Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit. David Reynolds
I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sunk in upon me.’ Across the Pacific and Indian Oceans ‘Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.’ That nakedness was then totally exposed by the fall of Singapore in February 1942 to inferior Japanese forces. Some 80,000 British and empire soldiers marched off into captivity in what Churchill called ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.[67] For some weeks India and Australia seemed in danger.
Churchill himself admitted the extent of Britain’s global overstretch in 1941–2, telling the Commons: ‘There never has been a moment, there never could have been a moment, when Great Britain or the British Empire, single-handed, could fight Germany and Italy, could wage the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of the Middle East and at the same time stand thoroughly prepared in Burma, the Malay Peninsula, and generally in the Far East against the impact of a vast military empire like Japan.’[68]
Although the Japanese tide was eventually turned – largely by the US Navy – and Britain regained most of its Asian Empire, the damage done in 1942 proved lasting. Newsreel film and press photos of British officers in their baggy shorts signing the articles of surrender in Singapore and then marching off into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps were beamed around the world, shattering the image of racial superiority that, as Lugard had rightly asserted, was so essential to British power. No longer could imperial loyalty be assumed. And the panic offer of independence to India in the crisis of 1942, though not enacted then, had to be honoured after the war – beginning the domino-like process of decolonisation.
In short, 1940–2 – from the fall of France to the fall of Singapore – was nothing less than a ‘strategic catastrophe’ for Britain’s global position. It constituted the ‘real turning point’,[69] forcing the British into the expedient of peacetime conscription that was not sustainable in the long term, and into dependence on a force-multiplier alliance with the American superpower. The standard national narrative emphasises 1940 – heroic evacuation from Dunkirk and victory in the battle of Britain – while ‘the import of the imperial disasters of 1941–2 has been obscured’.[70] In the country’s global history, however, Singapore matters far more than Suez.
Affluence, heritage and history
Britain’s current position in the world rankings of wealth and power does not compare with what it was 150 years ago. As has been suggested, this is hardly surprising: the country’s rise was remarkable but not the diminution in its standing when more populous and resource-rich states caught up and global decolonisation took hold. Yet this is not the whole story.
‘The British Empire declined; the condition of the people improved’: that was A. J. P. Taylor’s verdict on 1914 to 1945.[71] Taking the twentieth century as a whole, observes David Cannadine, the ‘age of decline’ was also ‘the age of affluence.’[72] Notwithstanding periodic hand-wringing about British economic performance, the country remains one of the richest in the world. At the end of the twentieth century, in income per head, Britain was ‘right in the middle of the range among big Western European countries (a little higher than Germany and Italy, a little lower than France), but on a world scale plainly very rich’.[73] Whatever the country’s changing place in world rankings, since the Industrial Revolution the British have been ‘beneficiaries of developments which in every generation’ have left them ‘richer than their predecessors’.[74]
The problem is: which British? The fruits of affluence have not been evenly shared across the population. Over the last century, the British economy has undergone radical restructuring. Just as Britain was in the vanguard of industrialisation – the shift of labour from the primary sector (farming, mining) to the secondary (the manufacturing industry) – so it also led a further shift to service industries (the tertiary sector) which today accounts for around 80 per cent of GDP. Even though there remains in some quarters an assumption that ‘manufacturing’ in more traditional forms such as steel, ships and motor vehicles is the mark of a great nation, this process of ‘tertiarisation’ is the norm for most developed Western countries. The USA, Germany and France are all around the 80 per cent level, but ‘in Britain the process of deindustrialisation has gone further and faster than just about anywhere else.’[75]
And the human cost has been considerable, especially at two points during the twentieth century. First, in the 1920s and 1930s, a whole generation of workers in staple industries such as coal, steel, textiles and shipbuilding experienced long-term structural unemployment. Their iconic protest was the Jarrow March from Tyneside to London in October 1936. And then the even more precipitous slump from the 1970s in what was left of those sectors and across heavy industry as a whole. Between 1971 and 1999 the proportion of workers in manufacturing halved, from 34 per cent to under 16 per cent, while employment in the service sector rose from 54 per cent to 72 per cent – with most of that growth coming in financial and business services: up from 6 per cent to over 18 per cent of the workforce.[76] In both phases, deindustrialisation was mainly the result of sharp foreign competition from lower-wage developing economies, but it has been accentuated by the policy decisions of various British governments – privileging the gold standard in the 1920s, sticking to monetary targets and breaking union power in the Thatcher era. The consequence in each case was high levels of unemployment and enduring social deprivation in regions that had been heavily dependent on a single economic activity or enterprise – a coal mine, steel mill or car factory, with the old industrial heartlands of northern England, South Wales and Clydeside hardest hit. This process has tended to exacerbate the sense of a North–South divide – with prosperity most evident in London, the Home Counties and parts of the Midlands. This fed into the pro-Brexit vote in June 2016.
Indeed it has been argued that ‘de-industrialisation’ not ‘decline’ should be considered the most appropriate ‘meta-narrative’ for post-war British history – perhaps even comparable with the epic historical transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, given its wide-ranging effects on ‘income distribution, unemployment, the gendered distribution of work and the shape of the social security system’.[77] The new service economy is highly polarised between what have been called ‘lovely’ jobs and ‘lousy’ jobs, with the latter routine and poorly paid, so that ‘in-work’ poverty has to be quietly mitigated by state benefits. Precipitate de-industrialisation has brought with it sharp increases in social inequality and economic insecurity. And in understanding the human costs, concepts such as ‘growth’ and ‘decline’ are not merely irrelevant but obfuscatory. The root questions are political more than economic. What have governments done to promote new economic activities, retrain unemployed workers and educate younger generations into flexible work skills? This agenda takes us into the realm of national policies rather than structural processes – and ‘policies’ in a much more sophisticated sense than political rhetoric about reversing national decline by acts of Napoleonic willpower.[78]
Yet the ideology of decline still has visceral power. There seems to be a ‘gut feeling that Britain, having once been top dog, ought always to be top dog’. In which case, the fact that other dogs are bigger is taken as evidence of the nation’s ‘decline’, even though the British dog is now a lot fatter than a century ago.[79] Some seem to find it particularly galling that former enemies, notably Germany, now occupy an elevated place. The insistence on ‘greatness’ – that Thatcherite aspiration to put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Britain’ – suggests a rooted Tory unwillingness to bid farewell to the position and status that had been lost. Yet it is striking that when