European Document/Dreams Before Midnight

...She may prove to be a kind of British Akhenaton, the fourteenth-century pharaoh who tried to replace the old religion of Egypt with a new faith—and failed...

...Thatcher's refusal to accede to the sanctions demand...

...But the British, who were industrial cripples even before the war, never matched the productivity of their future peacetime competitors—not even that of the Germans, which was hamstrung by Nazi administrative chaos...

...also a promised "independencei" from the United States through the removal of American forces and bases from these islands, as part of a Labour foreign policy that is ever more pro-Soviet...

...After the American life-support machine was withdrawn in the late 1940s, Britain's only substitute was debt and demagogic hot air...

...On the contrary, welfare state demands swelled up...

...The attention paid by Mrs...

...and also [on] the files of various committees on different aspects of post-war reconstruction, from social security to exports, employment, and regional policy.' This book utterly destroys the myth of a united, tough, ingenious people working shoulder to shoulder in the 'From a letter by Barnett to the Times Literary Supplement, answering an obtuse £md question-begging review by Robert Skidelsky...

...starvation of refugee children in the South African "homelands...

...In Harare a sweating decoiffi British diplomat appeared on television pressing a begging note into the hands of Robert Mugabe, pleading with him and his fellow African autocrats not to boycott the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh...

...Remorselessly, piling chapter and verse into mountains of damning detail, Barnett reveals a panorama of indifferent, greedy, shiftless, complacent, and above all incredibly stupid workers and management, for whom the deadly peril of their nation took second place (when it took any place at all) to class hostUity and the chance of massive featherbedding, plain skiving, and a pattern of industrial blackmail by unions which exploited the war to wipe out the connection between wages and productivity...

...Elsewhere the ex-imperial images were ugUer...

...and almost certainly increased bloodshed which would further envenom the tortured politics of South Africa...

...The Times called this a piece of "pure theatre," which is exactly what it was: a pageant of ritual splendor comfortably recalling the golden days of Britain's pride as a world power...

...This set the course for Churchill's massive electoral defeat after the war, and for Britain's excursion into the swamp of welfare state extravagance, economic anemia, and industrial disaster...

...Outside the covers of Barnett's book his terrible story has continued in fiill spate...

...Throughout the war they remained obstinately unwilling to accept any improvements that might increase profits for "the bosses...

...Beveridge and his acolytes asserted that the cost of their vision, which would be vast, could be met by "full employment" in postwar British industry, working as in wartime for a national purpose...

...They cited the achievements in wartime aircraft production and radar as proof that this was possible...

...While a beleaguered government continued to subsidize rising wages, productivity in the coal industry declined throughout the war...

...This book] is based on a thorough trawling of the nies of cabinet committees and wartime production ministries dealing with such questions as technical inefficiency, slacking, trade-union restrictive practices, and incompetent management in industries ranging from . . . coal and shipbuilding to advanced technologies like aircraft, radar, and machine tools...

...The bribe was eventually codified in the famous Beveridge Report, which sketched out the blueprint for a postwar welfare state...

...It was not until the 1980s that the government of Mrs...

...Workers and management in a shipbuilding industry described by Barnett as "medieval" resisted greater efficiency at a time when U-boat destruction of British shipping was threatening the country's very survival...

...That wartime story is told by the British historian Corelli Barnett in The Audit of War, published in Britain by Macmillan earlier this year...

...Most of all, they could feel that their country was a sort of great power again, leading the Commonwealth into action against somebody and counting for something in the world...

...Brushing aside the prudence of Churchill and Kingsley Wood, Beveridge and the "New Jerusalemers" went to the media—primarily Picture Post (the British equivalent of Life) and the BBC, both of which obligingly hawked glassy-eyed propaganda about the glowing postwar paradise...

...Wages padded by subsidy into mass bribery never dissuaded trade unions to abandon their sulky and obstructive behavior...

...The true heirs of the wartime visionaries of New Jerusalem, the left-plunging Labour party under Neil Kinnock, has now laid out a public spending extravaganza of more than £26 billion (a treasury costing says upwards of £35 billion) in promises, most of which is to be financed by debt...

...The vaunted new technology had been heavily dependent on outside help, especially from America, that would not be forthcoming after the war...

...face of Hitler's threat...

...the boycott was duly imposed, not only by Mugabe, but by about half of the Commonwealth and most of the dictators which infest it...

...Clearly there is a growing public distaste for Mrs...

...At the same time the coalition government was divided over what the people of Britain should be promised after the war...

...The prime minister's refusal to resume the potlatch game, like her resistance to pressure for gesturepolitics over South Africa, has led to determined efforts to blacken her in the eyes of the public Because of her reluctance to match public spending to swollen expectations, she has been accused of "wrecking" the National Health Service, of "ruining" education, and of generally behaving in a heartless manner...

...By playing on illusions of a bottomless government purse, her opponents have managed to destroy any rudimentary sense of economic process that the electorate might have had...

...It is Barnett's thesis that these war years created the conditions for what in the postwar decades would be called the British disease...

...They knew also that the largest black group in South Africa, Gatsha Buthelezi's Zulus, opposed sanctions...

...The song is still a popular hymn in Britain...

...Thatcher to consequences, and her stubborn resistance therefore to sanctions, were taking all this away from the frustrated Britons, and she was being vilified for it...

...elections became potlatch rituals, vying with promises the country could not afford, plus empty rhetoric Uke Wilson's hailing of a new technological age in the 1960s...

...The country's ability to pay was further curtailed by government deferral to trade unions and their wartime ritual, inexorably continued in peacetime, of continual pay increases without matching productivity...

...The British were well informed about the consequences of punitive sanctions: destruction of jobs in Britain...

...Kaunda's insulting remarks on Britain and its prime minister, that upset the British public...

...While Britain's electorate respected Churchill for his war leadership, they did not believe that he and his Tory party would deliver the New Jerusalem...

...Thatcher's fight against the illusions which have been a staple of British life for more than forty years...

...Thatcher made a serious effort to control trade unions and cut away the dead flesh in coal and steel and other outdated industries...

...they, along with the Labour party and SDP-Liberal Alliance (and some "wet" Tories), were making much the same demand as Kaunda, calling for punitive sanctions against the Boer autarchs on the Cape of Good Hope...

...They did not believe that the British could be trusted to fight Hitler without the inducement of a future "New Jerusalem...

...The sedative was Prince Andrew's wedding to Sarah Ferguson, cheered in the center of London by massed crowds of many nationalities...

...This petty despot, whose "African Socialism" has ruined his own country, was demanding that Britain take up its old imperial role—but only toward South Africa...

...mass unemployment for blacks in South Africa...

...It was saved first by a loan from the Belgian government-in-exile (!) and then by timely and generous American aid, which prevented the collapse of Britain as an industrial power and an ally...

...Despite the aid and the parlous state of Britain, management in the basic industries continued to show a complacency that verged on the incredible...

...Through the falling away of empire and the decline of British industry, the British never adapted their New Jerusalem expectations to fit their miserable performance in the creation of wealth...

...Something remarkably similar had happened to Winston Churchill diu-ing the Second World War—an abuse of mirage politics and Utopian afflatus by his opponents inside and outside the coalition government...

...But for the British public, for Labour and the AlHance, and for the Commonwealth, these details were ecUpsed by the imperative for a Grand Imperial gesture...

...From a song with words by William Blake, about "building Jerusalem in England's green & pleasant land...

...Even before the war inefficiency, waste, and a general sloppiness of thought and organization in industry had seriously impaired Britain's ability to fight, and by 1941 the country was bankrupt...

...He and his cabinet, especially Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood, felt that it would be wrong to commit the nation to postwar spending it could not afford...

...It was not Mugabe's contempt, nor Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright living in England...

...Not to put too fine a point on it, they did not think that Britain's people would stand up against Nazism unless they were bribed to do it...

...The diplomat and his note were treated with insolent contempt...

...Others, such as Sir William Beveridge and Ernest Bevin, had different ideas both about the British people and about the postwar commitment...

...They include quasi-imperial gestures to satisfy that papier-mache dummy of a lost empire which is called the Commonwealth...

...The inclination to Labour shows a renewed appetite for the politics of extravagance and fantasy, which do not stop at the chimeras of welfare-state spending...

...Thus suckered, the public responded with such enthusiasm that the coaUtion government, against the scruples of Churchill and his supporters, was swept into a commitment to the New Jerusalem, including a gigantic housing program that would supersede construction of vitally needed new industrial plant...

...Almost at the same time British viewers were treated to the sight of their foreign secretary in Lusaka, listening with bowed head to a disingenuous lecture on human rights and racism from Zambia's president-for-life, Kenneth Kaunda...

...The cause of popular anger in Britain was Mrs...

...Playing on welfare-state hostility to Mrs...

...The suffering and dying, after all, would be far away and in another country...

...This was a major contribution to the Labour landslide in July 1945...

...Churchill, who (rather naively, it seems) trusted the British to fight against Nazism in any case, was cautious about such promises...

...It shows an American reader that Edward R. Murrow's famous accotmt of the Blitz, with those plucky Londoners who "could take it," was a shallow and finally false image of Britain as it really fought the war on the home front...

...At home the British ParUament and public would be able to congratulate themselves on their virtue...

...Thatcher, this has helped to push Labour's popularity to more than 40 percent in the public opinion polls—almost ten points above the Tories...