We are living through one of Britain’s fits of declinism. The graphs of national development are flat, or slope down; politicians on left and right bemoan our stagnancy as they search desperately for growth. There is a broadening acceptance that the dominance of international finance and rentierism has “left behind” many if not all of our non-metropolitan regions. A slowing global economy is pitting nation against nation in aggressive diplomatic and martial rivalries, with Britain’s ally-cum-liegelord, the United States, readying itself to declare a trade war against much of the world. In this context, economic nationalism is back on the agenda – and many see it as the cure to Britain’s ills.
But while this period of relative decline may be real – and chastening – “declinism” is something more like a recurring national neurosis. There have been many calls for a return to autarkic national development in the past. And analyses of our denuding economic and geopolitical condition have, as David Edgerton has notably argued, often been entangled with a more emotional historical diagnosis: that these failings can be traced to a corruption at some point in our past. If those failings can be remedied, the thinking goes, then Britain can resume its exulted global role once more. The primary and most forceful exponent of this view in 20th-century Britain was the historian Correlli Barnett. And while Barnett hasn’t yet been taken up by those despairing over our national condition today – and resorting to extreme politics to rescue it – he singularly exhibits the pathologies of this pattern of thinking. In his work above all, we can find the source of the national self-loathing, geopolitical isolationism and ruthless economic radicalism currently at large within the conservative underground.
The author of a series of bestselling books on economic and military history, Correlli Barnett was hailed at his death in 2022 at the age of 95 by the Times as “one of the most influential historians of his time”. Yet his work is usually disdained or simply ignored by professional historians. There is no reference to his work in Brian Harrison’s contribution to the New Oxford History of England on postwar Britain, and only one in the Oxford History of the British Empire volume on the 20th century. In Edgerton’s celebrated and synoptic Rise and Fall of the British Nation, Barnett appears as a historical actor, not an academic peer, exemplifying the declinist critique of modern Britain that Edgerton is challenging. Although widely available, none of his books are currently in print beyond expensive print-on-demand editions.
If it was not in the field of historiography that Barnett was to make his mark, it was in politics. The second volume of his Pride and Fall quartet, The Audit of War from 1986, came at a propitious moment. Its argument – that the first symptoms of the “British disease” of spluttering economic growth could be traced to the formation of the British elite in the late 19th century, and that the post-1945 reconstruction, in which social goods were prioritised over industrial reconstruction, showed the nation’s indifference to industry – chimed well with the new economic consensus. “I’m a Correlli Barnett supporter,” Margaret Thatcher’s former secretary of state for education and one of the architects of the (then) new right, Keith Joseph, told Anthony Seldon in 1987. Other fans of Barnett’s included Michael Heseltine, who passed copies of his books around cabinet in the 1990s, along with Thatcher’s longest-serving chancellor, Nigel Lawson. Even Thatcher herself is said to have read him appreciatively.
Yet, his work has been equally well received by the left. Few are the writers who can claim enthusiastic readers in both Marxist historians like Perry Anderson and the myrmidons of Thatcherism. “I have had favourable reviews from Marxist periodicals and also from Fascist ones,” Barnett told Richard Kenny and Michael English in 1996, “so take your pick!” What linked both camps, though, is this intractable focus on Britain’s economic and geopolitical decline, a vexed historical question – and a vexing political one, as our contemporary upheaval shows.
Correlli Barnett was born in 1927 in Norbury, south London. His father, Douglas, worked for an American bank, and named the young Correlli after a minor baroque composer. Raised in nearby Croydon, it was his good fortune, he would later say, to attend the direct-grant grammar school Whitgift Middle, which balanced the usual emphasis on the humanities and classics with economics. This undoubtedly influenced his later views: criticism of the supposedly lopsided nature of British education in favour of the liberal arts would become a constant theme. On completing school, he went up to Oxford where he read modern history, graduating with a second in 1948. Though he was too young to serve in the war, after Oxford he completed his national service in the Intelligence Corps, mainly in Palestine, followed by a stint at the North Thames Gas Board as a graduate trainee. His first book was a comic novel, The Hump Organisation, published in 1957. It was based partly on his experiences at the gas board, featuring a protagonist who was a frustrated cog in a nationalised machine. The book saw Barnett lumped in with the then vogueish “angry young men” alongside figures like Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, though it had little public impact.
Three years later, Barnett published his first work of history, The Desert Generals, which, with its controversial attack on Field Marshal Montgomery as a self-publicising showman, and the battles of Alamein as unnecessary, provoked an immediate and heated response from veterans and journalists alike. The book also made Barnett’s name; he was soon able to quit his work to write full-time. Two further works of military history – The Swordbearers, on military leadership during the First World War, and the synoptic Britain and Her Army – followed soon after.
But the work he is best remembered for was inaugurated in 1972 with the publication of The Collapse of British Power. There, Barnett traces the sources of Britain’s decline – its relegation from the first industrial nation and the workshop of the world to a second-tier economy, lagging far behind its rivals – to the country’s deep past. In his telling, in the immediate post-Napoleonic decades, a “moral revolution” transformed the British nation. This turned Britain’s ruling elite from hard-headed realists, scouring the world for new markets, into romantic liberals, for whom sentiment ruled over sense and feeling over judgement, and who disdained the grubby business of industry. The Victorian elite became high idealists and humanitarians, a view inculcated by education at the new public schools. Instead of true world-conquerors, the cricket fields of Eton and Rugby turned out platoons of romantic imperialists, suited more to composing verse in Latin than ruling over a vast global trading network or a modern manufacturing combine.
Something similar overcame and softened the middle and working classes. Their Harrow was the local chapel. Methodism comes in for particular scorn for its evangelism and sentimentality. By the 1870s, the Victorian religious revivalism of which Methodism was a part, Barnett writes in one of his many arresting images, had permeated British life “like a clove of spiritual garlic”. (One wonders why Methodism became the bogeyman for so many mid-century historians. If, for Barnett, it turned the middle class into effete moralists, for EP Thompson the Wesleys managed to divert the energy of the working classes from revolution to a proselytising “psychic masturbation”.)
By 1914, the die was cast. Rehearsing his favoured military metaphor, Barnett writes that in the century after Waterloo “British industry has thus changed its character from an army of conquest, mobile, flexible and bold, into a defensive army pegged out in fixed positions, passively trying to defend what it had won in the past. The fire of creative purpose flickered low in the blackened grate of the British industrial regions.” The British elite was “fatly complacent men, constipated with inherited wealth”, while educational neglect in the 19th century produced “a stupid, lethargic, unambitious, unenterprising people for the twentieth century”.
[See also: Britain’s eternal decline]
One of the more consistently iconoclastic themes of Barnett’s work was his anti-imperialism. Born of the nationalist right rather than the internationalist left, it was rooted not in a liberal humanitarianism but drawn from what Barnett saw as the “colossal burden” that the empire placed upon the nation. By the end of the First World War, Barnett writes, with large portions of the globe coloured pink, “British responsibilities vastly exceeded British strength.” The ratio between the two would have to be addressed if the country were to keep its elevated global position, but any opportunity the elites had to do so was sacrificed in the interwar years on the altar of laissez-faire economics and moralising internationalism.
While 1914 demonstrated imperial overstretch, 1940 marked “the last months of England’s existence as an independent, self-sustaining power”. The Lend-Lease Act, enacted in the early months of 1941 – which would see the new global hegemon, the US, providing shipments of food, materiel and oil to Britain and the allies free of charge – finally confirmed Britain’s relegation to “an American satellite warrior-state dependent for its existence on the flow of supplies across the Atlantic”. Its eventual withdrawal in 1945 was, in Keynes’s phrase, an “economic Dunkirk”, emphasising the depth of British dependence on American largesse.
Barnett reprised the theme 14 years later in the Thatcherites’ favourite, The Audit of War, which attributed Britain’s continuing postwar industrial decline to the nation’s “wartime dreams, illusions and realities”. More clinical and historically rigorous than the previous book, and based upon extensive reading of official government documents, it retained Barnett’s characteristic pungency.
While his previous effort reserved much of its fire for the British elites, The Audit of War was just as scathing about the working class. To make his point, Barnett adopted Joseph Conrad’s romantic metaphor of the nation as a “mighty ship”, stratified into first- and second-class passengers, Titanic style. Yet it was in the bowels of the ship that were stored “the mere hands and the steerage passengers”: “Their only resource their muscle, their only knowledge what they gleaned from toil, hardship and subordination.” These, the working classes, stowed safely away from the view of the top deck in their unhygienic smoke-filled barracks, were of course “the nation’s most important and only lasting asset”. Much as the legacy of Victorian romantic humanism had degenerated the British elite into childlike Eloi, the working class was brutalised by hard labour and failed by an education system unsuited to a modern industrial nation. Lacking in “intelligence, energy, zeal and adaptability”, it had become a “tribe apart” all too happy to accept its subordinate status.
If this was the situation that Britain found itself in going into the war then a victory in which its major rivals, beyond the two now undisputed world hegemons, were crushed by defeat, presented a singular opportunity for industrial renewal. This was once again squandered. The Audit of War tracks the war-time debates between what Barnett calls the “New Jerusalemers” (liberal and Labourite inheritors of Victorian romanticism) and the modernisers and realists, few in number, who wanted the government to prioritise economic reconstruction. New Jerusalem, of course, triumphed in the 1945 election, in which the British people and its government chose “to relegate the physical re-creation of her industrial base to a very poor second place”, far behind the creation of a welfare state and the vast programme of postwar housebuilding. “Instead of starting with a new workshop so as to become rich enough to afford a new villa, John Bull opted for the villa straight away – even though he happened to be bankrupt at the time.” This was, for Barnett, a fundamental policy failure, one further compounded by an increasingly powerful and intransigent trade union movement – “possibly the strongest single factor militating against technical innovation and high productivity”.
The result was a sharp postwar decline. In turn, each of the sustaining illusions of 1945 faded as the country entered the 1950s: “The imperial and commonwealth role, the world-power role, British industrial genius and, at the last, the New Jerusalem itself, a dream turned to a dank reality of a subliterate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalised proletariat hanging on the nipple of state maternalism”. The standard to which Barnett found Britain wanting was supplied by Germany. Britain’s dominant liberalism, in both politics and economics, was particularly ill-suited to reverse this when arrayed against a thrusting German economic nationalism and its rapid industrialisation after 1871 and into the 20th century.
As his dislike of the welfare state demonstrates, Barnett was a conservative, albeit an unpredictable one. He may have voted for Thatcher’s Tories in 1979, identifying them as the party of modernisation, but he had done the same, for the same reasons, with Harold Wilson’s Labour 15 years earlier. And he was scathing of free-market dogma. His vision of state-led economic development fitted uneasily into the 1980s project of market liberalisation, even if both sought a technocratic cure for the same disease. As Paul Addison noted in a review of The Audit of War, economically Barnett was no Thatcherite, rather “he is probably the only modern British historian whose creed is Bismarckian nationalism”. He yearned for a command economy that could reconstruct the foundations of the British economy, and was enamoured of a vision of Teutonic efficiency, shading at times towards an appreciation of the Nazi war machine. Politically, however, as Tom Hazeldine noted in an obituary for the New Left Review, “Gaullist might be a closer fit”, with his visceral dislike of British subservience to American strategic interests, and his longing for an independent British nuclear deterrent and realist foreign policy.
His dissenting cast of mind continued into the 1990s, where he regularly appeared in the British press denouncing Blairite “humanitarian intervention”. The strategic debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, Barnett reasoned, sprung from Britain’s lingering great-power delusions. The solution? “Let us opt for a minimalist foreign and defence policy suitable for the fifth-ranking economic power – even if it means that our government ministers will no longer be able go around the world posing as important international figures.”
[See also: Who can answer the English Question?]
In 1996, David Edgerton could write that “the historiography of modern Britain is dominated by one issue – ‘decline’”. The same could not be said today. Part of this is surely a result of the frontal assault marshalled by Edgerton and others on the concept in general, and Barnett’s work in particular. Yet if historians are sceptical of decline as a national story, politicians and commentators are not nearly so shy. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising: as Barnett shows, the concept has long been more of a political sledgehammer than an instrument of fine-grained analysis. As Andrew Gamble notes, “future historians may find it puzzling that so much elite discourse was obsessed with the idea of economic decline at a time when the country was more prosperous than it had ever been”. In the postwar years, while Britain’s growth lagged behind most large economies, it continued to rise, often at a healthy clip. During the 1950s, Britain’s GDP increased by 3.2 per cent, compared to an average of 5.5 per cent among the nations which would come to make up the G7. That increased to 3.4 per cent in the 1960s, against a G7 average of 5.7 per cent, before both dropped to 2.6 per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively in the 1970s. Between 1979 and 1990, British GDP growth remained roughly the same at an average of 2.7 per cent a year.
The current numbers are nowhere near so rosy. The economy grew by just 0.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2024; in both October and November it actually shrank. Likewise, while labour productivity growth in the UK after 1945 compared unfavourably, it increased at levels nearly unimaginable today – 3.6 per cent annually from 1945 to 1974. Since 2008, productivity has flatlined, rising by less than 0.4 per cent a year, less than half the average of the 25 richest OECD countries, and an unprecedented low since the start of the Industrial Revolution. All of this has led to stagnant wages and a crippling of the public realm. With it too has come a renewed focus on the deeply rooted problems of the British economy. The publication of the Resolution Foundation’s report, “Stagnation Nation”, stimulated a healthy debate. As Adam Tooze, one of the commissioners for the enquiry, has written, today we are in a new era, one in which economically “the situation is dire”, though he has cautioned against a temperamental return to declinism. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer is taking a different approach, staking the house on a return to growth above all else.
Yet regardless of the work of historians to debunk or deflate many of Barnett’s claims, his political vision lives on, mining a rich seam of declinism and national nihilism that runs under so much English culture. To some, Barnett’s work – and some of his darker readings of Britain’s fate – may even seem prophetic.
Where once the right could believe that Thatcher had reversed Britain’s decline once and for all, leaving the Conservatives to get on with the job of governing a renewed, global Britain, a new generation of right-wing thinkers are questioning old orthodoxies. For Aris Roussinos, for instance, much like Barnett before him, Thatcherism’s free-market experiment was always destined to fail. Rather than investing in industrial modernisation, Roussinos writes, the “great national gamble on financialised globalisation” was “a drastic form of experimental surgery which the patient is unlikely to survive”. Its continuation under governments of both Labour and Conservatives has left us with a “grim landscape of tangible decline”.
In the online circles where such thoughts congregate, a solution called “Anglofuturism” is proffered, a utopian vision of national rebuilding and grand infrastructure projects, shaped in an aesthetic drawn from English folk history. As a form of national developmentalism, it is distinctly Barnettian in its economic nationalism. It is only one of many schemes developing on the new right that, whether consciously or not, appear to be channelling Barnett’s work. And as if to prove Edgerton’s contention that all such declinism is built on nationalist foundations, many of these visions, like Barnett before them, make the connections explicit.
[See also: David Edgerton: Don’t be seduced by the myths of the economic right]
Characteristic in this is Roussinos’s embrace of the Nairn-Anderson thesis – another influential historical analysis of British decline over the longue durée, although one of the Marxist left rather than nationalist right. For Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson, the New Left historians who developed the thesis from the mid-1960s on, British economic decline was only ever one aspect of a broader, Gramscian anatomy of the British state and society. Reading from the right, Roussinos sees it as more akin to what Barnett called his “operational study” of the economy, in which a diagnosis of decline shades easily into a programme of restoration. Such revivalism may be anathema to Anderson, who has written scathingly of the “futile attempts at retrieving national greatness” that arrived under the heading of decline. But for a right increasingly thinking in a more structural and sophisticated way, diagnosis is inextricable from prognosis. Roussinos has predicted that the “Nairn-Anderson thesis, but RW [right wing], is the coming stage of British politics”. Which rather begs the question: what of Correlli Barnett, a writer far closer to Roussinos’s Anderson than any thorough reading of Anderson’s work itself can sustain?
Another figure who has marshalled a particularly Barnettian scientistic rationalism, and whose hands have been rather closer to the wheels of power, is Dominic Cummings. “The best-known unknown historian of ideas,” in Stefan Collini’s memorable phrase, Cummings has produced a voluminous body of work stretching across a huge number of blog posts during the past decade and a bit. The guiding thread of much of this sometimes enlightening and oftentimes enraging output is the fecklessness of the British governing elites, many of them mentioned by name, obsessed as they are with the minor details of power and the media, rather than the grand systems in which they work.
What should come in their place for Cummings is a kind of Silicon Valley start-up writ large, taking its cue from Amazon and Y Combinator, modern advances in quantum computing and statistical modelling, and the authoritarian market-state of Singapore. Interestingly, like Barnett, one of Cummings’s political heroes is Bismarck, the subject of a rather bloated recent essay, although more for his lesson on governing (he was, according to Cummings, a “high performance monster”) than for the content of his policies. What Britain needs, and what it can learn from Bismarck and Elon Musk alike, is to be whipped out of economic torpor. In this, he shares much with Barnett’s technocratic nationalism.
Others on the right, meanwhile, are turning to more conventional sources to renew their nationalism. Many is the young Tory now invoking that old name, once only whispered: Enoch Powell. Though Barnett and Powell differed considerably in their economic vision – Powell being a free-market monetarist before Thatcher entered the scene – they shared a right-wing post-imperial nationalism and Little Englandism, as well as a loathing of the United States; Powell, much like Barnett, could argue in the run-up to the first Gulf War that “we as a nation have no interest in the existence or non-existence of Kuwait”. Recent years have also seen the emergence of a number of online publications and blogs which have been developing historical analyses of the British state, all of which share features of Barnett’s particular form of nationalist declinism. Perhaps the most sophisticated has come from the anonymous Substack, the Pimlico Journal, for whom Britain’s economic malaise finds its roots in the country’s early industrialisation.
The questions raised by this conjuncture for the left are profound. Is there any inherent connection between industrial policy and economic nationalism, for instance, or must the left be forever stuck between the Scylla of free markets and the Charybdis of nationalism? And how do we dispel the myths of Britain’s lost greatness and the revivalist bluster it so often gives way to? To that we could add a third and even more serious question, one raised by Perry Anderson. “How relevant a metric,” Anderson asks, in light of the looming threat of climate breakdown, “is growth of GDP… for assessing the course of a society from the left?” These questions are currently far removed from a national soul that feels the wounds of retreat so keenly. Despite his clear intellect, Barnett’s life work was scarred by them from the start.
Last year looks almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded, and the first to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The relentless focus on growth as a measure of national health above all else has undoubtedly contributed to deepening the mess we find ourselves in; the Thatcherite cures for the British disease of sluggish growth are only increasing the rampant inequality and rentierism in British society. Sections of the right, however embryonic, are developing a response, one which finds succour in the same streams of English nationalism that Correlli Barnett once did. They may one day find their ideas as close to power; their own volumes passed between cabinet ministers as they already are between Tory MPs and right-wing influencers. To chart a way out may require the left to start looking beyond nationalist discourses of decline for good.
[See also: Britain’s new Powellites]
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