Transcript: The Decision That Started Britain’s Long Decline – Lord Andrew Roberts

Those were his three big ones.

And so when he brought out, under the government’s auspices, a report on post-war society — essentially what should happen after the war — it was something that excited a lot of people. As you say, it sold 800,000 copies, and those are the people who could afford to buy it. It was also taken out millions of times in libraries, and each copy was thought to have been read by at least 3 people because it was handed on to people in the pubs and people in their families and so on. So it was a huge report.

Fascinatingly, actually, when you look at it nowadays, it doesn’t actually set out all the various things that a lot of people think it did. I mean, it doesn’t mention the words “National Health Service,” for example. And it’s got lots of tables and graphs and facts and so on. It wasn’t a sort of scintillating read, but it did argue essentially that if the state interposed itself in every area of society, that people would ultimately be better fed and better taught and healthier.

The New Jerusalem

WINSTON MARSHALL: It resonating with people is sort of understandable. This terrible war effort to fight this evil, a righteous war, and there was a sense, no doubt, that the British people deserved more at the end of it. What was that sentiment?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Well, it was called the New Jerusalem. They actually came up with that word, that title at the time, and it was not intended in that pejorative sense that so many British political names get. It was actually meant seriously that this was going to be — à la the song “Jerusalem” — a new world that was going to be much better and fairer for everyone, but particularly for the working classes who, of course, in the Blitz had stood up so well against Hitler.

WINSTON MARSHALL: But New Jerusalemism wasn’t invented by Beveridge. This is a longer part of the British spirit, right? This had gone back to Romanticism.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Well, of course, exactly. And actually, William Morris was very much into New Jerusalemism and so on. No, it’s an essential part, not just of socialist thought, but also Methodist thought. It has its roots in Christianity, as you say, in the 18th century, John Wesley and so on. But this was the first time that it was really put into a government program, a political program that would change schools and hospitals and so on. And it was messianic in that sense.

A lot of it, of course, the Conservative Party agreed with. Winston Churchill had always been very much on the left of the Conservative Party himself, as had other people — Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden and others who had been in the — who got to the top of the Conservative Party partly because all three of them were anti-appeasers. And so this didn’t really have anything to do with, you know, the nationalisation of hospitals.

WINSTON MARSHALL: And so it wasn’t socialism, it was more classic liberalism, but English liberalism, trying to uplift.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Precisely. Beveridge himself was a liberal rather than a socialist.

Lend-Lease and Self-Delusion

WINSTON MARSHALL: I want to focus on this word “deluded,” as you used it earlier. So during the war, it was of course a socialist government in that everything was controlled and run by the state, the government. It was in the war Cabinet, the war government. And not only that, you have Lend-Lease during the war. So the idea that people thought, firstly, socialism actually seems to be working — we beat the Nazis with socialism. Secondly, with Lend-Lease, did they appreciate how much our war effort was supported by Lend-Lease? And was Lend-Lease deluding them into their concept of how great their achievements were within the war?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yes, there was an element of self-delusion about all of that. There was no alternative to Lend-Lease. We absolutely had to have it. It was the thing by which we were able to buy the weaponry with which we were on the winning side of the war.

I never like to say that we won the war because of course the Russians lost 27 million killed, the Americans produced far more material than we did during the war. And there were lots of other countries. Canada was a huge contributor, of course, as well as India and Australia and so on. So we mustn’t just sort of slip into the easy — 15 million Chinese died fighting fascism in 1931 to ’45. So, you know, it wasn’t just us winning the war.

However, we were very much on the winning side of the war, of course, and we were crucially — or at least the Empire was — the only force to fight right from the beginning through to the end. That’s the other vital thing, of course, with the Americans and Russians coming in long after the war had started.

Britain’s Financial Catastrophe After the War

And so as a result, we were bankrupt. Not actually bankrupt, but the amount of material, the cost in terms of imperial power, actual financial position that we were in, men, of course, and so on, was enormous. It essentially cost us one quarter of our national wealth to fight the Second World War. It won us untarnishable glory, but in history, untarnishable glory doesn’t amount to a row of beans when you’re actually sitting across the desk from people you’re trying to borrow money from.

And so the financial situation actually in 1945 was a completely catastrophic one. Our exports were down to £258 million, whereas they’d been £471 million the year that the war started. And our imports had gotten massively increased from £885 million to £1.3 billion. And so without, first of all, Lend-Lease, which was necessary during the war, and then crucially, J.M. Keynes’s $3.75 billion deal that was signed on the 6th of December 1945, we would have gone under.

And there are historians, there are both contemporary writers and some historians that say that austerity — which was bigger and worse, in fact, immediately after the war than it was during it, which is something a lot of people forget — could have led to starvation in the streets.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Would they have seen that as part of the war effort, the austerity after the war? British people were like, yeah, this is still carrying on, still fighting.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: They were angry that we had austerity well into the 1950s. In fact, sweet rationing wasn’t abolished till 1955. And they were angry about that when they were looking across at Germany and Japan and actually seeing the beginnings of what is frankly an economic miracle in both of those countries, which was not being replicated in the victor country, Britain.

The German and Japanese Economic Miracle

WINSTON MARSHALL: And why was it that Germany and Japan were having that miracle and we weren’t?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Because they were able to recreate their societies from ground zero, effectively. They retained capitalism, of course, but it wasn’t a capitalism that was holding them back. They also managed to get a trade union situation where the unions worked with the owners, with the capitalists essentially. And in both cases, the state oversaw a much more rational way of distributing resources than we were getting in.

The Keynesian Illusion and Britain’s Economic Choices

WINSTON MARSHALL: So it was less socialist than our system.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: It was. Yes, ultimately that’s the surprising thing really, because although you had trade unions that were across, you had a single one per industry, which we of course never have and still don’t really have. You therefore managed to get a workforce that was every year able to collectively bargain with the bosses of that same industry. And you didn’t get wildcat strikes in either of those countries, you didn’t get the kind of supply chain disruption that happened to British industry really from 1945 up until Margaret Thatcher’s reforms of the early ’80s.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Was there a different channel for investment in those countries to our country? So were they investing more in industry than we were? Were we putting more— we were putting more into what we call now the welfare state. Yes, that’s right.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: That’s right. And so we, I mean, it was, I’m not for a moment suggesting that it wasn’t extremely tough for the Germans and Japanese in the late 1940s, it was. But they were driven by a sense of, of course, humiliation of having lost the war and also a massive desire to get themselves back on their feet.

We, on the other hand, had the almost exact opposite. We’d won the war and felt we should as a result be congratulated on it, whereas financially and commercially, and in a business sense, we’d lost the war too.

The Keynes Loan and Britain’s Financial Rescue

WINSTON MARSHALL: Yeah, you mentioned Keynes there in passing, a settlement he did in ’45. I actually didn’t know about that. What was that?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: J.M. Keynes went over to Washington in order to secure a massive deal, $3.75 billion, which we got in the December of 1946, which was essentially the way in which we managed to stave off national bankruptcy. And there’s a ditty that the ambassador, a British ambassador to Washington, Lord Halifax, whose biography I wrote about 30 years ago, my longer, where in the US Embassy, in the British Embassy in Washington, the ditty went, “In Washington, Lord Halifax whispered to Lord Keynes, they might have the money bags, but we have all the brains.”

Which the problem is that actually, of course, when you’re negotiating, it’s much more sensible to have money bags than it is to have brains.

WINSTON MARSHALL: So this isn’t actually the Marshall Plan. This is before then. This is before the Marshall Plan.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: It’s the year before the Marshall Plan. And it is a key moment also because had it not gone through, it could have led to the bankruptcy of the Bank of England.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right, okay. So not only did we have Lend-Lease from the war, but in our rebuilding efforts, again, under a socialist government, we have Marshall Plan and this deal.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: And borrowing, this massive borrowing from the Truman administration.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Do the British people have a sense of the loans and the money they’re being given in grants? Or do they think, look how brilliant socialism is, we’re rebuilding and it’s working?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: A bit of both. There was, I mean, obviously these were big public things. They were debated in Parliament. They were discussed a lot in the press. The Conservative Party actually interestingly abstained over the vote to accept the loan. And Lord Halifax himself was furious about this, but he being a Conservative had sat in Conservative governments and so on. He’d been Foreign Secretary under Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain, and he was furious with the Conservatives for not embracing this loan because, as I say, without it, we would have been utterly broke and unable to fulfill our obligations on the world stage with regard to paying a debt.

We had quintupled our debt during the Second World War to £3.3 billion. So we were the world’s largest debtor nation. The Germans essentially fought the war without borrowing. The Russians too didn’t need to borrow terribly much. They participated in Lend-Lease, didn’t they? They participated in— No, they turned down— Yes, they participated in Lend-Lease and turned down the Marshall Plan, which was a massive strategic mistake by Stalin to have done that. But nonetheless, he had political reasons why he needed to do it.

But as far as we were concerned, we were very fortunate to have these 3 big infusions. And it was not done out of hands across the ocean sort of cousins and all of that kind of kumbaya stuff. It was done for the straightforward reason, as Herbert Hoover said at one stage in the 1920s, he said, “Beggar my neighbour is not a good policy if you want your neighbour to buy goods from you.”

And so to have the United Kingdom strong, not strong enough that it was able to hang on to its empire — the Americans always wanted the British Empire to be broken up — but also it would be strong enough to ensure that industry survived to the extent that they would then, we would then be a good customer for American goods, which is exactly what has happened. That is the basis of what has happened ever since.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right, okay. So from the American point of view, it actually has worked out well.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Made a lot of sense.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Made a lot of sense.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: And as you say, also, sorry, the other point about the Marshall Plan, not so much in Britain, but in France, Germany, and Italy, particularly Italy, is that it stopped communism. European communism was a serious threat in 1945, and it wasn’t by the end of the Marshall Plan.

WINSTON MARSHALL: What was the threat?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Where was the threat coming from? From the French, German, and Italian communist parties. In Italy, you do get communists sitting in Italian cabinets all the way through, and they’re still there in the 1960s and ’70s, but they’re not in any danger of actually overthrowing the state. But it was a serious worry for American strategists in France, where the de Gaulle government had a serious communist threat, and also in Germany.

Learning the Wrong Lessons from the War

WINSTON MARSHALL: Just on the 1945 and sorry, the war effort and the sort of the, again, on the sort of sense of delusion. Do you think that we then learned the wrong lessons? I’ve kind of asked this question a little bit, but more explicit on it. Do you think that the British people learned the wrong lessons in that period about how the economy was working?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yes, I do. I don’t think that we recognized that really the Americans were coming to our aid, but that there were massive strings attached. And that, I mean, we didn’t actually pay off Lend-Lease until, I think, 2006, I think, was the last time that we actually paid off the loan. It’s an extraordinary thing, I think, considering it’s very generous to have had such a long— but as I said, we had no choice. We needed— we had no choice. Exactly.

WINSTON MARSHALL: But had we not, and then had this sort of socialist settlement not worked, maybe we would have learned harder lessons and like the Germans and Japanese gone a sort of circuitous route around a better rebuilding than what we did in reality.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: If anything, it should have been tougher, that we should have actually faced the prospect of starvation in the streets. Yes, or alternatively, what tends to happen in those cases is that you do get communism.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right, okay.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: So when you think how left-wing some— you had the Commonwealth Party, which was extremely left-wing, the Independent Labour Party, which was essentially Marxist. There was a Communist Party, and it had a lot of members, but it didn’t have any MPs. And then you had a very strong pro-Russian left in the Labour Party, which Attlee defeated, along with Bevin and so on. But if you’d had real grinding deprivation, then who’s to say what would have happened?

Keynesian Economics and the Tax Paradox

WINSTON MARSHALL: Can you explain to me how Keynesian economics fits into this? As far as I’ve understood, his type of economics was popular in the mindset of Labour then. But if you look at what they did in terms of taxes, so if you have Keynesian as in that situation, the economy’s weak and so government should spend more and tax less, but actually they spent more and taxed a hell of a lot more. In 1945 to ’51, the top bracket of tax was 98%, with the 45% being across the board. So they weren’t actually Keynesian in their economics, or were they? Have I misunderstood this?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: No, I mean, essentially what Keynes wanted to do was to bring down tax once the economy was doing so well that you had growth from the increased consumption from priming the pump of the economy. However, what tends to happen with full-blown Keynesianism is that taxes go up at the end rather than go down. And that’s what we saw really for a lot of the 1950s and ’60s.

Even when Conservative governments were in power, Margaret Thatcher was the first person genuinely to bring down taxes in a significant way. In what was called Butskellism, because it was run by Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, they pushed the two words together. And because Butler’s view, the Conservative Rab Butler’s view, was pretty much the same when it came to industry taxation and spending and so on as the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell. The word was Butskellism. And under that, you also had extremely high taxation.

WINSTON MARSHALL: So Thatcher was a real response to the economics of ’45, wasn’t she?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Utterly revolutionary. Yes, she was the person who essentially slayed the dragons of inflation and trade union power. Which were unleashed by the Second World War.

Churchill’s Return and the Failure to Reverse Socialism

WINSTON MARSHALL: So what’s curious is that, of course, not only did we have Conservative governments before Thatcher after the war, but Churchill himself was Prime Minister. He lost the election again in 1950. He won in ’51, although he lost the popular vote. When the Conservatives come back to power, why is it that they don’t reverse a lot of what had happened in that ’45 to ’51 period?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: They didn’t have the money. They tried to do as much denationalisation as they could. They did it to iron and steel. They didn’t have enough time, enough money to do it for the railways. They managed to get rid of the rest of rationing and that was a success.

But to be frank, it was two things really. First of all, Churchill was 80. He was not vigorous enough, energetic enough. He was 1855 when he finished. In ’54, November ’54. So by the time he left power, he was an octogenarian. That is not the kind of man who’s going to really get to grips with the underlying problems.

He also had a very sort of— his attitude towards trade unions was frankly one of appeasement. In this, he was an appeaser. There’s a marvellous moment during the 1953 railway strike where he wants everybody to be able to get back for Christmas, and so he wants to do a deal with the rail unions, which of course is the job of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler, but he takes over and starts to negotiate directly with the unions. And after the agreement is made with the unions, he phones up Rab Butler and says, “Good news, Rab, I’ve sold the rail strike. Everyone’s going to be able to get home for Christmas.” “On whose terms, Prime Minister?” asks Rab Butler, rather concerned about how much this is going to cost the exchequer. “Why, theirs, of course, old cock.”

That’s the problem, right there and then you’ve got the problem, is that wage boost inflation starts to take off in the mid to late ’50s and is rampant by the 1960s.

WINSTON MARSHALL: And that inflation you put down to?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: To giving up and surrendering to the unions. They had very much the old, what one calls, I suppose, wet Tories, the liberal wing of the Conservative Party of that time, had very much an emotionally totally understandable sense of, well, part of it was noblesse oblige, the idea that your job was to take care of people less privileged than yourself.

But also, and you see this with Harold Macmillan and his emotional attachment to the Durham miners, because he represented a Durham constituency before the Second World War, had seen genuine deprivation with the miners, he’d fought alongside the Durham Light Infantry in the First World War. He admired the men who went down the pits and thought that they should be essentially subsidized. And you can do that for a few years, but when you try and do that for decades, you wind up bankrupting the country.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Which happened in sort of the Sterling crisis.

The Sterling Crisis and Britain’s Economic Decline

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: The Sterling crisis and the crisis, what crisis, and the IMF bailout and so on. You weren’t born at that stage, but I remember it tremendously well, the 1976 crisis, economic crisis, and in ’77 it got sort of worse. And really there was no hope for this country until Margaret Thatcher was elected in the May of 1979.

WINSTON MARSHALL: It’s funny when you speak then, and I sort of think of the swinging ’60s, and now with many decades later, we look back and it seems like a kind of high period and a great time for Britain and England. But it sounds like the foundations it was built on were pretty shaky.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: It was shaky, but let’s look at the leadership. You had Ted Heath, who was a complete buttscolite, and Harold Wilson. The 1960s were a terrible dearth when it came to the kind of actual energetic, thoughtful leadership that was needed in this country.

So yeah, I mean, we all love the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but that was not really what in the world of political economy the 1960s were all about. They were opening the way for the catastrophe of the 1970s.

Immigration and the Post-War Settlement

WINSTON MARSHALL: So another thing that happens in the ’40s under Attlee’s government, which I think is pertinent to what’s going on today, is the beginning of immigration and what would become — I actually think you probably could call it mass migration in the ’40s — because most famous is the Windrush generation, which starts after the British Nationality Act, which I think is ’47 or ’48.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: ’47.

WINSTON MARSHALL: ’47. But there’s only a few hundred of them. You have actually from Eastern Europe, particularly from Poland, many hundreds of thousands coming in the name of rebuilding. Now, you mentioned wet Tories, and today we hear wet Tories saying — no, we’ve heard this over the last 20 years — we need immigration for the economy and to boost GDP. And what was the mentality behind immigration then? Not just under Attlee’s Labour government, but Churchill, because then under Churchill, I believe that’s when immigration from the South Asian, from the subcontinent begins.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yes. Well, Winston Churchill himself was very doubtful about the effects on society. He called it the “magpie society” of having too many people, non-white people coming into the United Kingdom. He was — I mean, he saw race through a prism that we would consider to be absurd and obscene in many ways, frankly. And so he was not happy about it happening. However, as I say, he was in his 80s by the end of it.

And the National Health Service, apart from anything else, did need to have an influx of essentially unskilled workers who weren’t paid very much. And that is what happened under the 1947 immigration setup. By 1961, that was all closed down — not all and not totally closed down, obviously, because it did continue. But it was really the Ugandan Asians who were being oppressed by Idi Amin in 1971 that brought the next stage of large-scale non-white immigration from the Commonwealth. That was when mass immigration, Commonwealth immigration took place. And it’s carried on.

WINSTON MARSHALL: You say non-white, but as I say, the first wave was white. It was white Eastern Europeans.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yes. But you see, first of all, the Poles were people who we had literally gone to war for. You know, there was a very positive sense about the Poles. I mean, that’s also true to another degree of lots of other Commonwealth countries because they’d obviously fought on the same side as us in the Second World War.

WINSTON MARSHALL: We’d gone to war with the Jamaicans and the Indians.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Absolutely, and the Ugandans and Asians and so on. Pakistanis, of course, who found — who created the largest volunteer army in the history of warfare.

WINSTON MARSHALL: The Pakistanis.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: The Indian Army, which obviously—

WINSTON MARSHALL: Oh, yes, of course.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Which involved Pakistan and the Sikhs and so on. Yeah, it’s the largest volunteer army ever in history. And so there was a very positive sense that the Commonwealth was a positive force for good.

And I think, by the way, I think that that’s always stayed with us. There was a period, of course, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when people started worrying about whether the Commonwealth was going to lead to a kind of implosion into Britain. But the Commonwealth itself, partly I think because of the late Queen’s great love of the Commonwealth, has always been a popular institution in this country.

WINSTON MARSHALL: But the Commonwealth is one thing and immigration into Britain is another thing. So when this started happening, what was the discourse in Britain? What were the politicians saying? Were they encouraging it? Were we like, we need people to rebuild? What was the idea that you needed people and it couldn’t be done ourselves?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yeah, some were, some weren’t. I mean, obviously Enoch Powell being the classic example of the person who was openly opposed to it from 1968 onwards.

WINSTON MARSHALL: But that’s still later.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: But that’s much later. And yeah, but there were other people, there were Tory MPs who started to worry about the social aspects of having large new Commonwealth mass immigration. But they weren’t the key figures in the Home Office, for example.

WINSTON MARSHALL: What about the proponents of it? What were they? What do we know about their ideology?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Well, there were a couple really. Firstly, from the Conservative point of view, people like Alan Lennox Boyd argued that they’d been on our side in the war, we needed these people to come in to keep wages down — essentially was one of the arguments that was not made publicly but was certainly made sotto voce. And that they would be doing jobs that a lot of natural-born British people didn’t want to do. And that’s in a sense also been true ever since. You know, there are an awful lot of people in this country today who ought to be doing all kinds of jobs, but they think it’s sort of beneath them.

Correlli Barnett and the Roots of British Decline

WINSTON MARSHALL: I want to bring in Correlli Barnett, who was a friend of yours, a historian at Cambridge, if I’m not mistaken.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yeah. And he was the director of the Churchill Archives at Cambridge University.

WINSTON MARSHALL: You were telling me before we started recording that he might not have been a popular historian, but he was a cult historian and massively influential on Thatcher and her government when she came in. And in his book, The Audit of War, he goes into quite a few of the things that we’ve talked about, but he actually paints a picture of Britain where these problems weren’t a problem of the war — they actually long preceded the war.

And he argues that certain of our industries were well behind the Germans, even the French, even before the First World War. But certainly by the Second World War, I think when it came to steel, chemicals, optics, shipbuilding, even aircraft — which is quite hard to imagine because of the story we’ve told ourselves about the superiority of Hurricanes and Spitfires in the war. And he argues that our economy had failed already long before the war. Do you agree with his analysis of our economy and our industries?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: That’s definitely what he argued, yes. And he did have a tremendous influence on political thinking in the 1970s because essentially he created this argument — I was about to say myth, it’s not a myth, a lot of it’s absolutely accurate — but it was an argument that was very much taken up by Margaret Thatcher and the thinkers around her. That essentially there was a rottenness in British capitalism that could be seen in the 1920s and 1930s. And it wasn’t therefore just the fact that the Blitz had destroyed our factories that was responsible for the below-par performance of the British economy in the 1950s and ’60s.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right. Okay. But it was the case that our GDP per capita wasn’t overtaken by the Germans until the ’70s. So it doesn’t seem to me that it’s entirely correct that we were behind the Germans.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Interestingly, it’s very often in history you find it’s not the moment that you’re overtaken that is the most politically difficult moment. It’s the moment when you fear you’re about to be. You see this again and again in history. One of the reasons that the Germans unleashed the First World War deliberately was that they feared they were about to be overtaken by Russia. They weren’t about to be, in fact. Most of the modern historians see Russia as having plateaued by 1914, but the Germans believed that they were going to be.

I think a lot of what America is going through at the moment can be put down to the subconscious realization that Chinese GDP — in some areas already has outstripped. It depends which rubric you use.

WINSTON MARSHALL: You’re talking about the Thucydides trap then?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I’m talking about the Thucydides trap. And there was an element of the Thucydides trap in British views of the German economic miracle in the 1970s. Not that we were going to go to war with Germany — of course we weren’t. Germany by that stage was a model democracy in the way that it’s continued to be. It had essentially had its warlike sense burned out of it by the combined bomber offensive of 1942 to 1945.

Before that, in the 75 years between 1864 and 1939, the Germans had started 5 wars. From 1945 onwards, of course, they’ve been a model pacific democracy. So we weren’t worried about that, but we were worried about being overtaken by our former enemies. And it was the process of seeing the overtaking take place.

WINSTON MARSHALL: The British were worried about that? When?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: In the 1950s and ’60s. And so by the time it actually happens, as you say, in the 1970s, it’s already been factored into a sort of defeatism, essentially. So rather than wanting to do anything about it, we essentially decided we were going to manage our decline vis-à-vis our former enemies.

Managing Decline: Political Cowardice and the Trade Unions

WINSTON MARSHALL: When you say we were going to manage our decline, can you give me an example of that? Someone saying that or—

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: No, no, of course they never said this. This is the key thing. It’d be electoral suicide for anybody, any politician to say I’m going to manage our decline.

WINSTON MARSHALL: So why do you believe it?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Because that is what happened. They did nothing — until the election of Margaret Thatcher — they did nothing to try to stop the decline. They continued to appease the trade unions who by the mid to late 1970s had a stranglehold over the economy.

A bit more moral courage, frankly, would have been useful from these people, who actually had shown tremendous physical courage in the war. If you look at Ted Heath’s cabinet, it’s full of people who’d won the Military Cross at Arnhem or Anzio or whatever. These guys were tremendously brave. But when it came to saying no, essentially, across board tables or especially in industrial disputes, they opted for the quiet life.

WINSTON MARSHALL: It’s not hard to actually fathom that because it seems that we’re still — I still see that continuing to this day — where things that are politically unpopular, or people are maybe nervous about what the media classes might say, they decide they prefer to step away from it. And those who do step out get absolutely lambasted and torn to shreds.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yeah, and also kicking the can down the road is something that quite a lot of the civil service prefer to do. And they’re not going to ever excoriate a minister who says, okay, well, we’ll go along with your plan to essentially kick the can down the road.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Well, Barnett’s actually a big criticiser of the civil service. He even wrote a novel about it. I think it’s—

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I haven’t read Bill’s novel. That’s a guy I ought to. What’s it called?

WINSTON MARSHALL: It’s called something like The Bunk, The Grey Bunk something or other.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Right. Okay. All right. Well, that can be on my reading list. But he was a tough, hard thinker. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. I can easily see why — as you say — he was a cult figure amongst a small group of people who in the 1980s did want to have radical change. But he didn’t have that sort of easy manner that would turn him into a sort of charismatic, popular ideological figure.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Like you. I’m an ideological figure, not charismatic. Just on Barnett though, just to complete this — what I’m trying to piece together about ’45 and the myths we’ve told ourselves as a nation. His argument is actually that Britain had a head start in the Industrial Revolution. We were ahead of them starting in the 1760s, 1780s, and we sort of rested on our laurels there.

France, Germany, and the Industrial Revolution

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Well, actually, we were very lucky in a sense that the French didn’t embrace the Industrial Revolution more than they did, and that was because of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon stuck to the Colbertian system of essentially state control rather than embracing Adam Smith’s argument in Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776. So, he — and it’s thought that Napoleon did read it, although it wasn’t published in French until much later. And yet he, for a couple of reasons, preferred — partly obviously because he was a dictator and he wanted control, and also because he didn’t want to get into competition with the British, who would be able to sell the same goods cheaper because they’d started the Industrial Revolution slightly earlier. And also, they were at war and it was much more difficult to trade because the Royal Navy completely dominated the sea lanes.

So for one reason or another, the French Industrial Revolution doesn’t start until peace breaks out in 1815, which is a full half century after we’ve been going at it hammer and tongs. We’ve been building the required canals that are going to be able to take raw materials to where they can be turned into finished products. And so they’re half a century behind.

Education and the Classical Curriculum

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right. Okay. But they are ahead of us actually in education. And this is a Barnett argument, which I think is kind of crucial, not just actually for understanding our economy, but even the civil service, I think, is that Napoleon was building or pushing a technical education.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yes. He created the Sorbonne, of course, and the lycée.

WINSTON MARSHALL: And we had the classical liberal education by —

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Well, and Bill is very critical of Oxford and Cambridge and the public school system and also the curriculum. He didn’t think that kids should be learning Latin. He thought that they should be learning how to create the most advanced, technically advanced factories.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Which the Germans were emphasizing.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Which the Germans, French, and Japanese — to a much lesser extent the Italians — were doing. I mean, obviously with regard to the Russians, it’s completely different because communism is so corrosive to real education anyway. They weren’t going to pose a threat. But the other place that he looked across to, and who doesn’t when it comes to modern capitalism, was America, where you had capitalism in sort of red in tooth and claw, and they were burying everybody. Their growth rates were far superior to ours.

America’s Economic Rise and the British Empire

WINSTON MARSHALL: And that’s because you think because of their economic system. You don’t think — we’ve mentioned already the advantage they took of the British and wanting to take our empire. I mean, we didn’t go too deep into that and we could, but.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: No, I mean, they also had their own massive raw materials. They’ve got an entire continent, obviously. But the essentially breakdown of the British Empire was not primarily for the Americans an attempt by them to take our empire. They wanted a series of independent states from which they could buy raw materials on the same basis that we did. And that’s essentially what happened after the collapse of the sterling area in the 1950s.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right, okay. Because there’s one ongoing idea is that Roosevelt really just took advantage of Britain and this, I guess, starts with the Atlantic Charter in ’41, is wanting to break up the British Empire.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yeah, the wording of the clause in the Atlantic Charter — it was agreed by Winston Churchill, of course, who was a huge imperialist who believed, in fact, it was his sort of secular religion, the British Empire. But he was willing to go along with the clause because of all the other things that we were — I mean, the Americans were essentially committing themselves to what sounded like a sort of world crusade against Nazism. And this was in August of 1941, which of course was months before the Americans actually came into the war. So overall, the Atlantic Charter was a good thing for Britain.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Churchill was under some duress though, because he needed the Americans in, right?

Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Germany-First Policy

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Of course. The whole of the free world was under massive duress until the Americans came in. But what he wanted was to have Roosevelt completely ideologically on side and then essentially waited for events to unfold.

I mean, the extraordinary thing is, of course, that after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war four days later on America. And it wasn’t the Americans who declared war on Germany at all. If Roosevelt had wanted to on the Day of Infamy, he could have, but he didn’t. But what he did do, and what for me is the greatest act of statesmanship of the 20th century, is to adopt a Germany-first policy. He adopted the Clausewitzian view that you hit your strongest enemy first in any coalition. And so you have 70% of American troops and ships and planes and material and so on dedicated to winning the war against Germany and only 30% against Japan, despite the fact that it had been the Japanese who’d attacked Pearl Harbor. And you have, right at the beginning, the American Congress and the press and much of the public wanting to punish Japan for Pearl Harbor before you unleash operations which put American troops on the ground in Northwest Africa.

The 1945 Settlement and Its Unravelling

WINSTON MARSHALL: I wonder if you might indulge me in kind of tying this all together a little bit. And one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you is because I see a lot of what’s going on across the world today as a revolt against the 1945 settlement. Now, we’ve gone a little bit deeper and shown, as Barnett did, that there were deeper issues or longer-standing issues in ’45 that were manifesting then.

But it seems to me that across many domains, the settlement of ’45 hasn’t worked. And I see — you can challenge me on anything I say that you think is incorrect. 2016, Brexit and Trump, this is a revolt against globalization and actually the left behind, the deindustrialized areas, the working people of those were shouting out against — it was a kind of long shout of the night that they were hurt by the system as it was.

In 2020, COVID, we see organizations like the WHO, which by the way was set up in 1948. It was at best fraudulent, at worst completely corrupt and just not fit for purpose. We then see 2026. Now the whole conversation has been, it’s the end of the rules-based order. Of course, the rules-based order, the UN, NATO, these were all formed in ’45, well, all the years just after. There’s a whole other play, of course, which we will see, which is Bretton Woods was in ’44 and the economic policies that the West is built on, or rather Europe, I should say. And we don’t — that full system hasn’t had the same ruptures yet, but it seems that this post-war settlement is being ruptured and torn apart.

And I even think — sorry — the likes of Nick Fuentes who make fun of the Holocaust, for them, the Holocaust is as abstract to them as the Napoleonic Wars are to us. We don’t know people who were in the Napoleonic Wars. It doesn’t have the emotional pull, whereas you and I know people who are in the Holocaust or who fought in the war. So that’s kind of what I see here. What do you think I’m getting right or wrong in this?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I think the only thing I disagree with you about any of that was the very first bit where you seem to cast doubt on whether the original settlement was a good thing, because it was a good thing for the world, for world peace. We’ve had 75 years. NATO was a magnificent invention which essentially defeated communism.

The problem starts in 1989 when European communism was defeated. And instead of keeping our guard up and spending the so-called peace dividend sensibly, we just splurged essentially on social and welfare provision, but also in cutting our military spending to such a degree that we’re now in a situation where only the United States is able to project power in a meaningful way outside its own borders, apart from obviously Russia and China.

So I’m not advocating a non-US NATO as such, although I do think something like that might have to happen, especially if President Trump is followed by somebody who’s like-minded when it comes to essentially the contempt for NATO that the Trump administration has shown.

A Non-US NATO?

WINSTON MARSHALL: So a non-US NATO?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: A non-US NATO, a form of —

WINSTON MARSHALL: An alliance without the US?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: An alliance of Western democracies which is friendly with the United States, of course it is. But it builds its own weapons, it finances itself.

WINSTON MARSHALL: I mean, that seems unthinkable at this moment. The US — 60% of defense spending within NATO is done by the US.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Precisely. And so that’s why we’ve got to bump up the other 40. And instead of spending money in the way that we have spent it, the so-called peace dividend, which was a tragic disaster in my view from 1989 through to 9/11 and beyond. And certainly up to the moment when Obama refused to abide by the red lines in Syria and then almost immediately afterwards Putin took the Donbas and Crimea.

So you have this sort of moment where we forgot history in our jubilation at the fall of communism, which was achieved by this remarkable alliance, NATO.

The Collapse of the United Nations Dream

At the same time, you have the collapse essentially of the dream of the United Nations. The United Nations was created in 1945 at San Francisco with a dream of peace — that somehow the world was going to be able to be a better place, especially if the big nations and small nations were able to come together. That was really exploded only a few months later at the time of the Chinese Civil War and the fall of China to communism in 1949 by the end of the Chinese Civil War. And then of course the very following year you got Korea.

And when we’ve seen some of the most terrible things that have happened — Srebrenica and Rwanda and Yugoslavia — these are explanations why in the post-war period the United Nations has been next to useless when it comes to doing anything worthwhile. So that concept was appalling.

And then you mentioned Dumbarton Oaks and also Bretton Woods. These are the economic frameworks of the post-war settlement, which as you say, went far, far too far when it came to globalization because you had people who were just simply not benefiting from it. At the same time that, as a result of what Obama did in Syria and elsewhere, and of course what happened after 9/11, you have mass immigration into Europe, some of which is welcomed by Angela Merkel, but an awful lot isn’t, and still isn’t today. That’s why it’s the top or the second top issue in British politics.

And so to have all of those things come together, of course, is not just going to put strain and stresses on the rules-based international order and the post-war settlement. It is in places going to break it. And when you then on top of all of that have a United States president who doesn’t believe in it anyway, then you’re right, we’re going to have to come up with something else.

WINSTON MARSHALL: In the rules-based order.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: It’s something else beyond the — I mean, some of the rules —

WINSTON MARSHALL: But it doesn’t sound like you believe in the rules-based order.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Well, you see, the thing is that it’s very rare in history to have a period of 80 years of peace and relative prosperity. Very rare indeed. The Roman Empire didn’t have it. It certainly hasn’t really happened since. I mean, it’s something — instead of us seeing this period of a whole of our lives and our parents’ lives as being normal, we should recognize that it’s extremely exceptional.

Nuclear Deterrence and the Rules-Based Order

WINSTON MARSHALL: And you put that down to the rules-based order or nuclear arms? Well, the mutually assured destruction?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: The two, of course. NATO’s entire ultimate defense strategic capacity is entirely based on that — on the fact that in the end, the Russians, Chinese, and French, and Americans, and British — and Israelis and Indians and Pakistanis — have the bomb and nobody else does. That’s the other important thing, which is why I was a huge supporter of what President Trump did to take out the Iranian nuclear capacity last year. That was exactly what needs to be done by the great powers in order to ensure that there are any rules at all, frankly.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Venezuela this year?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Well, the problem there, I think, was that you had an absolute sitting opportunity to help the opposition, which won 70-plus percent of the vote in the election. Instead, you stick with the old guard, which I think was a mistake. I hope that he’s not going to do the same thing. If he tries the same thing in Cuba, I hope he learns the lesson of that.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Well, the logic, I think —

Britain’s Future and the Hope for Leadership

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: And also the timing. About this, the timing of the Iranian uprising. I think to say that you’re locked and loaded and then actually effectively not be locked and loaded for at least another 2 to 3 weeks, was led to later tragedy.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Yeah, I mean, it could so be that the situation in Iran ends up being Trump’s Obama in Syria. It’s the red line that they cross and then he doesn’t actually do anything. He said he’s already— I think it’s already happened. He said if you kill any protesters we’re going to intervene. They’ve killed tens of thousands of protesters and not intervened.

But on Venezuela, as I’ve understood it, is they learning the mistakes from the neocon wars of regime change. And instead of just wiping it out and wiping out the regime, they do a deal with the regime and be like, there’s going to be a slow transition, but your option is to work with us or—

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: The huge difference though, Winston, is that the mistake that neoconservatives, including myself, made is that there isn’t a— except for in certain places, in certain circumstances, for relatively short periods of time— there is no tradition of democracy in Islam. Venezuela is not Islam. Venezuela has had democracy in the past. Lots of Latin American countries have. And there’s no reason why a rich middle-class country like Venezuela should not be a democracy. That’s not necessarily the case in, as we’ve discovered in various countries in the Middle East.

WINSTON MARSHALL: So you would support regime change in non-Muslim countries, but you think the reason the neocon regime change didn’t work is because they were Muslim, but that doesn’t mean that shouldn’t work elsewhere.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yeah, essentially. I think that if you’ve got a history of democracy in a country, then it can be, especially as I say, if it’s a— I mean, it should be one of the richest countries in the world because of its oil deposits, Venezuela. And it ought to be a democracy because it’s got a very strong middle class and the Democrats won 70% of the vote. So there’s no reason why Venezuela shouldn’t be able to be a democracy.

Whether that’s the case in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, I’m afraid I’m not sure. And with regard to Russia, you know, when is that? When have they been? It’s strongman after strongman, maybe a few years under Yeltsin at the end of Gorbachev. But I mean, it’s such a short period that it strikes me that maybe it is one of those countries that simply because of its background and its size and its history and so on, just is not conducive to the same form of Jeffersonian-style democracy that you and I and America and other countries enjoy.

Where Does Britain Go From Here?

WINSTON MARSHALL: And I think China as well, another example. Just to tie things back together with what we’ve discussed about ’45 and the settlement there and the kind of lies maybe we’ve told ourselves or the spirits that have animated us in our decision-making economically. Where do you see things going forward? Do you think this, it’s not quite somewhat socialist, not quite socialist state, increased taxing reports that the wealthy and the wealth creators are leaving the country. Where do you see this next for Britain? Do you think it is going to collapse? Do you think that we’ve got something to worry about looking forward?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I’m not one who goes down the whole broken Britain route. I think there’s a lot about Britain that isn’t in the slightest bit broken, that’s extremely good and works well. We’ve got fabulous universities. We’re the world leaders in certain industries. We’ve got tiny armed forces, but they’re extremely good. So I’m not a total sort of woe is me person, but then I’m 63, and if I were your age, I probably would be a lot more worried about things.

But the good thing is that I’ve seen it all before. I saw it in the ’70s, and I saw the way in which we had the humiliation of our Prime Minister coming back from the IMF, and we had the rubbish piled up the streets and the dead being unburied and so on. You know, it went on and on and it happened from the age of, for me, 12 till 16. But then at 16, something happened. We had a leader. We had a fabulous leader who said no and was able to put in place policies that turned things around. So instead of being a complete economic basket case and about to drop out of even the second tier of world powers, we got our mojo back.

And so I think, and I’ve seen this so many times in history, individuals can make a massive difference. It’s, you’re taught, especially now amongst the sort of determinist and Marxist view of history, that actually individuals don’t matter. Yes, they do. You know, I write about Churchill and Napoleon and the decisions they took have truly changed the trajectories of their nations. So I do put hope in a great sort of “arm yourselves and be men of valor” moment. But we need the leadership.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Do you see any individuals that excite you?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I really do. The more I see of Kemi Badenoch, the more I realize that she is a tremendously formidable figure. She’s got a sort of steel to her that I think is tremendously impressive. And I do hear echoes of the person who I consider myself to be a still devoted believer in, which is Margaret Thatcher.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right. Well, so that’s going on her ideas maybe, but the polls show that the British public don’t feel the same way as you do.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I know. They just need to know her as well as I do.

Keir Starmer’s China Visit and the Appeasement Question

WINSTON MARSHALL: Do you, when you look at Keir Starmer returning from China, he pretends he’s got some sort of deal. He hasn’t. It seems to me to be somewhat of a humiliation tour. He had banked on, he’d hedged on getting some sort of deal. It’s why he allowed the China mega embassy in London to be built. It’s why he, or it’s purported that that’s the reason why the Chris Cash and Chris Berry spy cases were thwarted because the Chinese didn’t want those to go ahead, and he’s got basically nothing. It’s some sort of marginally better deal on whisky tax. He claims that he’s got some business deals, but the only one he’s actually said is that AstraZeneca, a British company, are going to be investing in China, not the other way around.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: And also Jimmy Lai, of course, he mentioned, he brought up Jimmy Lai, and the story of Jimmy Lai is a truly terrible one. We’ve got a British citizen there, he’s 78 years old, he’s been imprisoned for 1,587 days, not just in prison and not just in a Chinese prison, but in solitary confinement. Imagine what that does to your mental state. And if he came back tomorrow and suddenly Xi turned around and said, “Yes, I was persuaded by Keir Starmer that this was a terrible thing to do,” then I would probably think again.

But certainly it hasn’t happened yet, and also even the parliamentarians, my fellow parliamentarians, 6 of them who had been under severe banning and sanctions and so on by the Chinese. They’ve lifted them on those 6, but not a former parliamentarian or any of the groups around them. I’m very concerned about this whole attitude, this appeasement that we have towards China. But I do also understand that of course in terms of business, you can’t cut yourself off from the second biggest economy in the world.

WINSTON MARSHALL: It’s just in the context of our conversation, and we think at the beginning we were one of the great nations.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Yeah.

WINSTON MARSHALL: And now I look at that, I’m like, it’s over.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: But also I think it’s very important to remember that just being a close economic partner of a country doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t go to war with it. The number one, our number one export country in 1914 was Imperial Germany.

WINSTON MARSHALL: We can’t go to war with China, we’d lose in a—

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: No, I’m not saying we should do, for God’s sake, absolutely not that. But all I’m saying is that historically, the idea that being close to a country economically therefore means you’re going to be at peace with it doesn’t follow in history.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Right, okay. Was that Kissinger’s idea?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: John Bright, it starts with Cobden, obviously. Yes, Kissinger also put that.

WINSTON MARSHALL: So that’s the globalist fallacy. The more we are entwined, the less we’ll go to war with each other.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: The assumption is that if you have a lot of trading with a country, that therefore you’re not going to go to war with it. That’s not true. The only one of these sort of generalizations that really works is that democracies don’t go to war against each other.

Closing Remarks

WINSTON MARSHALL: Interesting. Lord Roberts, we’ve covered a lot of ground.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: We have, haven’t we?

WINSTON MARSHALL: Thank you so much.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Thank you so much.

WINSTON MARSHALL: I’ve got 2 or 3 questions from our brilliant Substackers, which I’m going to invite you to take on our Substack. But before we go there, in this part of the conversation, is there anything you think I’ve missed important to the story that we need to complete our conversation?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I really don’t. I think we’ve done a fantastic overview here. It’s very impressive.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Wonderful. And is there anything you’d like to bring viewers and listeners’ attention to? Your brilliant podcast — have you got— and when’s your next book?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I have. I’ve got a podcast called Secrets of Statecraft that I do for the Hoover Institution. And my next book is Napoleon and His Marshals. It’s coming out in October. It’s going to be about the relationship that the emperor had with his 26 marshals.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Oh my goodness. I cannot wait. I hope you’ll come back on to explain. Can I?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: I’d love to come back.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Wonderful. Lord Roberts, a great pleasure.

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Thank you so much.

Substack Questions

WINSTON MARSHALL: What are your recommendations for historical fiction that can introduce the reader to the best portraits of British Empire and its beneficial works?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Bound to be, may I say right now, bound to be unbelievably politically incorrect.

WINSTON MARSHALL: I’m sure. Now, another good question, which actually ties to our longer conversation, is about the Fabians. To what extent, if any, do you believe the Fabians and similar late Victorian or even earlier elite movements have been behind the attempted undermining and destruction of Britain?

LORD ANDREW ROBERTS: Left-wing intellectuals are at the root cause of almost all the problems this country has. They’ve always been a very serious threat to British greatness.

WINSTON MARSHALL: Thanks for watching The Winston Marshall Show with our phenomenal guest Lord Andrew Roberts. Head over to winstonmarshall.co.uk right now for that extended conversation between me and Lord Roberts, where he takes some of our Substackers’ superb questions, including how the Fabians fit into all of this. But we also look at the British Empire and much else. That is all at winstonmarshall.co.uk. Otherwise, remember to subscribe, and until next time, be well.

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