To Stay or Not to Stay (in the E.U.) asks Britain

by Glenn N. Holliman

The comments from the last post continue.  My friend, Nancy, from Ontario, Canada posted a link suggesting if the United Kingdom exits the European Union, Canadians and USA citizens may need visas to visit Europe, an extra hindrance to free movement across the North Atlantic.

Steph in Australia asked for a conversation between David Lott of the United Kingdom Independent Party and Terry, his English neighbor and good friend in Normandy, France, who reluctantly favors continued union.  Steph sent some lovely photographs of birds in her garden, now autumn 'down under'.

 As the forthcoming tome is heavy on economics and history , it seems to me her pictures are an excellent bit of natural delight to begin our text.  Thanks Steph for asking for a dialogue and the beauty shared!

Terry replies in this post with a magnificent 'tour of the horizon' of the United Kingdom and today's global economy.  His tome is so massive that I have broken it into bits, some now and more later, allowing the reader to have one's coffee and intellectual stimulation over several mornings.  Here is Terry's first part of a piece that belongs in the Atlantic, Harpers or in a book that I keep encouraging him to publish. - GNH

MORE ON BREXIT by Terrance Field 

One of the readers of this 'blog' has asked that David and I engage in a conversation about the issue of British exit from Europe. I am a little reticent since I greatly value my friendship with David, and have taken a long time to consider this matter, having recently decided my position given all that I know of the arguments, both publicly stated, and those which I own myself.

I would firstly say that there can be no 'right ' or 'wrong' answer in this matter. All is opinion, highly subjective, and most professed outcomes are both incapable of proof and verification in advance, and are subject to forces not yet experienced or really comprehended.

I have been relatively agnostic on the matter. I am no longer.

My clear position now is that Britain should remain in the European Union. I am not happy about it, but there it is. All alternatives are worse.

I will endeavour to explain why but before I do so I think it very important to 'set the scene' as I see it, and thus I would make related but oblique observations (which require the indulgence of the reader) concerning the condition of the United Kingdom, and its recent history since the commencement of the First World War.

Britain has experienced a 'pivot point' in both fortune and the consequent psychological experience from 1914 onwards that I struggle to find parallels with anywhere in the advanced world.  Up to that point, Britain was a power of matchless excellence.

It was equalled in industry by Germany, and exceeded by the United States, but the experience of global imperial trade, combined with the exchange of civilisations and matchless financial power concentrated a sophistication in a small space not seen since the classical world.

The experience of almost effortless dominion, and the liberality and breadth of imagination that flowed from it was dented but largely intact until 1940.

That date changed everything. For ever.

The direct enemy would utterly destroy the British civilisation; would rip the mind from the culture, as well as sequestrate all assets and replace the British world view with the vigorous and radical German National Socialist world view.

Survival was unlikely; the consequences of collapse well considered, by a fearful but stoical people, and the United States was disinterested in action to protect and engage.

At that point, it was understood that the imperial project, long discussed in British cabinets as being a temporary phenomenon that would have to be replaced with a shared participatory 'commonwealth' (see cabinet papers from as early as the 1830s) and survival completely depended upon the United States.

If it entered the war, we would survive. If not, Britain would be occupied, and utterly ruined.

Churchill's words: 'For without victory there is no survival'.

This reality has been submerged in the mind of the British people by subsequent events, and the unconditional surrender of Germany. But not from the British ruling elites.

The post war period for Britain is, in historical terms, exceptional, in many ways.

First of all, the political dispensation has been one of universal suffrage. The political landscape has adjusted over the decades to better represent the changed power relationships between different elements of society that such a revolution in voting power has brought.

This has had an interesting effect, not experienced in the other large regional powers of the continent, since for them, bloody and truly catastrophic experiences have not allowed long political evolution and continuity.

In Britain, although the patrician classes gave way to a mixture that included the bourgeois and proletarian social groupings (I apologise for a touch of Marxist shorthand but it serves a purpose) they all continued to behave as though they were themselves patrician - as it were, one step removed from the consequences of their governmental actions.

This allowed for divestment of the Imperial mindset over a long period. And with patrician and generous allocation of policy and funding that other, more hard-nosed societies who had reconstructed themselves on the ruthless basis of logical-rational budgetary constraint without surplus resources being available could not consider for themselves.

This translates to incompetence and waste.

Britain thus perceived itself as a morally praiseworthy, large-minded, battered culture and society whose time would come again, albeit without the reach and feel of Empire.

As this continued for the first decades, post-war reconstruction continued apace, modest prosperity spread on an egalitarian basis, and the British civil service applied itself to the 'management of decline'.

Little regard was paid to the Europeans by the British for the first couple of decades. They were busy at home, and the past had to be overcome.

 The first real interest British society showed in matters European happened in the mid to late 1960s. Britain was experiencing a transition from post war reconstruction to steady state economics, and it was doing really quite poorly in making the change.

For a hundred years and more, Britain had been a maritime trading power, with trade routes guaranteed by 'Imperial Preference,' an access control that offered immense maritime and shipping advantage   to British trade. This had resulted in a superfluity of raw materials of all types being traded, processed and redistributed to imperial customers and suppliers.

One result is this luxury was the lack of sophistication in British chemical engineering, and other related skills, that had developed particularly in Germany to supply synthetic raw materials in place of the natural products habitually used by the British. This harsh discipline (amongst others), found in Germany, gave them a great advantage in competition in the post war period; The German nation had found its competitiveness.

In short, Germany, aided by Marshall Plan, and massive surviving industrial capacity, was comprehensively out-competing Britain. France seemed to prosper by the 'dirigist' state.

It showed. The German 'wirtschaftswunder' (economic miracle) delivered a sleek, rich, modern society and environment for Germans to enjoy, that was simply unavailable to the British.

France seemed glamorous.

At the same time, the strife between working people and managers of enterprises in Britain declined to trench warfare, their markets disappearing, their capital leaching away, their opportunities bleaker by the day. The social and economic construct that made for success seemed to have deserted Britain. Nobody knew how to recover the situation.

There were some successes, usually associated with technologies that the 'national consciousness' made an effort to promote. Military aircraft were adventurous in design and performance, even civil airliners were developed, but that sub-economy survived at ruinous cost, and in the end was abandoned as simply unaffordable. Henceforth, military design and manufacture would concentrate on exports; thus glamour projects died a death never to be resuscitated.

All the while, there was the painful experience of the deconstruction of Empire. As this progressed, roughly from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, a cultural deconstruction of the past proceeded apace. The Imperial past was, in general, vilified and regretted by the Left, the then dominant force. The 'Tory' world view went into sharp decline, and the new world of egalitarian 'liberal' left wing 'progressive' politics become the unchallenged view of what it was to be British.

As a British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, said - 'we are all socialists now'.

The currency value collapsed against all other major currencies, nationalised industries 'packed' labour, soviet-style, personal taxation stood at 83% on earned and 98% on 'unearned' (i.e. investment yielding dividend) income, competitiveness collapsed, productivity fell as massive overtime grew in factories starved of capital and competent management dominated the union - management conversation.

At one point, Henry Ford Jnr visited the British prime minister discussing whether or not Britain could be governed. 

I attended a GM senior managers meeting in the US where there was total mirth and hilarity at the thought of investing in plant in the UK.

Through all this, there was social deference between the major 'classes'. This replicated the life of India with the caste system, and was a sort of emotional camouflage, to hide the real collapse in the condition and prospects for the economy.

In 1976, the IMF began to manage the British budget directly.

All this sets the scene for British accession to the then 'Common Market'....to be continued in the next post.

Comments welcome as always....