An Identity CrisisA. Madhavan THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE 1945-75 Peter Calvocoressi Penguin Books, New Delhi, India, 1979, pp. 261, £1.25 VOLUME IV NUMBER 5-6 March-April/May-June 1980 The
Second World War is a great divide in the history of 20th century Britain. It
marks the transition of Britain as a world power to a period of post-imperial
identity crisis. The 30 years since the war were difficult years of adjustment.
A major protagonist was reduced to the role of a participant in the Greek
chorus of nations.
But Britain is by no means a minor power. Its economic
strength ensures a high ranking in the league table of GNP, and its
self-sufficiency in oil is an enviable favour of geological fortune. Its
political influence, necessarily diminished, is still respectable. Its arts and
letters, although no rival to the first Elizabethan age, still have power to
delight and astonish us.
The problem of identity remains. In Donne's metaphor we
can say, ‘No nation is an island.’ But does Britain feel itself part of the
main? Which continent? These were the years when Britain behaved like a trapeze
artist who leaps to the forward swing but is loth to quit the swing he is
poised upon.
This book is a concise, analytical account of Britain
coming down in the world. The difficulty of writing recent history is one of
focus and selection. The author has done well to avoid the superimposition of
a grand design on the welter of events. He purveys no thesis. He is fair, from
a right-of-centre standpoint, and sufficiently distanced from the narration to
exclude his personal experience of the times. He is an annalist rather than a
historian. He wrote some of the annual volumes of Chatham House's Survey of
International Affairs. The dry touch of the expert summarizer is palpable.
The pageant of colourful political figures who flit through these years—Attlee,
Bevin, Bevan, Gaitskell, Eden, Macmillan, George Brown, Wilson, Heath—flit
through these pages as flat impersonal agents rather than as living people.
The book is divided into five parts. First comes a report
of the post-war tasks, the foundations of the welfare state and
nationalization. (It is seldom realized that the public sector in Britain is so
extensive—post, telecommunications, electricity, gas, coal, railways, airlines
(75%), motor (50%), steel (75%) and shipbuilding). There is a thoughtful
discussion on property. ‘Europe has known two distinct and incompatible
traditions about private property. The one holds that private property is
natural, the other that it is unnatural. The first tradition is rooted in
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