Introduction: Britain’s ‘Decline’

Three-quarters of a century ago, one of His Majesty’s Trade Commissioners regretted ‘that national self-depreciation which is so peculiar to Britishers and so irritating as a handicap to those who try to push the sale of British products overseas’.1 It was a habit of mind that has lasted right through to Corelli Barnett’s ‘English disease’, and its origins are traceable back to the second half of the nineteenth century. It started under the pressure of an emergent, united Germany, when German industry, with the support of German finance, introduced new qualities of competence and efficiency. ‘All the evidence agrees on the technological backwardness of much of British manufacturing industry’, yet the reasons for Germany’s success, David Landes argues, were ‘not material but rather social and institutional, implicit once again in what has been called the economics of backwardness’.2 For Eric Hobsbawm, however, ‘simple sociological explanations’ are ‘unacceptable’; the answer was the failure of privately owned business to modernize and amalgamate, for which the solution lay, quaintly, in systematic state control.3