A good grouse but why blame the liberals?
John Grigg
THE VERDICT OF PEACE by ComeHi Barnett Macmillan, 420, pp. 732, ISBN 0333679822 Like the Book of Jeremiah itself a contemporary jeremiad can be stimulating, and Correlli Barnett is a master of the genre. He has now completed a four-part polemic on the collapse of British power since its moment of glory in 1918, when Britain's 60 divisions on the Western front had won 'a crescendo of victories' forcing imperial Germany to sue for an armistice; when Britain possessed 'the largest navy and air force in the world'; and when the country's industrial machine was 'the most powerful in Europe', with old industries modernised and new technologies created to meet the demands of war. The story since then, he argues, has been 'tragic in the true dramatic sense', because it has been brought upon the British by themselves.
The rot began in the Twenties and Thirties, when vital gains of the war were thrown away as enfeebling myths about it captured the public mind. Britain's extraordinary achievement in it was discredited, and the war itself came to be seen as 'a futile carnage'. Ceasing to recognise the realities of power, the British fell for the 'romantic illusion' of the League of Nations, and continued to maintain worldwide responsibilities without the necessary armed strength, economic dynamism or imperial cohesion. This Dr Barnett describes as 'one of the most outstanding examples of strategic overextension in history'. The result was another war which Britain was lucky to survive, but from which it nevertheless emerged with many of its illusions intact. The British believed that their country was a victor in its own right, whereas in fact it had been 'towed home by the United States while the Red Army was gutting the Wehrmacht'. Hence the attempt, even after 1945, to maintain Britain's status as a world power, and the persistent failure to undertake drastic industrial, educational and institutional change.
The latest and last volume in Dr Barnett's baleful quartet begins with the Korean war in 1950-53 and ends with the Suez fiasco in 1956-57. It therefore covers a period when Labour and Conservative governments were in office, and when there were four prime ministers — Attlee, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. Dr Barnett sees little difference between the two parties, since both were prisoners of the same view of Britain's place in the world and of the same socio-economic assumptions. This seems not quite fair to Churchill's peacetime government, which at least dismantled the residual food rationing which Labour had kept in place, and made a start towards liberalising the tax system. All the same, there is much force in Dr Barnett's argument, and he rightly points to the failure of R. A. Butler's attempt to float the pound as an example of the postwar consensus blocking fundamental change.
Not for him the still fashionable opinion that Attlee presided over a radical reforming ministry. Apart from the decision to leave India, Dr Barnett sees nothing radical in the 1945 government's attitude to Britain's external commitments, though the country was bankrupt and entirely dependent upon the United States. At home, no effort was made to provide the means of escape from this condition of thraldom. The sort of nationalisation that Labour chose to introduce merely 'laid a new central bureaucracy on top of existing managements already stiff and slow enough'. Even the National Health Service is dismissed as a 'cumbersome Stalinist-style bureaucracy', only five of whose 14 regional hospital boards had got as far, by 1956, as accounting and administration 'based on ordinary electro-mechanical punched-card machines — let alone electronic data processing machines, let alone computers'. (One should note, however, that in 1979 the NHS was still so popular that even Margaret Thatcher had to promise that it would be safe in her hands.)
Dr Barnett is at his most devastating when he contrasts the British and French approaches to railway management in the postwar period_ Britain's nationalised railway system was from the first so crippled by Treasury limits on expenditure that even arrears of maintenance and repair could not be made good, and there could be no question of any large-scale re-equipment. In any case, the new regime was as backward-looking as the old. At the Festival of Britain in 1951 'British Railways showed off their major postwar technical innovation', the first of a new class of steam locomotives. Two years earlier the French SNCF had built its last steam engine. Under the direction of the brilliant engineer Louis Armand (who was a top Poly
technicien as well as a member of the Academic Francaise) France had, by 1955, electrified main lines from Paris to Lille, Toulouse and Lyon, and introduced diesel expresses to Normandy. Brittany and the Auvergne. Obviously the causes of the present British railway crisis go back long before the Major government's botched denationalisation measure, though that certainly did not help.
The Korean war gives us an early illustration of the pathetic tendency of postwar governments to make Britain act as a satellite of the United States while pretending to be an equal partner. It is possible that the substantial British military contribution to that war, which the country could ill afford, may have enabled Attlee to exercise some influence on the Truman administration's policy towards communist China. Possible, but doubtful (Dr Barnett discounts the idea). Certainly there have been many occasions since when automatic support has been given to America without any evidence at all of countervailing influence. At the beginning of a new millennium the Blair government is adhering to the tradition of subservience while continuing to talk of the 'special relationship'.
In the Suez crisis this supposedly unique bond of fellow-feeling and mutual confidence was non-existent on both sides. First, the Eden government entered into a conspiracy with France and Israel to destroy the Nasser regime in Egypt by force, without a word to the Americans. Then, faced with joint military action against Egypt (following a transparently fraudulent ultimatum), the Eisenhower administration denounced it and imposed sanctions which brought it swiftly to an end. Dr Barnett describes this episode as 'the reckoning', as though it were the inevitable consequence of all the mistakes and make-believe since 1918. But surely there was nothing inevitable about it. Rather. it should be seen as a one-off lurch into unspeakable folly, a contradiction of all that Britain in modern times, and indeed Eden himself, had stood for.
Part of the value of Dr Barnett's campaigning style is that it provokes annoyance. But there is one repetitive theme which is annoying without having much value, and that is his demonisation of what he calls small 'I' liberals. He presents them as the chief culprits in his story. But how then does he explain Britain's defeat of Germany in the Great War? There were more small 'I' (and, for that matter, large '1') liberals around in 1914 — including the two men who led Britain through the war — than during the period covered by Dr Barnett's quartet. Germany was already miles ahead of Britain in technical education and many of the author's other desiderata for success. Yet somehow the liberal British managed to adapt more effectively to the challenges of an unprecedented war than the Germans did. Are the two facts in no way connected?
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