Firstly, the formatting for Kindle made it very difficult to read a few pages of the book and practically all of the bibliography.
Secondly, I was unable to obtain Books 1, 3, or 4 in this series (the Pride and Fall sequence), despite very much wanting to. However, reading this one (#2) first, is fine since it isn’t a fiction series.
Thirdly, Barnett’s bias as a Conservative and an Oxford man is clear from the way he constantly disparages the working people of Britain, particularly the trade unions, whom he attacks savagely throughout.
That being said, I still award this the maximum five stars because as a work of history it is supreme. I’ve never before read such an eloquent and data infused work which describes Britain’s fall. This is absolutely essential reading for any business leader, politician, economist, historian, or student in Britain or the nations which today still represent her ‘competition’ in the world markets.
Regarding Barnett’s ‘Tory’ bias, it is essentially this: he blames the restrictive practice of the trade unions for being one of the major brakes on industrial modernization. Yet, he never empathizes with the plight of the working man, despite constantly acknowledging that their origin in Georgian and Victorian coalmines and factories represents a major reason for Britain’s backwardness. He correctly asserts that the British working man’s attitude is political and informed by what his grandfather and father taught him, but he stops short of truly understanding why the British worker was so antagonistic to its bosses and governments and therefore refused to co-operate. In my view, it is because the legacy of the Georgian and Victorian bosses was one of extreme abuse. To the British working class, their war was therefore always with their own bosses. Restrictive practice was their only defence, their way of protecting themselves from unemployment and destitution. Barnett’s states that money was always the deciding factor when it came time to invest: British business simply would not spend it, whether on better pay and conditions for their workers, or on upgraded plant and machinery. “What they saw as assets were in fact liabilities.” Their idea of maintaining profits was to simply pay lower wages or prolong the life of already decrepit machinery. An example is the productivity of the coal mines during World War 2. The government extorted the mine bosses to achieve greater output, a request passed on to the miners themselves with such little effect that the opposite was achieved: production actually decreased. In my view the reason for this is simple: to these miners, the Germans were not their enemy, and they didn’t really care. To them the main war was always with their own bosses, the ruling classes, the Oxbridge men who had been abusing them for generations. To be now asked to work even harder to provide extra energy for a fight they didn’t ask for, a fight which was about which empire could dominate the globe, a fight which once again pitted working men against each other, was an insult.
In 2024 Britain is still a nation where the boss and the working man are not friends and never could be. They attend different schools, live in different areas, and have vastly different experiences of life. The ruling classes are still primarily educated in the classics, the literature and history of faraway places thousands of years ago, which is almost entirely irrelevant. This is in contrast to practically all of Britain’s competitors, as it was in 1980, 1940, 1910, 1880, and so on. Barnett’s final chapter on education explains also the church’s role in making sure religious instruction took up an untenable part of the curriculum, to the detriment of technical training and preparation for industry. To his credit he does mention the particular college of Oxford and Cambridge that all the leading men of the time attended, highlighting how hidebound Britain is.
Finally, regarding New Jerusalem, he criticizes it throughout. Not because he didn’t want the British people to have decent housing, full employment, and a National Health Service; but because according to the figures, the lavish expenditure on those things massively outweighed investment in education, new industrial facilities, research and development; so much so that it produced a situation in which Britain was then unable to pay for it all. Britain was writing cheques without the means to pay for them, rather than building up the means to pay before writing the cheques.
Rating: 5/5