Both imperialist right and the nationalist left resisted what Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell lamented as “the end of Britain as an independent nation state”, “the end of a thousand years of history”. Photo by Sipa Press/REX

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation David Edgerton Allen Lane, 682pp, £30. “Only satirists”, he concludes, “not historians, could do justice” to recent events. Edgerton is scathing of the idea that Britain was economically regressing and shows instead a dynamic national economy: “declinism was always closely linked to notions of British exceptionalism”, an obsession that has blinded generations to realities at home and abroad.National anxiety was one of many factors behind the UK’s desire to join the growing European Economic Community. The national economy was transformed again into a global one, creating “a nation of shop-workers” not shopkeepers.

This is partly because he takes on so many received ideas. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: Timely jolt to a deluded ‘Bullshit Britain’ David Edgerton fillets national delusion and historical amnesia of ‘Bullshit Britain’ Related articles.

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His central thesis is that Britain was a normal nation state only quite briefly in the 20th century. Yet there was no anti-technocratic elite. A radical new history contends there was steady economic growth and social reformForget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain in the 20th century. In fact, Edgerton counters, it was an era of benign national-technocratic leadership, high investment, relative equality, economic protection, self-sufficiency in food, and later in energy, and high growth (GDP grew 7.3 per cent in 1973 alone). A “unique” and stable “island story”, we are told, sets Britain apart.This is, of course, nationalist delusion. The historian David Edgerton begins his account of 20th-century Britain with some bold claims. In 1980, British Leyland (a nationalised company) would advertise its new Austin Metro as “the British car to beat the world” in a TV ad featuring German, Japanese, French and Italian cars being beaten off an English beach as “Rule Britannia” played in the background. Britain did not become such a country until the 40 years after 1945, during most of which time it was highly industrial, proletarian and nationalist, before reverting to a new post-national openness in the Thatcher-Blair period. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History . David Edgerton is a pig-iron and power station historian who has established his reputation with a critique of technology-boosterism, past and present, and by challenging the “declinist” work of historians such as Correlli Barnett and the “two cultures” thesis of C P Snow. This “developmental” state was dissolved and replaced with an entrepreneurial culture that unleashed few entrepreneurs.

From welfare to public assets, the state had not failed but strengthened – not least through the expansion of the security services through a dirty war in Northern Ireland – and it was not rolled back but repurposed through privatisation and radical shifts in priorities.The Iron Lady “undoubtedly failed” in her pursuit of a stable, socially conservative Britain, as economic nationalism increasingly gave way to “openness to the world, to other people as well as other things”.

Her Euroscepticism was futile, her Falklands War ‘”a last quixotic adventure” for nationalist John Bull to protect (invariably white) “kith and kin”. Economic nationalism was Britain’s real “post-war consensus”, as the land of free trade became one of “of tariffs, quotas, import surcharges”, moving towards self-sufficiency in food and energy in “an epochal transformation” widely ignored.Despite growth and improving living standards, the relative success of other nations fed anxieties of “British decline”. It was a highly distinctive and powerful country in 1900, the largest exporter and importer right up to 1939, with open borders and an open economy, importing half its food, and with a rambling empire held together with a “top dog” liberalism that rejected the notion of imperial domination.

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