In 1882 Sir Bernhard Samuelson, after a lengthy investigation of education, science and industry, concluded that ‘the Englishman has yet to learn that an extended and systematic education is now a necessary preliminary to the fullest development of industry.’ A century later in 1986 Sir Bryan Nicholson of the Manpower Services Commission put it more succinctly: ‘we are a bunch of thickies’.

In the last hundred and thirty years or so Britain has steadily declined from its economic position as the ‘workshop of the world’ to that of a low-ranking laggard European power. Our share of world manufactured exports has fallen from around 45 per cent in 1875 to 30 per cent by 1913, 20 per cent by 1939, 25 per cent by the early 1950s, before slumping to 5 per cent by 1994. As this happened so we were overtaken successively by other powers. In 1870 our Gross Domestic Product per head was second only to Australia in the world. By 1913 we had been overtaken by the United States and Belgium in addition. Fewer than forty years later, by 1950, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden had also surpassed us and Germany overtook us in the 1950s. Then the decline was headlong in the 1960s and 1970s so that by 1976 Norway, Japan, France, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium (which had temporarily fallen behind but once again overtaken us) had all joined those front runners ahead of us (Aldcroft, 1982 citing Maddison).