Image: Largest tanker built in Britain launching on Tyneside, 1969After its recent annual conference in Liverpool, the Labour Party released a well-received party political broadcast pitched squarely to the Leave voting working class electorate of Britain’s post-industrial towns. It painted a portrait of painful loss and redemption to come: a world of well paid jobs in factories and fishing fleets that had once given pride and purpose to communities, but which had been destroyed by forty years of neoliberalism and would now be rebuilt by a Labour government.
The makers of Labour’s broadcast might well have spent the summer immersed in David Edgerton’s powerful new work, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History. In it, Edgerton documents the rise and eclipse of a manufacturing powerhouse, able to feed, house and heat itself, led by a state with full spectrum capabilities and a vigorous, nationalist political class. Edgerton is an extraordinary historian who challenges established preconceptions of British history at every turn. Out go the myths of Britain as an imperial power in terminal decline, presided over by a gentlemanly class of capitalists and effete politicians living off the rents and fading glories of empire while squandering its industrial heritage. In their place is a portrait of a nation - drawn in the brute, material statistics of coal production, industrial exports, foodstuffs and freight - which prioritises warfare as much as welfare, and comes into its own in a productivist, scientific and industrial post-war period more commonly associated with relentless diminution and decay.
The myth of post-war decline
It was the very strengths of this British nation – in modernised nationalised industries, domestic food production and indigenous energy supply – that made Thatcherism possible, argues Edgerton. With North Sea oil and abundant agricultural production, Britain no longer needed manufacturing exports to pay for imported food and energy. This was an ‘epochal transformation’ that ‘has barely registered in political discourse or the history books’. The success of the post-war state, not its failure, provided Thatcher with a platform for restructuring the economy and society. The family silver had been thoroughly burnished in the 1960s and 1970s, making its sale all the more lucrative. The miners, dockers and factory workers made redundant in the shake out could be cushioned by a newly comprehensive and generous welfare state.
