycle by examining the nation's record between the Korean War in 1950, and the Suez debacle six years later.

When North Korea invaded the South and America determined to intervene, Washington demanded British support. The British government was highly sceptical about whether the Korean threat was as grave as the Americans supposed. The nation was also broke. Yet, in their anxiety to maintain the pretence that Britain was still a world power, Attlee and his colleagues committed troops and embarked on a huge rearmament programme which by 1952-53 was absorbing more than 10 per cent of Britain's GNP.

Barnett is withering in his contempt for Britain's delusion that helping America in Korea, or anywhere else, did anything to preserve our global status in the eyes of Truman or his successors: "The United States so esteemed Britain as a world power, and so valued the ' special relationship' as to press the Conservative government to join the European Defence Community." Then and later, the Americans wanted Britain as an important player in Europe, rather than as its partner in a bilateral Atlantic alliance.

He cites Keynes's repeated warnings to British governments, that they were overplaying their hands by seeking to maintain their worldwide interests: "All our reflex actions are those of a rich man," the economist observed sardonically in 1944. Barnett contrasts the fantasies of British ministers throughout the 1950s about expensive new imperial structures with the reality of inadequate industrial management, Luddite trade unions, and a woefully underfunded education system and national infrastructure.

Britain's national curses in peacetime, he declares in his peroration, are slackness, lack of will and steel, "Niceness - the desire 'to do the decent thing'. These qualities constituted then, and still constitute today, the emotional essence of small 'l' liberalism. They are qualities desirable in a friend, a neighbour or a colleague-and admirable in a citizen of democracy. But they serve ill as a guide to a nation's total strategy in a ruthless world of struggle". Appeasement has been Britain's vice, he says, whether of prewar dictators or postwar trade unions.

I think Barnett's denunciation of Britain's role in Korea is mistaken. In 1950 there was a Cold War. There was a worldwide threat from Communism, of which the North Korean invasion was a glaring manifestation. In one of his earlier books, the author was similarly scornful of British policy before 1941, antagonising Japan by opposing its aggression in Asia, when we lacked the military means to do anything-about it. But it is not necessary-to be Robin Cook to believe that there must be some moral dimension in foreign policy.

The author also takes little account of how hard it was bound to be to convert the British people to a realistic view of their own predicament after victory in two world wars and almost two centuries of global supremacy. But it is hard to dispute his central argument, that Britain failed to come to terms with the modern world for far too long, and paid a heavy price for its sluggishness. Barnett asserts that all British governments hate making hard choices. Not much has changed there, even in the 21st century.