that called in question the whole post-war order. Strikes in the seventies meant that the average worker was not working for nearly a fortnight every year (‘average’ is not the right word: large unions alone were involved, and not all of them) whereas in the fifties the figure had been three days. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, who had the face of a large and angry baby, would harangue the nation on a television that was switched off after 10 p.m. In 1974 he launched an election distinguished by the abstention of 2 million of his natural supporters, lost, and was replaced by a man who pandered to the unions. The Stock Exchange sank to a pitiful level and banks went under. The country was about one third as well-off as Germany, and in parts of the North there were areas that even resembled Communist Poland. In 1970 a rising figure in the political-media world of London, Ferdinand Mount, remembered that, from the capital, ‘the main railway line to the north passed through great swathes of devastation — industrial wastelands with rows of roofless workshops — the roofs had been removed in order to avoid taxes’. Why had this decline come about, in a country which, after the war, had been still the second-greatest exporter in the world? It was partly that the pound had become a very strong currency, and latterly because there was oil in the North Sea, but the fall of exports was really to do with ‘poor quality, late delivery, trade union restrictions, timid and defeatist management’. In fact Keynes himself, towards the end of the war, had bitterly hoped that the Germans would still have enough bombing power to obliterate some of the worst-managed industries. As things were, the obliteration happened painfully a generation later.
There was of course a great British problem, that the old industries had been the very first in the world, and, to a lesser extent, that their old markets were declining. In its way, the London Underground symbolized the entire national problem. It had been the first network in the world and was a triumph of engineering in the 1860s. But back then tunnels had to be extremely deep, whereas a generation later engineering had advanced and the Paris metro, say, was far shallower. London was stuck with a museum piece, and still is (the government at the time of the Millennium opting, quite characteristically for governments of the epoch, to build an entirely pointless structure, the Dome, at great expense instead of appealing to Londoners to put up with trouble for five years in order to have a state-of-the-art transport system). British industry entered upon a decline, and the means selected to stop it only made things worse. The facts were indeed as Ferdinand Mount had said, an awful litany of uncompetitiveness, and it had happened to other country-empires in the past. An economic pundit of the sixties, Thomas Balogh, opined that England was going the way of Spain: she too had run an empire upon which the sun never set, and in the seventeenth century had declined very rapidly, as the contrast, to this day, of North and South America shows. But this was the wrong parallel. There was a much closer one, with Holland. The British Empire had not been, like Spain’s, a military-religious affair, involving wide settlement and the forcible conversion or assimilation of natives: it had been, like Holland’s, a commercial business, and it was abandoned when commercial logic dictated as much. Once India had gone, in 1947, there was little sense in trying to retain the rest in the face of local nationalists who, if given their way, would agree to keep the commercial ties going.
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
