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Britain’s current position in the world rankings of wealth and power does not compare with what it was 150 years ago. As has been suggested, this is hardly surprising: the country’s rise was remarkable but not the diminution in its standing when more populous and resource-rich states caught up and global decolonisation took hold. Yet this is not the whole story.

‘The British Empire declined; the condition of the people improved’: that was A. J. P. Taylor’s verdict on 1914 to 1945.[71] Taking the twentieth century as a whole, observes David Cannadine, the ‘age of decline’ was also ‘the age of affluence.’[72] Notwithstanding periodic hand-wringing about British economic performance, the country remains one of the richest in the world. At the end of the twentieth century, in income per head, Britain was ‘right in the middle of the range among big Western European countries (a little higher than Germany and Italy, a little lower than France), but on a world scale plainly very rich’.[73] Whatever the country’s changing place in world rankings, since the Industrial Revolution the British have been ‘beneficiaries of developments which in every generation’ have left them ‘richer than their predecessors’.[74]

The problem is: which British? The fruits of affluence have not been evenly shared across the population. Over the last century, the British economy has undergone radical restructuring. Just as Britain was in the vanguard of industrialisation – the shift of labour from the primary sector (farming, mining) to the secondary (the manufacturing industry) – so it also led a further shift to service industries (the tertiary sector) which today accounts for around 80 per cent of GDP. Even though there remains in some quarters an assumption that ‘manufacturing’ in more traditional forms such as steel, ships and motor vehicles is the mark of a great nation, this process of ‘tertiarisation’ is the norm for most developed Western countries. The USA, Germany and France are all around the 80 per cent level, but ‘in Britain the process of deindustrialisation has gone further and faster than just about anywhere else.’[75]

And the human cost has been considerable, especially at two points during the twentieth century. First, in the 1920s and 1930s, a whole generation of workers in staple industries such as coal, steel, textiles and shipbuilding experienced long-term structural unemployment. Their iconic protest was the Jarrow March from Tyneside to London in October 1936. And then the even more precipitous slump from the 1970s in what was left of those sectors and across heavy industry as a whole. Between 1971 and 1999 the proportion of workers in manufacturing halved, from 34 per cent to under 16 per cent, while employment in the service sector rose from 54 per cent to 72 per cent – with most of that growth coming in financial and business services: up from 6 per cent to over 18 per cent of the workforce.[76] In both phases, deindustrialisation was mainly the result of sharp foreign competition from lower-wage developing economies, but it has been accentuated by the policy decisions of various British governments – privileging the gold standard in the 1920s, sticking to monetary targets and breaking union power in the Thatcher era. The consequence in each case was high levels of unemployment and enduring social deprivation in regions that had been heavily dependent on a single economic activity or enterprise – a coal mine, steel mill or car factory, with the old industrial heartlands of northern England, South Wales and Clydeside hardest hit. This process has tended to exacerbate the sense of a North–South divide – with prosperity most evident in London, the Home Counties and parts of the Midlands. This fed into the pro-Brexit vote in June 2016.

Indeed it has been argued that ‘de-industrialisation’ not ‘decline’ should be considered the most appropriate ‘meta-narrative’ for post-war British history – perhaps even comparable with the epic historical transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, given its wide-ranging effects on ‘income distribution, unemployment, the gendered distribution of work and the shape of the social security system’.[77] The new service economy is highly polarised between what have been called ‘lovely’ jobs and ‘lousy’ jobs, with the latter routine and poorly paid, so that ‘in-work’ poverty has to be quietly mitigated by state benefits. Precipitate de-industrialisation has brought with it sharp increases in social inequality and economic insecurity. And in understanding the human costs, concepts such as ‘growth’ and ‘decline’ are not merely irrelevant but obfuscatory. The root questions are political more than economic. What have governments done to promote new economic activities, retrain unemployed workers and educate younger generations into flexible work skills? This agenda takes us into the realm of national policies rather than structural processes – and ‘policies’ in a much more sophisticated sense than political rhetoric about reversing national decline by acts of Napoleonic willpower.[78]

Yet the ideology of decline still has visceral power. There seems to be a ‘gut feeling that Britain, having once been top dog, ought always to be top dog’. In which case, the fact that other dogs are bigger is taken as evidence of the nation’s ‘decline’, even though the British dog is now a lot fatter than a century ago.[79] Some seem to find it particularly galling that former enemies, notably Germany, now occupy an elevated place. The insistence on ‘greatness’ – that Thatcherite aspiration to put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Britain’ – suggests a rooted Tory unwillingness to bid farewell to the position and status that had been lost. Yet it is striking that when the Europhile Liberal Democrat politician Nick Clegg published his 2017 manifesto about how to reverse the verdict of the EU referendum, he felt it necessary to entitle the book How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again). The appeal of the ‘G’ word, it seems, is not confined to the political right.

Magnifying this sense of lost greatness is the visibility of the past in contemporary Britain. The era of ‘decline’ is not only an age of affluence but also the heyday of Heritage. Yet what the ‘H’ word actually means is elusive. ‘We could no more define the national heritage than we could define, say, beauty or art,’ stated the first annual report of the National Heritage Memorial Fund in 1980–1. In its view the term obviously included ‘the natural riches of Britain’, threatened by ‘thoughtless development’, but ‘heritage’ was also ‘a representation of the development of aesthetic expression and a testimony to the role played by the nation in world history’.[80]

The prodigious growth of the ‘heritage industry’ has spawned many forward-looking projects of urban and rural regeneration. But it can also foster nostalgia funded by affluence. At one end of the spectrum is the National Trust – despite its name a private charity whose membership has mushroomed from 1 million in 1981 to over 5 million in 2017. Now one of the largest landowners in Britain, the Trust describes its mission as preserving ‘special places’ not only ‘for everyone’ but also ‘for ever’. It has been credited with largely ensuring the survival of the English country house, and with that an alluring evocation of past gentility. At the other end of the spectrum, local councils and museums have given new life to a multitude of derelict industrial sites.[81] Some of these – Ironbridge, for instance – can be infused with a gritty grandeur to match, in a different way, country houses like Stourhead or Cliveden.

The vogue since the 1980s for ‘heritage films’ has also enhanced the ‘historical imaginary’ of Britain. Many influential blockbusters feature famous monarchs, such as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and George III, and country-house dramas have always been popular, from Brideshead Revisited to Downton Abbey. Often memorably acted and beautifully filmed, these films and TV programmes can insidiously suggest that the nation’s past is more impressive and exciting than its present. That can also be the effect of the most dynamic area of recent history television, so-called ‘Reality History’. Moving away from an academic, informational approach, TV channels adopted a more emotive, participatory format – encouraging the viewer to identify with historical figures and their experience by adopting their lifestyle (the House genre), wearing their clothes, or enduring their experiences (Trench, Ship, and so on).[82]

Particularly potent have been movies about Britain’s Second World War produced by post-war British studios. The total number was remarkable: about one hundred in the two decades from 1946 to 1965. Some 30 million people went to the cinema every week in the late 1940s, when Britain’s population totalled 51 million. Although attendance fell below 15 million in 1959, this figure still virtually matched the circulation of all national daily newspapers. War films – though despised by many critics – proved consistent box-office successes. The Dam Busters was the top-grossing British film in 1955; likewise Reach for the Sky in 1956 (about the wartime aviator Douglas Bader). Sink the Bismarck was another big success in 1960. Unlike movies of the 1920s and 1930s about the Great War, there was very little questioning of the conflict’s rightness; nor were soldiers on both sides depicted as essentially ordinary men led as victims to the slaughter. The post-1945 films celebrated men and masculinity; their heroes – stars such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd – were generally tough but reserved, stereotypically English, and their German and Japanese foes usually classic ‘baddies’. Apart from a few Australians, the contributions of the empire to victory rarely figured, nor those of allies such as the Americans – let alone the Russians. Complementing the message of the popular boys’ weekly, The Eagle, these movies projected the war as ‘a great game’ and ‘a good cause’. Of course, most audiences probably enjoyed them simply as action-packed entertainment – escapes from Nazi prisoner-of-war camps being particularly popular. But, at a subliminal level, the films served to reinforce the heroic narrative of Britain Alone.[83]

These movies were seen by much larger audiences from the 1970s through endless repeats on television. And, more recently, the heroic narrative has been sharpened down to the person of Churchill himself, through what is called a process of ‘re-mediation’ – as one medium refashions the product of another: book, journalism, film, with multiple feedback loops – and in the process amplifies the Churchillian impact. Churchill started the process with six volumes of war memoirs published between 1948 and 1954. He intended to shape the verdict of history at an early stage by, as he liked to put it, being one of the historians. The most vivid parts of those books were purveyed to a much larger audience through serialisation across the world in major newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the New York Times and Life magazine in the USA. Film-makers also picked up the memoirs, for instance, the Winston Churchill: The Valiant Year series shown in America and Britain in 1960–1, and Churchill’s immortality was then assured by a state funeral in 1965, broadcast on TV across the world. Meanwhile, historian Martin Gilbert was gradually constructing Churchill’s literary mausoleum in what became an eight-volume ‘official biography’, on which he worked for twenty years before its completion in 1986. These volumes and the accompanying tomes of supporting documents in turn provided vast amounts of additional information for new movies and TV films. In The Wilderness Years – an eight-part television series of 1982 – Churchill in the 1930s was brought to life for a new generation by the actor Robert Hardy. In the twenty-first century, British-American co-productions hiked up the budgets and also the special effects. In quick succession came Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance in Darkest Hour in 2017 – the same year as the movie Dunkirk, another box-office triumph about Britain in 1940. And so the process of Churchillian re-mediation has continued for some seventy years, with books, films and journalism feeding on each other.[84]

In the process, however, there has been a gradual narrowing of the Second World War in popular British imagination to the story of one country and one leader in one year, and this has distorted the magnitude and complexity of that global conflict. In June 1940, Churchill urged his beleaguered countrymen to ‘so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’ In his memoirs, Churchill turned exhortation into description, entitling the second volume, about 1940, Their Finest Hour. Over time, ‘theirs’ and ‘his’ have become intertwined. And ‘finest’ implies that Britain’s Churchillian moment cannot be bettered, in other words that it has been all downhill ever since.[85]

In various ways, therefore, heritage is in danger of becoming a substitute for history in public awareness of Britain’s past. ‘The nation’, observed historian Patrick Wright, ‘is not seen as a heterogeneous society that makes its own history as it moves forward, however chaotically, into the future. Instead it is portrayed as an already achieved and timeless historical entity which demands only appropriate reverence and protection in the present.’[86] In other words, history is understood as content not process: a proud inheritance to be cherished and preserved, rather than an ongoing project of making and remaking.

If you are sure what Britain is, or should be, this may not be the book for you. But if you can cope with the challenges of living in the future tense, rather than luxuriating in the past pluperfect,[87] then read on. What follows is an attempt to conceive of Britain and its history as work in progress.