Edgerton’s Britain

by PERRY ANDERSON

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, by David Edgerton, which appeared three years ago, met with well-deserved success. In the extensive literature on the subjects with which it deals, the book delivers a stand-out synthesis of trenchant ideas and arguments. Coming from a historian whose professional interests have been principally economic and technological, its range is remarkable: covering not just industrial, but political, military and cultural matters with confidence and fluency. Characteristically, all these are enlivened by an excellent eye for detail. The book is filled with striking local facts and figures, recounted in a lively, vigorous prose.

Attractive too is the iconoclastic bent of Edgerton’s writing, a general impatience with what he takes to be conventions of one kind or another. The leading pay-off of this temperament is a remarkable demystification of the history of British welfare systems. Beginning with a demonstration of the contrast between Lloyd George’s reforms before the First World War and the bonanza enjoyed by rentier holders of the National Debt afterwards, the book proceeds to the striking difference between inter-war Conservative expenditures on welfare and defence, and Labour outlays on these after the Second World War, which reversed their emphasis, Attlee by comparison spending much more on weapons and less on social services than Chamberlain; exposes the meanness of the much-touted Beveridge Plan of war-time vintage; and ends with the ‘minimal generosity’ of New Labour, refusing to restore earnings-related pensions that Thatcher had cut. Intellectually, the reader encounters a writer who is cheerful, equable and original; politically, one for whom the world of the far left holds few mysteries, and arouses no phobias.

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