O! What a fall was there: reflections on the decline of Britain

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.(1) 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 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."(2) 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 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.(4)

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 refuses, 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 loyalty and, on the whole, competence which the British empire had been able to command from those who worked for it had been replaced by covert disobedience, and, on occasion, downright treachery from a breed of officials, unwilling to admit change or any diminution of their own power and, often, ideologically motivated to oppose what was being done.

The history of British society after the liquidation of empire has also been that of the fading of the accompanying values. The high style of government, the sense of responsibility and justice that, at its best, went along with world power was replaced by what might be called "business values": living within one's means, hard work, rewarding entrepreneurial skills. Mrs. Thatcher's administration marked the transition to a new kind of Britain that had shed the remnants of its imperial ideology, while not necessarily being less nationalist in feeling. It was a Britain adapted primarily to the task of earning its living, where even young aristocrats, instead of going into the Guards to defend the country, went into Sotheby's or Christie's to sell it up.

That task, indeed, was so difficult that it was only by ruthlessness that it could be achieved. Just as empire had exuded a sort of ethical cocoon whose values corresponded to the requirements of government, so economic pressure gradually developed a harsher society, one willing to recognize the need for cuts in welfare, that rejected consensus of the Butskellite(5) vintage and valued determination more than compromise. The toughness that was once deployed on the more disturbed outposts of empire was now used against Arthur Scargill, the miners' union leader, and the "flying pickets" that he used to intimidate miners who rejected his revolutionary tactics. In Britain today the predominant values are those of the market. This is not so much because of any moral preference (though there is an innate morality in work) as out of necessity. In any case, the fact is demonstrated by the collapse of Socialism as a system of ideas. If the Labour Party comes to power again, as presumably in a democratic country it must, then it will come without ideas. It has abandoned what used to be its favorite fetishes--state ownership of the "commanding heights" of the economy and redistribution of income--perhaps hoping to find them again on a pilgrimage to Brussels. The churches might provide beliefs, but sometimes appear as merely another lobby asking for money to keep the social services going. They seem to have little to put against the logic of national survival. Perhaps, as Nietzsche foretold, disappearing religion is taking humanitarianism back into the past with it.

The end of the British Empire was certainly a massive decline in power over a very short period. For that reason, it was also the beginning of a psychological confusion which has hardly yet been resolved. First there was a twenty year loss of nerve by the governing classes, marked by lack of confidence in the British people's ability to solve its own problems, particularly those which concerned the economy. The old "establishment" faded--no wonder after its demonstration of helplessness--and nothing new emerged. The Thatcher administration of 1979-1990 was the first move towards a new deal in Britain. This is why it cannot be written off, however convenient this might be. Thatcherite values will remain with us because we need them to survive.

At present, however, the ghost of Butskellism is rising foggily from the tomb of socialism, and, as recent disputes over "basic" values have shown, there is a clash between libertarian Conservatism and those who hanker after the older, paternalist ethical certainties. Such a debate might become fruitful, as it was in the nineteenth century when Matthew Arnold called for the education of the philistine nouveaux riches. At present it is sterile. The inability of the old governing class to pass on their values effectively is deplored with a bitterness that attaches to Mrs. Thatcher and all her works, which are deemed to include a more materialistic moral climate. Partisans of a market economy still feel a similar anger over the way that their leader was dismissed by her party. The confusion of the debate, in which the Labour Party is only marginally involved, is only equaled by the determination of the participants to ignore the context of history or the lessons of philosophy.

Arnold's words have a relevance for us today:

If there is one need more crying than another, it is the need of the English middle class to be rescued from a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners.(6)

The "middle class" now covers almost a majority of the country (over 40 percent), and if the economic values which influence their lives and incite them to perform their daily tasks are to be reconciled with the higher aspirations, which once accompanied an ethos of public service, then the means is education. It was so in Victorian days when the country found a corrective to the brutalities arising out of the energies released by the Industrial Revolution. Education will save us from the sterile clash between two ethical positions which appear opposed, but really have a dialectical relationship to each other. The benevolent use of money and the development of public spirit cannot be achieved until a secure economic base is first assured. Then the tone of society can be improved and its moral unity secured through education. But not through education where teacher flatters pupil, and which is afraid to pronounce the word "elitism." Schools and universities will justify their existence as long as they show confidence in their mission of elevating those they teach.

As recently as fifty years ago Britain possessed an empire which was a rationale for national unity and a source of values in domestic political life. Now the memory of it is growing faint, but the uncertainty which has fallen upon us after its loss still remains. At present the alteration of our foreign policy and the adaptation of our beliefs and habits are no joy to us. Anger, bitterness, and a kind of self-hate well up in too many British throats, and threaten to poison the life of the nation. This is what it is, we might say, to cease to be great. Yet the British people have done so much and seen so much that no one who was present when it showed itself formidable can quite believe that it will continue in the pettiness of its present political discourse. Even after its disappearance the British Empire remains as a testimony to its capacities. Its history could be a source of strength to us today, if we chose to accept our past rather than reject it, quarrel over it, or, with our new educators, bury it. May we come to recognize our national achievement and see the work we now have to do with eyes unblurred by nostalgia or resentment.

One Little Word

The English language marks the process of national decay with a single five-letter word. When you hear it, you know things are going downhill fast. The word is "still"; as in "The United States is still the most important economy in the world," a sentence someone used on American television the other day during a discussion of the North American Free Trade Area |sic~. NAFTA was devised partly in order to prevent the process of decline; "still" reeks of the need for reassurance and comfort. It is an anxious word, which drags reluctantly after it an unspoken, half-sentence "...but maybe not for much longer." British politicians and commentators used it a good deal in the early 1960s ("Britain is still the second largest producer of motorcars in the world," "We still have the third biggest navy"). Now the United States is entering the "still" phase. The vote on NAFTA in the House of Representatives will not change that long-term process; it will merely affect the pace of a decline which began 30 years ago....

"The United States remains a superpower still," the New York Times reassured itself the other day. But "super-power" was a term coined in the 1960s to distinguish the Soviet Union and the United States from lesser nations. It has little meaning except in the plural, because the two of them defined each other's powers and mirrored each other's capabilities. A singular super-power, no matter how large its arsenal, is just another power. Under Clinton and his ineffectual Secretary of State, the United States jerks back and forth from helplessness over Bosnia to threats against the nuclear capability of North Korea. American diplomatic and military power has been insufficient to deal with a few hundred Somali warriors with Kalashnikovs and "technicals." If Vietnam was America's Boer war, Somalia is its Cyprus: thugs and corner-boys have demonstrated the feebleness of imperial pretensions. America's withdrawal from Somalia early next year will mark the end of empire as definitively as the pulling down of the Union Jack in Nicosia.

1 See Evelyn Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez: Diaries 1951-56 (London, 1986). A specimen entry for April 19, 1955, gives the tone: "Everything is in a mess--the economic prospects very bad, relations with the Arabs, Asiatics, Chinese, Russians very bad, no longer any lead in the atomic field." The odd thing was that he cared.

2 J.L. Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain, Vol. III 1895-1900 (London: Macmillan, 1934), p. 19.

3 Sidney Pollard, The Wasting of the British Economy (London, 1982).

4 Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 148.

5 The term refers to that compromising, evasive and muddled approach to political affairs, adopted by both parties in the Fifties and Sixties, and described by an elision of the names of the Conservative Rab Butler and Labour's Hugh Gaitskell. It implies a corporatist approach to economic and social problems.

6 Matthew Arnold, Mixed Essays (London: Smith, EIder), 1880, p. 178.

Anthony Hartley is a contributing editor of The National Interest.

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