Another thread mentioned countless missed opportunities economy-wise for Britain in the years after WW2. I would be interested in hearing what the members of this forum consider those to be, and how they might best have been taken advantage of?
Missed opportunities for Britain in the post-war years?
- Thread starter NthBelisarius
- Start date
I'd say there were several but don't expect much agreement on what they were. My picks are skipping the foundation of the EEC, and I'd also argue that there were missed opportunities in making the Post-War Consensus actually work (stop-start cycle in the 1950s, wage-price spiral in the 70s, etc.), leading to an even bigger missed opportunity by creating conditions in which it could not be politically or socially sustained through the 1980s. Generally I think there were plenty of opportunities for Britain to become economically more like Germany which it didn't take.
Oh, there's so much that would be done with such a broad brush - and part of it could be down to the educational system, which was certainly woefully inadequate to deal with what was needed. (It also helps describe some of the predispositions for career choices, reinforcement of the class system, and all that.) While it would have been better to start with it earlier, going towards comprehensive education from the get-go (instead of waiting until the '60s) would have helped quite a long way, along with more love for the polytechnics as a permanent system of post-sec education and greater use of upper-secondary technical+vocational education. Even then, that doesn't touch the myriad of problems in the educational system that needed to be resolved pronto, even post-war (and the earlier, the better), and other things like the perilous state of the "public" (= private) schools and their possible merger into the secondary system (possibly as an interim Scottish-style junior sec/senior sec division of the comprehensive schools with delayed selection).
I'm no economist, my interest is in British Cold War aviation, a field where the mistakes and missed opportunities are so common as to be cliche. A few examples are:
- British officials telling the West Germans to not buy the Lightning.
- Rebuffing a Japanese proposal to buy the abandoned SR53 and SR177 prototypes.
- BEA demanding the Trident airliner be smaller and less powerful than the highly successful 727
- BOAC saying the VC10 Super 200 was too big, even though it would have been the biggest transatlantic airliner in the late 60s
- The P1154 debacle that ended in the purchase of the original P1127
- Cancelling the TSR2 for being too expensive and delayed, then canceling the F111K and dragging the 1965 AFVG for 14 years until it became the Tornado