Britain is not in decline

I just finished and cannot praise highly enough Robert Tombs' The English and Their History. To be honest, I never read a one volume history of England (Lord Macaulay's History of England doesn't count as it only covers the reigns of James II and William III and is in several volumes), but this is now the only one to read. 

It is not good to read a history book from cover to cover, as I have just done. One should read in small portions, think, then re-read. So many ideas jump out.

One of Dr Tombs' themes is that the myth of British decline since 1945 is precisely that, a myth.

There was something in the complaint Britain had been a third rate power with a great Empire. Except at sea it had slender means and was shaken by frequent disasters. If Mrs Thatcher could not delay German unification in 1989-90 neither could Mr Gladstone in 1870- 71. Loss of Empire was the most spectacular face of decline but the Empire as a whole was ceasing to be (if it ever really had been) the bedrock of wealth and power and this winding up has not weakened or impoverished England - rather the contrarry, for what was a liberation for the colonies was also a liberation for England. The fact is that the power of the empire, real when it could be mobilised, had been mostly taken up by defending itself. In military terms, even leaving aside technologies such as aircraft and the atom bomb, Britain in the 1950s was far stronger in sheer numbers of men than at the height of Victoria's empire. .....
Britain was overtaken in the 1940s only by America and Russia, but it had itself overtaken its old rivals France and Germany: whereas at the height of Victorian power its armed forces had always been smaller than those of France, Russia, Germany and even some lesser states and only at sea has it been predominant. Moreover, Britain's former hegemonic and imperial position was not taken away - no country has been able (or perhaps wished) to exercise comparable sway. Of the two 'superpowers' (a 1943 coinage) that seemed to dwarf Britain in the 1950s, one proved to have feet of clay. The other, whose huge economic and military expansion constituted the real change in the post-war structure of power, has found in Vietnam, in Middle East and Afghanistan the very different ideological and political state of the world no longer permits the light touch hegemony formerly exercised by Britain. 

The English and Their History, Penguin edition, p.760

I agree with this. 

Although the 1970s, when I grew up, were a terrible decade for Britain, our relative decline in relation to other countries was not very important. So I thought at the time and it happens, perhaps by luck, that I was right and all the clever men were wrong.

I thought so because everyone was so vastly richer than anyone imagined possible in 1950, which is one reason I did not understand or sympathise with Mrs Thatcher in her day. But politics in those days was drearily materialistic and all about economics. 

And we all (including me) thought of Britain as a small, shabby place.  It was shabby and felt small.

As Julie Burchill said, in the 1970s we tried being Belgium and didn't like it. 

Which reminds me of Lord Curzon's remark in 1907 that 

" ... if India should go ... England, from having been the arbiter, would sink into the inglorious playground of the world. Wondering pilgrims would come to see us just as they climb the Acropolis or inspect the Nile... A congested population would lead a sordid existence with no outlet for its overflow, no markets for its manufactures ... swallowed up in a whirlpool of American cosmopolitanism ... our aspirations defined only by a narrow and selfish materialism ... England would become a sort of glorified Belgium."

Historians now know, but we did not then, that Britain's relative decline in the 1960s and 1970s was due to the fact that Britain had industrialised first and people moving after 1945 from agriculture into towns in Western European countries like France and West Germany increased for a time growth in those countries. It wasn't about us. It was about them catching us up.

Loss of the empire was sad or a cause for celebration, depending on your taste, but did it matter? Did the empire affect ordinary British people's lives?

Britain probably did not got much out of her empire in monetary terms, if anything, though economic historians continue to argue about this. Free trade prevented us doing so and prevented us forming the white dominions into a tariff union, as Joe Chamberlain presciently wanted. But the value of the Empire cannot be measured in l.s.d. (pounds, shilling and pence, not the drug). 

Speaking personally, it fills me with sorrow that Canada, Australia and New Zealand no longer consider themselves British and part of the (imperial) family. This was mostly inevitable, but partly because we abandoned them and joined the E.E.C. in 1973. 

What good did the empire do us?

It cannot be measured in economic or military terms. We spread British civilisation throughout the whole world. It could very easily have been France that achieved this world hegemony - France and England warred over this from 1701 to 1815 - and for all my intense admiration for French Catholic civilisation, British hegemony was very much better for the world as a whole. French republican, secular culture, with its glorification of violence and a disastrous revolution in its national anthem, would be worse. 

This mattered and gives my country huge reasons for justified pride. 

Unfortunately, many British people feel shame instead. They are taught in schools and universities, in the words of an anonymous historian quoted by Robert Tombs, that 'the empire is our holocaust'.

Decline happens when people feel they are in decline, whatever the facts, because decline is not about facts but is subjective. 

British people - most of them - thought they were in decline in the 1970s and 1980s. 

I did not like Thatcherism at the time but I recognised that it would have worked if it succeeded in raising our national self-confidence and ending the sense of decline, and this is what it did. 

What Robert Tombs, who voted Leave, calls declinism is the reason we applied three times to join the E.E.C., as well as the reason for Thatcherism. 

It is interesting that no-one suggests that the end of our putative decline is thanks to our joining the E.E.C. It was due to changes made by Margaret Thatcher.

We are the only E.U. member that never had any obvious reasons to feel grateful for being part of that club, beyond the advantages of the customs union.

The British never any longer think of themselves, as they did in the 1970s, as 'the sick man of Europe'. (Tsar Nicholas I coined the expression to describe the Ottoman Empire and it was very regularly used to describe Britain from 1976 until some time in the 1980s.) Brexit has not and will not change that. 

The British are, however, still convinced that they are a secondary, not very significant country, which is not true, except in the sense of being (like every country in the world) second fiddle to the USA. 

This has had two big consequences for foreign policy. Most people since the war, except the far left (Jeremy Corbyn, for example), the far right (Sir Oswald Mosley) and a very few mavericks (Enoch Powell), thought until 2016 that Britain needed to be the close ally and satellite of the USA. Donald Trump's election has thrown that up into the air to some extent, but the deep states of America and England remain very close indeed. So close that MI6 seems to have tried to prevent Donald Trump being elected president.

The second consequence is that many think that Britain needs to be in the European Union, because we are too weak to do well outside.

Once more, national strength is a subjective, not an objective question. If the British are defeatists Brexit will go wrong. If we are the creative, innovative and courageous people we always have been (and arguably showed that we were at the referendum) it will go very well, at least in the medium term and perhaps sooner.

I remember the very thoughtful Conservative cabinet minister William Waldegrave musing in the 1997 election that it might be a good idea for the UK to leave the EU, but we must realise that this would mean the end of our global influence. 

If it were so then that would be fine by me, but I do not think that it is necessarily would happen, for the reasons Robert Tombs gives. 

I see no reason in any case why loss of our global power should hurt our national self-confidence. On the other hand, were Scotland ever to leave the U.K. that would be a absolutely disastrous for Anglo-Welsh self-esteem. Fortunately, Brexit means Scottish secession is less likely.

Talking about whether it is necessary that we continue to throw our might around, I even ask myself what the reason is that we stay in Nato. 

But that is the subject for another article and also a lot of thought by me.