Nearly one hundred years ago, Brooks Adams published a short essay
called "The Decay of England." Basing his views on the poor
performance of the British army in the Boer War, the decline of
English agriculture, a lack of entrepreneurial spirit ("the slackness
of London tradesmen"), and the part played by beer in Dickens's
novels, Adams foretold the end of Britain's nineteenth-century
preponderance. He did not welcome this, since he regarded England as
a "fortified outpost of the Anglo-Saxon race," whose future inability
to guarantee the European balance of power would soon require America
"to fight her own battle whether she will or no."

A hundred years later this prophecy has largely been realized.
Subsequently Britain was to help repel two German attempts at
expansion, but the effort was an exhausting one, and, after 1945, the
United States took over the uncomfortable business of maintaining the
European balance of power, as Adams had foreseen. Britain ceased to
be an empire--the most extensive collection of territories ever
accumulated by a European power was disposed of in some twenty-five
years--and is still criticized for backwardness and sloth, most
notably by British journalists. It is also still afflicted by the
bitter taste of a national orgy of self doubt. Thirty years after the
end of empire the shock is dying away, but it still visibly affects
those traditional governing classes who once acted with as supreme a
self-confidence as the Achesons and Lovetts who became their
replacements in the United States after 1945.

The liquidation of empire was, on the whole, well managed. It did not
include any episode as traumatic as France's departure from Algeria.
Nor did Britain suffer enemy occupation in World War II. On the
contrary in 1940, by a supreme effort and a heroic demonstration of
national unity, it enjoyed one of the most brilliant episodes of its
history. For any Englishman it seemed in the nature of things that
Hitler should join the line of European conquerors--Philip II, Louis
XIV, Napoleon--who had unsuccessfully tried conclusions with his
country. What happened accorded with the national myth. This
apotheosis cast a glow over the subsequent relinquishment of power,
which could be attributed to a disinterested moral gesture. As a
student in Paris between 1947 and 1951, I felt proud of this record.
It seemed that Britain was better governed than France, with its
political scandals and its fleeting ministries. Of our moral
superiority there was little question.

Later the glow faded. It was borne in on us that there is no such
thing as a free lunch. We were left in a cold world, in reduced
circumstances, with the fading glow of victory and a sense that
something was wrong with the way we were governed. In 1963 I wrote a
book, A State of England, where I used the phrase "Loss of power
means loss of purpose." Indeed. By then Britain was going through the
so-called "Swinging Sixties," and I was appalled by the triviality of
intellectual fashion and the irrelevance of what was on offer from
the prophets of the media. The "Swinging Sixties"!--Good Lord! In
fact, we were preparing to swing from a rope of our own making as we
sought to enter the competitive world of the European Economic
Community (EEC) while wrecking our schools, and as we burbled about
the wickedness of nuclear weapons while Khrushchev had them
transported to Cuba. Meanwhile, we were distracted and satisfied by
those oh so many brilliant people, those "sound" treasury officials
and "dynamic" company chairmen who, somehow or other, never succeeded
in pushing the country into earning its living or its people into
working harder. It was a horrible time. It is hard to describe the
feeling of deep depression that resulted from all this cheery chatter
of the new Carnaby Street culture, while England got poorer under a
Labour Prime Minister who promised everything that public relations
recommended.

The Great Retreat

The loss of nerve that afflicted the principalities and powers of
British life at this time is not perhaps surprising. Already before
the First World War a Conservative intellectual, Lord Hugh Cecil, had
seen what might be coming:

"Losses to a nation may be so great that they change the character of
the nation itself. It would be so with us if we lost our dominions
beyond the seas."

Indeed it seemed reasonable to suppose that a considerable upheaval
in national life would follow a gradual perception of loss of power.
But the perception was very gradual. As late as 1960 few people were
conscious of the full consequences of what was happening, though
their judgments and attitudes were already beginning to reflect the
continuous acceptance of an ethos of retreat and the pessimism it
engendered.

The process itself was not particularly surprising. Withdrawal from
control of the colonies was perhaps the most easily explicable aspect
of Britain's decline. It was Sir John Seely who described the British
empire as having been acquired "in a fit of absence of mind," but
there was also a logic to its extension. Behind those small colonies,
those bases and coaling-stations strung out along the world's sea
routes, lay a concept of imperial strategy that concerned the road to
India and Australia. Even before the Second World War, however, such
measures as the Statute of Westminster (1931) and the India Act
(1935) had pointed the way towards an evolutionary policy of
independence for the colonies. A more remote approach to empire had
already been sketched by Lugard's strategy of "indirect rule" in
Africa. Indeed, there had always been those who disliked colonies and
regarded them as a waste of money. These voices had never been
totally silenced even by the drums and trumpets of Disraeli's
Imperial Idea, and now Britain's economic difficulties seemed to
recommend the cutting down of overseas commitments. Thus the gradual
dispersal of the empire appeared less novel than it actually was,
when viewed as a cumulative process.

The moment that independence came to the Indian sub-continent, the
old imperial strategy disintegrated. There was no longer an Indian
army east of Suez at Britain's disposal, and, though brilliantly
successful campaigns against Chinese Communist guerrillas in Malaysia
and Sukarno's Indonesia in Borneo provided a suitable last hurrah for
British colonial administration, a continued British presence in the
Indian ocean, during the Sixties was felt to be too much of a
military and financial strain. Economic difficulties, a liberal
zeitgeist (particularly strong in the United States, Britain's
principle ally and successor as leading Western power, during the
struggle with Soviet Communism), the strain on military resources of
new commitments along the Rhine--these were the proximate causes of
the rapidity with which the Empire disappeared. The longer-term cause
was perhaps the very brilliance, and therefore fragility, of the
achievement itself.

The first problem posed by the retreat from empire was, naturally
enough, one of foreign policy. If its priority was no longer the
defense of empire, in what direction should it turn? There were
those who would have wished to adopt policies demonstrating the
superior morality of a power that had divested itself of empire.
Should we shun nuclear weapons along with the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (cnd), consort with the non-aligned and spout good
intentions at the United Nations? That was always a fringe
alternative, really no alternative at all. Or should we stick to the
familiar role of the closest and most candid friend of the United
States--Greeks to the Rome of America, as Macmillan put it in one of
his ironic asides. Self-preservation and the balance of power
certainly indicated enthusiastic support for the North Atlantic
Alliance as a defense against the ecumenical ambitions of Russian
Communism. That support was given. nato was a satisfactory
arrangement for successive British governments, its creation having
been an objective of the Labour administration after the war.

But if Britain favored the Atlantic Alliance, would it not be logical
for it to join the newly formed EEC which provided an economic base
for the alliance and whose immediate motivation had been the Cold War
and the urgency of German rearmament? When Acheson said that Britain
had not found a "role" he was not so much giving friendly advice as a
hefty shove towards Brussels. To do what the Washington
"Atlanticists" wanted would solve the problem of where Britain was to
stand in a world that increasingly required membership in a trading
bloc. It also had the advantage of giving the Foreign Office
something constructive to do--a lot more to do, indeed--and of
overcoming the depression that had reigned there during the Fifties.
It was no accident that Foreign Office officials became eager
partisans of entry into the European Community. The pursuit of
accession gave them a policy where they had had none, and its
attraction for them was increased by de Gaulle's evident opposition.
Not only was the Foreign Office's importance enhanced by the
operation, but there was an adversarial element in it which added a
special zest.

The face of British foreign policy was changed. The adaptation to the
loss of empire seemed to have been made. After de Gaulle's veto it
became the policy of the British government not to take no for an
answer. Unfortunately, the British people, even the educated part of
them, remained in ignorance of the reasons for joining the EEC; they
were inadequately informed both of its implications and of the nature
of the organization they were joining. Thus the new challenge did not
produce in Britain that enlivening psychological effect that had been
anticipated--by the present writer amongst others. Instead, as in
other European countries, there was growing irritation at the stream
of rules and directives from Brussels, many of them incomprehensible
and easy targets for ridicule by press and politicians. Unlike other
member-states, there was little sense in Britain of the Community's
long-term ambitions. A bureaucracy which saw itself as benevolent was
seen by the British people as interfering, petty and out of touch
with reality. We were embarked on the road to the Danish referendum
of May 1992.

An attempt to give Britain a new direction, which would excite the
interest of its people after the lassitude following on loss of
empire, and which had been viewed by Prime Ministers like Macmillan
and Heath as a cure for the "British disease," ended in an
institutional impasse, with squabbling over minute constitutional
changes and a major political quarrel over the Maastricht treaty,
already out of date when it was signed. Europe has so far provided
for Britain no vocation with anything like the attractiveness of the
old imperial one. It may be that the country had entered the European
Community too late to catch its moment of idealism. Take the vision
away, and what remained was bureaucratic chaffering and political
log-rolling, useful, no doubt, but hardly inspiring.

A Class Adrift

One of the effects of the imperial adventure had been to build up a
governing class, educated in the schools modeled on Arnold's Rugby
and with values formed by the experience of ruling territories
overseas. For the English middle-classes, and the intelligent boys
from Scottish and Welsh grammar schools, the existence of empire
meant a career open to their talents. What they acquired in the
course of a life spent in the service of the Crown were qualities
such as a confident energy, independence of judgment, responsibility,
loyalty, and a sense of justice. That, at any rate was the ideal.
Knowledge of empire brought them a wider world than they would
otherwise have known and an ennobling, if burdensome, sense of
service. This was the spirit expressed by Virginia Woolf's uncle,
Fitzjames Stephen, when he wrote in the 1860s: "I for one, feel no
shame when I think of the great competitive examination which has
lasted for just 100 years and whose first paper was set on the field
of Plassy and the last (for the present) beneath the walls of Delhi
and Lucknow." It was a civil servant's metaphor, but it conveys
something of the pride and effort that informed the administrators of
the British empire. Moreover, since this caste contained some of the
most energetic and active parts of the population, a whiff of this
ethos was passed on as an ideal to the country at large. Britain owes
to its imperial experience rigorous standards of public behavior and
the high prestige of the British state at home as well as abroad.
Success is indivisible, and the empire seemed a guarantee of the
superiority of the country's political system. It helped to build up
around the state a protective nimbus of moral capital which was to
carry Britain through two world wars.

The disappearance of this tonic element in British life left the
class that had been informed by it adrift. Those who had concerned
themselves with the administration of global power over huge
territories and vast distances could not easily transfer their
activity to the accumulation of wealth or the creativity of the
entrepreneur, though many of them were to become merchant bankers
(the City of London was, in some ways, the continuation of the empire
by other means--an empire touched by the finger of Midas). But their
real occupation was gone; there is no doubt that the changed
situation seriously demoralized the so-called "establishment" in
Britain. In the years after loss of empire they were singularly
unable to cope with the new problems set before them.

An Anti-Industrial Culture?

Confusion was understandable, but why should Britain have been so
incapable of resolving its commercial and industrial problems? Here
the past possession of empire added certain negative factors. Even in
the nineteenth century, the priority assigned by British statesmen to
imperial questions had been partly responsible for a neglect of the
decline in trade, as competition from Germany and America began to
tell. Disraeli did not give half the attention to this that he gave,
for instance, to the Eastern Question. Before the First World War
only Joseph Chamberlain seriously addressed the matter, and his
"imperial preference" could hardly have been the answer. Apart from
anything else, Chamberlain thought of imperial preference primarily
as a unifying factor for the empire rather than as a remedy for the
British balance of payments. As Chamberlain's biographer, J.L.
Garvin, put it, "the question of empire...could no longer be
separated from the question of employment." Later on came the
controversy over free trade and cost of living. In Chamberlain's mind
empire and trade were in symbiosis, with empire (i.e. its power in
the world) being paramount.

Between the wars, Britain's economy did not do badly. While some of
the older industries like textiles and coal mining declined in the
Twenties, the recovery from the slump was better than that in other
countries, with new industries coming on and national inventiveness
showing what it could do in the years immediately before the Second
World War. Automobiles and later airplanes, artificial fibers,
plastics, and electrical goods provided new employment, mainly,
however, in the South of England. The development of penicillin and
the jet engine in the Thirties provided a notable advantage when war
came.

After 1945, however, Britain found itself with aging factories and
infrastructure, with its currency reserves and overseas investment
dissipated and a government which, after wartime promises and
expectations, felt itself committed to expensive schemes of social
improvement. Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government, no doubt,
had to fulfill wartime promises by the creation of the welfare state.
But it squandered Marshall Aid by failing to use it for investment,
and its nationalization program bureaucratized and finally destroyed
large sectors of industry. Also, rather than increasing national
income, it stressed redistribution of a cake that was to become
smaller and smaller. Since then there has been no end of the
difficulties attending the management of the economy. They speeded
the end of empire and contributed to the deterioration of Britain's
position in the world, until, in 1979, the British ambassador in
Paris in a despairing retirement dispatch could complain how hard it
was to conduct the foreign policy of a country whose affairs were so
ill-managed.

Britain's post-war economic failure has been variously explained.
Theories range from the historical view taken by Martin Wiener, who
believes that Britain had had an "anti-industrial" culture, to
specific criticism of the financial and economic policies followed by
successive post-war British governments, lack of investment, failure
to develop technology, and undue deference to the City of London. In
his account of Britain's post-war industrial decline Sidney Pollard
points to the Treasury's "contempt for production" as being to blame.
He also described British trade unions as "among the most
irresponsible and destructive unions in Europe,"3 a judgment borne
out by the improvement in industrial productivity following the
change in trade union legislation under Mrs. Thatcher. In 1977 ten
million working days were lost in strikes; between September 1992 and
September 1993: 622,000.

The imperial experience also made its unfortunate contribution, one
in addition to the distraction effect already referred to. The belief
that governments can take successful economic initiatives within the
framework of a type of state socialism was encouraged by the
frequency of resort to such solutions in colonies, where only a
primitive market economy existed. Whatever the conclusions reached,
however, there was little doubt about the increasing pressure of
industrial competition as the European Community constructed a new
trading bloc on Britain's doorstep and tariff-lowering negotiations
began under the auspices of GATT. At the beginning of the Sixties,
and after losing the initial advantages it had enjoyed in exporting
after the end of the war, British industry was under attack even in
its home market--something that neither its management nor its trade
union leaders appeared to realize.

It is not easy to apportion the blame for Britain's industrial
failure, but if preoccupation with empire was one part of the
explanation, educational theories that systematically underestimated
the importance of hard work and presented vocational education as an
inferior option were another. No doubt, the use by government of
Keynesian techniques to put off the evil day of fundamental change
must also be held responsible. It is a mistake to spend more than one
possesses, and Britain has lived at a higher rate than it could
afford for some time, given its fascination with the "noble" theme of
foreign affairs.

All that having been said, it may be that in the future historians
will look at this complex problem a little differently. Now that
similar chickens are coming home to roost in other Western European
countries--notably France and Germany--it is possible to think that
Britain may have reached a particular stage on a path common to
European countries in the second half of the twentieth century, but
rather earlier than others. Now it looks as though it has been
Germany over the last few years which might be described as "wasteful
and profuse." In fact, so many aspects of Britain's economic and
social difficulties over the last thirty years recall present-day
phenomena in Western Europe or the United States that it no longer
seems possible to speak of a merely "British disease" and necessary
to speak of a Western one. The decline of the open-ended welfare
state, the rise of an "underclass," distinguished by an illiteracy
which deprives them of the ability to work at tasks requiring
accuracy and sobriety for their fulfillment, the crises arising from
overseas immigration into cities already beset by problems of poverty
and the break-up of families--all these symptoms are common to
industrial societies in Western Europe and America. To them economic
depression has, over the last five years, added greater employment
and the resulting political instability. For many years Britain's
economic failure stood out as a peculiar exception in a particularly
favorable conjuncture, like a man who is unable to pick up a coin in
the street. Now others have joined the club.

Debauching Education

Britain, unlike Germany, was to have no Wirtschaftswunder to
compensate for the disappearance of power. But, in the Sixties, as
the Macmillan era drew to its end and a sense of national stagnation
began to creep over politicians and officials, the desperate search
began for some formula that would improve the country's performance.
Often this took the shape of waiting for Godot. But Godot turned out
to be Harold Wilson.

The great and good who had previously governed the British empire or
presided over changes of direction in public policy once again found
reforms to recommend, but they were all too often reforms indicative
of a crisis of nerve or confusion of spirit than substantive
proposals of the kind put forward by the great Victorian legislators.
Since, at this time, the supposedly egalitarian society of the United
States was deemed to supply a favorable environment for industry and
business, should it not be imitated in Britain by getting rid of an
"elitist" educational system? It was at this time that Anthony
Crosland, with a frivolity that is shocking even thirty years later,
decided to abolish the grammar school which had been for generations
the path to higher education for bright working and lower middle
class boys. In her biography of her husband, Susan Crosland describes
how, on becoming Secretary of State for Education, he explained his
intentions to her:

"'If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking
grammar school in England," he said. "And Wales, and Northern
Ireland.'

'Why not Scotland?' I asked out of pure curiosity.

'Because their schools come under the Secretary of State for
Scotland.' He began to laugh at his inability to destroy their
grammar schools."

The Crowther Report (1959) talked of education as "an investment in
national efficiency," describing the new comprehensive school as "an
effective sign of that unity in society which our age covets." But is
it the business of schools to act as mere social symbols? And, in
1993, can anyone concerned with British education regard
comprehensive schools in the light of a contribution to national
efficiency? Moreover the report went on to do something worse.
Applying the analogy of the Public School system to the inappropriate
circumstances of state secondary schools, it suggested that
"...teenagers...need, perhaps before all else, to find a faith to
live by...Education can and should play some part in their search."
This was to make a start on that downward path of regarding knowledge
as a relatively unimportant part of schooling, a process that was to
lay waste British primary and secondary state schools. Instead of
learning, children were offered a delusive ideology of equality,
"self expression," that attached no importance to achievement or,
indeed, to the capacity to earn one's own living.

This was a conception of education proffered by men and women who did
not lack idealism, but who saw no contradiction in depriving pupils
of the advantages which had endowed themselves with academic
distinction or in destroying schools with a long tradition of
excellence and substituting an undisciplined confusion. Since
educational ladders did not fit the egalitarian pattern and to climb
their rungs was "elitist," why not knock the ladder away? The
educational story of the Sixties in Britain is of men betraying the
values by which they themselves had lived, albeit for the best
motives. No wonder that guilt permeates a book like Noel Annan's Our
Age, which is an account of these changes. Lord Annan, who ended as
the Vice-Chancellor at the University of London, asks the question
"Was our age responsible for Britain's decline?" To which the answer
might be "Yes, since all of you, politicians, Vice-Chancellors,
educational theorists and the rest, helped to destroy that stock of
ability by which your country lived." Lack of self-confidence
combined with a desire to be regarded as apostles of the new
modernity to make the media increasingly the originators of a growing
tide of criticism of established institutions. There was a
dialectical process here. If court officials regarded the private
lives of royalty as material for helpful little paragraphs in gossip
columns, it is little wonder that journalists harried members of the
royal family when their private lives offered an opportunity. If
bishops played politics, it is not surprising that politicians
attacked bishops, and that more irreverent people mocked the clergy.
How else could one react to the Dean of St. Paul's doing a parachute
jump from the peristyle to inaugurate a "Youth Week"? Acerbic
criticism directed against what were deemed to be old-fashioned
institutions was often met by obviously silly attempts to show
oneself young and "relevant"--efforts in which both common sense and
the dignity of office were lost. Criticism of authority assumed such
proportions that even schemes whose benefits were widely admitted had
only to appear for them to be overwhelmed by a wave of criticism,
much of it ill-informed. Public works, such as a new Thames bridge or
the re-development of the waste areas of the old docklands, were
attacked by supposed representatives of the "community," set on by
the press and obstructed by lobbies. Sometimes it seemed that, like
an aging mushroom, Britain was dissolving itself in its own acidulous
juices. The media too had their mushroom growth, more and more
becoming active players in the political game and enthusiastic
leaders in the campaign against the past.

Thatcher's Impact

The process of the assault on authority accelerated on the coming to
power of Margaret Thatcher. She had a surgeon's mandate to save a
national economy that was on its last legs, coming to office shortly
after the country had suffered the indignity of receiving the largest
loan ever granted by the International Monetary Fund. But the
operation was painful, undulled by anesthetic. Cuts to grants for the
performing arts, threats to lay sacrilegious hands on the BBC, less
money for universities, a freeze on teachers' pay, tough measures
with the trade unions--as these things occurred, protest from the
liberal chattering classes rose to a roar. In fact, in some circles
the Thatcher government was hardly considered as representing Britain
at all. A season at London's National Theatre was incomplete without
a proletkult play blaming the miseries of the characters on
"Thatcherism." During the Falklands campaign a BBC correspondent
asked the Prime Minister, "Are you going to withdraw your
troops?"--"Your troops," not Britain's! The aged Harold Macmillan
emerged, like some latter-day Chatham, to denounce privatization as
selling off the family heirlooms. Oddly enough, the British
electorate remained contented. Mrs. Thatcher was elected three times
and remained in office longer than any Prime Minister since Lord
Liverpool, more than a century and a half earlier. In 1990, after an
insufficiently prepared attempt to change the basis of local
taxation, the discontented and the rejected within the Conservative
Party, what Alan Clark was to call the salon des refusés, had the
opportunity of taking their revenge and splitting their own party.
Thus ended a remarkable effort at restoring British self-respect and
winning England renewed international repute--not least in the United
States.

In the Sixties, criticism of British society and its institutions,
consequent on a feeling of national failure, had largely been fueled
by a middle-class demand for a more egalitarian society. When,
however, Thatcherism promised the creation of a society in which
status played a lesser role, and the differentiating factor between
classes became largely economic, then those who had derided
paternalism and the values dispensed by the old Oxbridge teaching
began suddenly to perceive the merits of Tory knights of the shire
and to wonder whether the old-fashioned concepts of responsibility,
loyalty, and fair play, molded by the administration of empire, had
not more to be said for them than the bustling, ruthless activity of
the entrepreneur. The chattering classes had asked for a more
egalitarian society and now they found it inhabited by figures whom
they disliked. The difficulty was that only the entrepreneur, with
all his disadvantages, could produce the economic growth the country
needed. True, economic growth itself could reasonably be said to be
destructive of old values, but Britain and its eager consumers could
hardly do without it. Indeed, perhaps the most significant feature of
the Thatcher years was the spread of entrepreneurial values among the
young. Thatcherism took the risk of speeding up social change, and
this, for better or for worse, transformed British social life.

After the 1980s, the lines of class conflict divided the country
differently. It was no longer a question of the "establishment" on
top and the rest below. There emerged an opposition between those who
owed their living to the state and those who found employment in the
private sector. The Thatcherite attempt to roll back the state and
cut down its bounty had some unexpected victims. Having defeated the
unions, after 1987, Mrs. Thatcher took on the entrenched privileges
of the professions. The previous struggle was nothing to this. It was
the professional middle classes who were most affected by
administrative reform of aspects of the welfare state such as legal
aid and the national health service. Shrieks of pain were uttered by
defenders of professional standards the moment that government
economies touched on their interests. A similar outcry greeted
efforts to require more effective work from school teachers, at a
time when the educational service was visibly breaking down.

By this time the wheel had come full circle. Those who were meant to
be the servants of the state were resisting its policies. In the
civil service--whose salaries, it should be noted, were fully indexed
against inflation--there were those who were ready to leak documents
to the political opponents of government. It was an irony that the