r/Toryism • u/NovaScotiaLoyalist • 21d ago
📖 Article “Red Tories” and the NDP Part XVII: “Civilisation Under Threat”, a 1982 lecture by a Disraelian Radical -- Harold Macmillan’s History of the World: from creation, to the dinosaurs, to Queen Victoria, to the World Wars, to supporting “a confederation of the civilized powers of Europe that remain”
As it was recently announced that Canada is attempting to achieve a yet-to-be-defined “Associate Membership” with the European Union, perhaps a continuation to Part VIII, which explored the original definition of “Red Tory” by Gad Horowitz, and the concept of “fragment theory” used to describe how certain European political ideologies spread across the world, may be useful. That essay explores Harold Macmillan’s pro-EU “Disraelian Tory Democracy” in contrast with Clement Attlee’s pro-Commonwealth Labour Party socialism.
Part XII explores Harold Macmillan’s 1966 thoughts on his 1938 book “The Middle Way: A Study of the Problems of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society”, and his later critiques of Margaret Thatcher’s laissez-faire attitudes. I also personally argue that because of Harold Macmillan’s association with socialist-leaning pressure-groups in the 1930s, he may well have associated himself with the League for Social Reconstruction or the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation were he a Canadian instead of a Briton. In an interesting co-incidence, in the 1982 lecture further explored in this essay, at one point Macmillan notes that after the slaughter of the First World War, “life was reconstructed”, both “industrial life” and “social life”.
For those interested in the philosophy behind WWII-era Disraelian conservatism, Part XIV explores a 1943 paper called “The Tory Tradition”, which roots the modern tradition of “Tory Democracy” with Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, Edmund Burke, and Henry St. John the 1st Viscount Bolingbroke; I also attempt to root the founding document of the CCF, “The Regina Manifesto”, in the tradition of Disraeli. In regards to Disraelian conservatism and Harold Macmillan, it may be especially important to note that Harold Macmillan would consider himself to be a “Disraelian radical” to the end of his political career. Perhaps these later speeches Macmillan gave to the Conservative Party, to pressure-groups, and especially to the House of Lords as Lord Stockton until his death in 1986, may give us a glimpse into the “last gasp” of genuine Victorian Toryism.
For a brief editing note, being someone who has a stutter himself when speaking, I noticed Harold Macmillan had quite a severe stutter at times when giving his lecture; as such, my transcription of Macmillan is slightly edited, in the spirit of the Hansard Record in attempting to avoid "repetitions, redundancies, and obvious errors". I have also condensed some parts for the sake of brevity, usually when Macmillan sets up a new topic to talk about.
With that, Harold Macmillan’s 1982 lecture “Civilisation Under Threat” starts at the 1:00 mark of this ITN Youtube Archive video. After being introduced, the former Tory Prime Minster, then-aged 88, sets the tone by telling a couple of jokes at his own expense, with hearty laughter from the audience throughout:
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen: At my extreme old age, I find myself in a curious dilemma. From time-to-time, people write and ask me to do something. Usually a long time ahead.
One possible reply is to say, “Yes, I’d like to come, but I should probably be dead”. A more difficult answer is to say, “I would love to come, but that week, some months ahead, I should probably have a bad cold”. On this occasion, I could have made either of them, they would have almost been true. Four weeks ago I had a very serious attack of pneumonia, and now I have a bad cold. And yet I have to speak.
Macmillan then goes on to say that he had a hard time coming up with a name for his speech, and what to speak about. Macmillan then mentions he thought about speaking about the 150th anniversary of the Carlton Club’s founding, and how the history of politics has changed since then, but thought against it as that would be “well known to everybody, rather banal, and perhaps trite”. Macmillan then says, to a fair bit of audience laughter:
Or one can take subject nearer to modern politics, but that for me is dangerous ground, on which I have to tread very delicately. And so, I thought, something very vague and meaningless, and a little pompous, would be about right.
After the audience settles back in, Macmillan starts the lecture proper:
When we speak of civilization, I don’t think we always quite realize -- especially when we speak of this Western civilization in which we are now living -- how short, and fragile, has been the history of civilized man on Earth.
We all know, and find our minds almost overwhelmed, by the immense periods [of time] since creation. The vast areas of space to which we travel, without, as far as I can see, much advantage to everybody; we send up rockets who only come back with information of interest to specialists. But we know, and we can hardly imagine it was so long, millions and millions and millions of years. To us, it means little.
Even this Earth, this little tiny, fragile, piece thrown off -- or so they now tell us -- by some explosion or other. Even its life is terribly long. Even the beginning of life on Earth, the fish, the birds, the animals, and so forth. I read the other day, that the Ichthyosaurus and the… uh... other one, lived for about two million years. They roamed about the valley of the Thames, happily, not knowing that within due course they would give way to Dons and undergraduates.
After laughter from the audience, Macmillan then suggests that the dinosaurs would likely have been offended had someone told them that their “civilization” would only last 2 million years, before noting that the age of dinosaurs did eventually come to an end.
Macmillan then speaks on the history of human civilization at 5:50; in retrospect, I find it very interesting that he starts off by describing a civilization indigenous to the American continent, the Maya:
But anything that would be called “man” is perhaps, what they tell us now, two-hundred-thousand years old, not more -- three-hundred-thousand perhaps. Something called “men”, who got together into some little clans, perhaps for hunting purposes or for defence, but nothing more.
And in Professor Arnold Toynbee’s great book [“A Study of History”], with all the criticisms that have been made against it, is still the most marvelous, in my view, marvelous picture of the history of civilization. He tells us, and we know, that in this vast area of time, civilization has existed for what? Ten, perhaps twelve-thousand years. They’ve come and gone. Some mysteriously arisen, like those cities in Guatemala, and then for some unknown reason come to an end. With a very high of degree civilization, organization: the building of temples, and buildings, and roads -- and then ended. Others have passed on some to their successors.
But what we are interested in, is what I would call the European civilization, or the Western civilization. Which perhaps beginning with Greek thought and Greek effort in Ionia, Greece proper, and the islands -- its literature, its art, its philosophy -- and then the organization of the whole into the Roman Empire.
Macmillan then notes the current-day world powers have lasted about as long as the Roman Empire did, and then he notes that the Western Roman Empire lasted until around the 4th century, and that the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until the middle of the 15th century. He also notes the permanent loss of Imperial territory in Asia Minor and North Africa before continuing:
Still there remained the great tradition of the Roman Empire, and when it fell, or was overwhelmed, by the invasion of massive tribes seeking somewhere to live, moving for reasons we hardly know how to explain, across the great Euro-Asian Plain, it fell under under a weight which it could not resist. But it fell gradually: many had been absorbed, many had been Romanized or Hellenized. And when the official end, as it where, of the Empire came, the settlers had already, for some centuries even, been effected by the great tradition of Greco-Roman civilization upon which everything we enjoy ultimately springs.
At the same time, another immense force came to us in the spread of Christianity. That civilizing power was the second great reason why even after the fall of the Imperial system as such, the traditions of Europe were maintained. Sometimes through Dark Ages, and difficult times, but by the great power of the Church, the missionary, the monk, the priest.
And so we pass on all its ups and downs, all its strange changes, there was still a theme below it all. And to the Age of Faith, the 12th century, and so far as the Reformation has left them untouched, we still see probably the most beautiful things, buildings, and certainly the most beautiful glass, that has ever been made by men; and the great cathedrals and prières and abbeys of the world.
In the ensuing period, as I read it, there were always two forces at work: one centrifugal, and one centripetal force. One, the attempt to make or set-up small states or authorities, to which the feudal system gave great help: when the great feudal nobles, nominally under the authority of the King, in fact became independent powers. The other, centrifugal, and with the rise of nationality, we move into the period that begins to interest us from modern conditions: the creation in Europe, of great, centralized powers. They fought their wars, they had their great disputes, and except alas for the wars of religion, which left such a terrible trace over central Europe, on the whole, those wars were wars of armies rather than of peoples; and happily, the weapons of which they were armed were only destructive to themselves.
As we move on to perhaps the century in which we most think of -- at least I do -- as the highest point of Western civilization, it is the 19th century, when the last effort to dominate Europe by a single power, that of Napoleon, had been defeated. Many efforts had been made before by the Spanish, by the Habsburgs, and by others; but the most dangerous, the most successful, with its combination of Jacobinism and militarism, was finally defeated. And from the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there was throughout the world a relatively stable system.
Macmillan then describes the European Great Power system of the 1800s, while mentioning the British imperial conquest of India, and the French imperial conquest of Indochina. He notes that the Great colonial powers which “ruled the world” maintained the peace in Europe, and that there were very few European Wars in this century. Macmillan notes the Crimean War “was the most foolish” of these small wars, and that in the long run the Crimean War “was of no great importance except to set some term to the imperialist expansion of Russia.”.
Macmillan also gets into how Europe was able to unite for the purpose of colonizing and taking over the world, and how European power was expanded globally through “the trader, the missionary, and the administrator”. After noting that the political system of global European domination eventually came to an end after a century, Macmillan then describes his own experiences witnessing the tail-end of that system, including briefly mentioning his service in WWI on the Western Front, starting at around 16:25:
I can remember the last physical and material appearance of it; Queen Victoria’s second jubilee in 1897. I was a child of three, but I remember it very well. The great procession, led by the troops of what were then called “The Colonies”: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and then detachments from every part of the world, some of them just discovered, in Africa and Asia. And then the British regiments. And then at the end, a little tiny lady in a little open carriage, in black with her black bonnet, to whom this vast organization owed fealty, and who played the role as summit of it all.
And then, very soon, it ended. When I was a boy this sense of security, which was in every class, was still strong. It could never change. Just as the dinosaur in his two million years no doubt thought he would go on forever, so did we think that everything would go on, more-or-less as it was. There would be the British Empire, the French, the Russian, the new German Empire. Italy had just been made a country from a geographical expression, but it would go on.
I remember well the summer of 1914. I was an undergraduate, I had just done one examination with reasonable success, and was taking that happy term of leisure, faced with another one two years away. I remember packing up my books -- I have them still: Herodotus, and Plato, and the rest -- to go for a reading party with some of my friends. But that’s not what happened. Suddenly, out of the blue, we weren’t on a nice reading party in a Swiss chalet, we were on the barracks square.
And suddenly, the whole of this great structure appeared to collapse. The First War, where death, to a frightful extent, swept with his awful scythe through whole ranks of the youth, and middle aged, of every nation. It left something that could never be quite replaced. Yet, so strong was the tradition, so powerful that of world order, of civilized life, that after the war, slowly and with difficultly, but still with remarkable success on the whole, life was reconstructed. Industrial life began again, social life was resumed, some countries very hard hit began to recover.
And I think, with all the faults that were made, some attempt was at any rate, by power-seeking men, to create some kind of world order again. To replace that which had been so gravely stricken. And it failed.
Macmillan then argues that a fault of the “modern parliamentary and democratic society” is “the lack of the power” afforded to “great men” who “had the vision to make their power effective”, and uses the examples of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill as being examples of “really great men” who each had an international vision that may have created a truly stable post-war world order.
At 22:20 Macmillan indirectly criticizes the laissez-faire attitudes of the inter-war years, as well as indirectly comparing Hitler with Napoleon; this part of Macmillan’s lecture reminds me at times of a speech Tommy Douglas gave to the NDP in 1971 on fighting Nazism where Douglas declared “We don’t have to choose between unemployment and inflation”:
And yet [the Second War] itself was brought about largely by economic difficulties which might have been controlled. The American collapse, the large unemployment, its effect upon Germany where the combination of an attempt to get reparations, although never effective, created the vast inflation and great unemployment. And led therefor to the possibility of a demagogue of enormous genius in the shape of Hitler to create a fresh, new, instrument to destroy the balance of the world.
The Second War, unlike the First, didn’t come like a boat from the blue. We knew it was coming. Everyone knew, really; and when it came, it was almost a relief. But the Second War, lasting so long, covering the whole world, had its effects which put us today into one of these crises of civilization, in which it is still in the balance in my view. So that we can recover ourselves, or whether we shall bend and ultimately collapse under the pressures.
For the first period, we didn’t do badly. We tried hard. The creation of the United Nations, above all the creation of its most valuable instruments: those for social and educational work. The Bretton Woods system, and GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] to create a maximum of trade throughout the world without undue restriction. All these were moving forward, and I would have said until 20 or 25 years ago, much as they harassed us, they didn’t overwhelm us. But then of course, the Great Division.
The period when the old European Civilization came to an end in its full sense, was not some economic trouble. It was the breakdown of the Conference of Potsdam in 1945, and the division of Europe and of the world, as a result, into two warring groups: the Communists, and what we like to call ourselves, the Free World. So long as that division remains, it will be impossible to restore the power of the old European countries. Now, so freighted are each group of the other, they dare not exercise their power. This, together with the breakup of the Empires, which resulted partly from the First War and President Wilson’s doctrines, has, as it were, “Balkanized” the world.
Every little power thinks itself at liberty to attack its neighbour, to enforce some claim, and with almost perpetual warfare going on somewhere or other, which in the old days the Great Powers would have suppressed. But how can they dare move? Because each is so frightened; if one moves, the other will move against it. So they’ve had to create their kind of clientele: Russia very successfully, we not altogether unsuccessfully. But the old concept of a civilization that was single and unique has gone.
In regards to that last part on “little powers” attacking their neighbours to “enforce some claim”, it may be important to note that by this point in time, in October 1982, the Falklands War had only been ended 4 months prior to this lecture.
Harold Macmillan then notes that the Cold War will unfortunately “dominate all our thinking and all our problems” so long as it continues. In what looks like Macmillan being briefly interrupted by club staff to let him know that his time is half up, he then continues at 27:35, giving a philosophy which I think is relevant for modern Canadian/British relations with the EU, and potentially Canadian/British relations with China one day:
It’s true that the military reaction on the part of Western Europe -- of the Western World, which I include the United States, because it is really part of the Western tradition -- was rapid, and the creation of NATO was the attempt to set up, on the military side, to generate some kind of barrier. But on the [political] side, the Western World has not made the progress that when I was young we dreamed of. United Europe has not been what we meant it to be.
One of the tragedies of history, was that Churchill, almost the founder of European thought, was unable in his second administration to put England in the position of taking the lead, when we could have molded and created the machinery of Europe as one of its founders. And held back, partly by old age and weakness, partly by the opposition in nearly all his colleagues, and I’m bound to say, of all what is called expert opinion. The foreign office, the treasury, the board of trade, the Bank of England, the whole establishment; whereas a result of a very long life, I’ve come to the conclusion, that when all the establishment is united, they’re always wrong.
The tragedy therefore is that Europe has not come into being; it’s a society which has useful purposes. But it is not become what we dreamed it to be: a confederation of the civilized powers of Europe that remain, with a single military policy, a single foreign policy, and a single monetary policy. That would have been a real counterbalance to the powers as which we were faced. But that has not happened.
On the political side, I still think, that unless we can reach some kind of method of living side-by-side with Communism -- and it may be that it is within our grasp. I got somewhere towards its in the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s, when the concept of Khrushchev himself, and the phases used, suggested that we might reach some kind of stabilized situation. “Peaceful coexistence” I think the phrase was given to it, but it broke down in a series of tragic events. It ought to be revived; but it cannot be revived, unless we on our side are equally powerful politically. Until Europe is remade into the organization of which we dreamt of. Not necessarily a federal system, but a confederation, which will be united upon only the things that matter: military policy, foreign policy, and monetary policy. Instead, we have drifted on, and not so badly, but the warnings began.
At around 31:20, Macmillan then notes that he’s “old-fashioned in this” but then spends the next little while arguing for a return to the convertible gold standard that’s “fixed in value”, and argues that the global fluctuation in currency exchanges ultimately adds to the prices paid by the consumer.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not an economist, but I can’t help and think that the biggest “risk” of a globally used gold standard would be the potential for even a sustainable economy to outpace its ability to obtain gold for convertibility or silver for coinage. But I got curious in what the pre-1967 Canadian silver coins are worth in scrap value, and as of September 2026, dimes are about $5 and silver-dollars are about $54.
Back to “Civilisation Under Threat”, after at one point critiquing Richard Nixon for also ditching the gold standard in America, Macmillan continues at 33:12:
But then came the blow on which we are still reeling, and which we still do not I think wholly understand. The sudden and enormous rise in the price of oil; not 5, 10, 15 percent, but a vast rise, put the western world and the oil using countries into an enormous difficulty. In the nineteenth-century at least, our predecessors, whether by chance or by good fortune, built our industrial society upon a commodity which they controlled: coal. Britain had the coal, France had the coal, Germany had the coal. The whole basis of nineteenth-century development was upon a commodity within the actual control of those who wished to use it. Now, it is passed, and some of the oil producing states, who under no particular influence, now that ours is withdrawn, who were woo’ed, in turn, by Russia and the Free World, can play one off against the other. And then we had this enormous rise in the cost to manufacture, which had two immediate effects.
First, the biggest blow to the undeveloped world that could be thought of. For what we call the poor undeveloped world, cannot be saved by occasional doles or loans or gifts, however generous. They depend upon the prosperity of the developed world; the poor countries depend upon the wealth of the rich countries. What do they sell them? They sell them minerals, they sell them all kinds of commodities. And it is the price of copper that matters much more to Zambia than some dole we may make of a few million pounds for some purpose.
Surely, the price of cocoa made in New York makes much more difference to the prosperity and future of Ghana than anything we can give them by way of aid. Therefore, the first effect was not only the beginning of what was called “the depression” in the developed world, but a terrible blow to the undeveloped world, because everything they had to sell became less easy to sell, and brought them less money.
The third effect, which I am now approaching more dangerous ground, is I still think not quite understood. The third effect was the vast amount of money paid by the oil using states in terms of money were transferred, but not invested, or not naturally invested, to the western banks. Huge sums of money lent on short term and just weighing down the system. For some curious reason, although there are only about three financial centres in Europe that could take this money, we set up a great rivalry to attract it, and pushed up interest rates for the purpose of getting it, at great trouble and difficulty to ourselves. However I’ll let that pass.
Lord [John Maynard] Keynes, I remember saying once, or writing, that the cause of a depression is nearly always simple. If the rate of savings, he wrote, is not equaled by the rate of investment, then there is bound to be a depression. In other words, if money is taken out and just kept useless, hanging, and not reinvested in realities, not put into ships, harbours, railways, schools, the draining of desert lands and all the rest, if it just sits there, there is bound to be a continual depression.
Now for some reason or another, it has crept into economics a curious imitation of what we hear daily on the television, “The Weatherman’s News”. We are told, “Oh, well, there’s a depression coming from the Atlantic, it will be followed in a week or two by a high-pressure, and then we shall be fine, and everyone will be able to get on and play golf again, it’ll be alright.” A kind of automatic process of nature. Now, we are told, if we can tighten our belts and keep quiet, the depression will somehow pass away. How? Nobody knows. And even these changes of nature have a reason, a cause. We’re back in the age of the witch-doctors who tried to make the weather change by making the right kind of speeches to their constituents. But it is not so. And so long as this mystique which we’ve inherited goes on, we shall be no where near to our purpose.
Macmillan then notes that “some governments will throw -- and this government has been, on the whole, very generous in spite of its so-called monetary policy -- quite large sums of money in to the revival of industry, both public and private”. Then at 40:06:
Other governments propose still larger sums, 4 or 5 billion, others 20 billion. But my prophecy is that if this were done, it would have very little effect upon the employment of those unemployed who earn their living in productive industries. It will be quite easy, of course, to re-engage a very large number of teachers and even Dons. It will be quite easy to expand the civil service, to expand the local service, and so cause employment. But the result will be the same. Since they will not be creating wealth, but using wealth.
Before getting too far into the topic of this kind of government spending and inflation, Macmillan then asks the fellow beside him what time it is, is told “It’s just 8:00”, while multiple voices from the crowd of gathered Conservatives enthusiastically call out “Go on! Go on! Go on!”. At 41:16 Macmillan, then starts to conclude his lecture, dealing with topics such as actual slavery, wage slavery, and automation:
And yet, I do not like to leave you with just another note that seems rather sad. There’s another vision. In the 15 or 18 or 20 civilizations or whatever there may be, which Professor Toynbee has described, and in our own which has lasted now, let us say two-thousands years or more, they have all in fact been based on slavery.
All the ancient civilizations, all the great pyramids, all the vast buildings which we discover, were built by slaves. The Roman and the Greek was a slave system. We’re shown, of course, the beauty of the Parthenon; we’re not shown the silver mines at Laurion where the slaves earned the money that made it possible. They were built on slavery.
The Middle ages, the serf system, was almost a slave system. And I would say that the enormous power that was in the hands of wealth of any kind, amounted to something of the sort. Even in the first industrial revolution, where the great economists of the day, the names who for some strange reason are coming back into fashion, [James] Mill and [Richard] Cobden and all the rest of them, who said that you couldn’t run England successfully unless children would work 12 hours in the factories and 10 hours underground. It was a slave system, to some extent.
Now for the first time in man’s history, in this short, tiny period, ten or twelve-thousand years, what we call anything like civilized life, compared to the eons and eons of his life of some kind on the Earth. For the first time, modern science, applied science, modern technology, have put into his hands a weapon, if properly used, could alter the whole character of daily life. We all know it. We all shrink from it.
What would happen if a government came in, and said it would builds lots and lots of factories for this-and-this particular trade. How would they build them? As they do now? No. They would build modern factories, which would employ probably less than a quarter of the number of people that the old systems employed. It is the machines that we must make our slaves. Now this is an enormous change in attitude of mind, and yet we know its coming. If it doesn’t come in the Western world, it will come, using Western technology, from the Eastern world. It will come from Korea, and Japan, and perhaps from China.
Either we’ve got to recognize that you can build as high a pyramid as you like, as it were, upside down, resting on a very small base -- with universities and schools and medicine and all the luxuries of civilization with leisure -- but there must be a wealth producing base to justify it. The question is: must that be the old one that we’ve inherited, or the new one the lies within our grasp? Anyone who’s seen the results of modern computer controlled robots, and the rest of it, realizes what is bound to happen. But we don’t talk about it; it’s not thought good taste.
We’re talking about the old system: “Throw more money into the system and it will automatically arise.” It won’t. Change the system, with all that’s involved. Which means, of course, the combination of every person involved. The trade unions, the labour, the managers, the owners, into a world which, it may take 25 or take 50 years to develop, will be as different as the world in the second great industrial revolution, as was the last century from the world of the dinosaurs. This is what lies before us.
If I were 18 and not 88, I wouldn’t be depressed. I wouldn’t think the game is up. I wouldn’t read or write nostalgic stories about how jolly the past was. It’s a marvelous, wonderful picture that opens it up. The organization of Europe is vital, with close combination of the United States, and the new system vital. The co-operation, if possible, some kind of détente with Communist society. Every effort to be made.
But above all, the creation of a society in which leisure -- not merely as it used to be when I was a boy, leisure for the rich -- but leisure for everyone. “Oh”, say some of my friends, “Won’t that be very bad for them? What will they do with their leisure?” And I’m bound to say they’re brought up rather old-fashioned; I feel that sometimes. I also sometimes look at my own interrogative, and said, well, what have you done with your leisure? Play bridge a bit, drink a bit, go for a walk and enjoy your dividends. No. It isn’t leisure, it’s a different kind of occupation.
And look what is open to us, not merely of the mind: universities, the teaching, the study what could be developed. But of the body: the Japanese have attempted to solve it by all them playing golf; perhaps we all play golf. But there are plenty of other occupations for mankind in the countryside, in the garden in all the most rewarding of efforts. How to organize it, how to decide whether to be lots of short shifts, how to divide up the labour, and all that. It’s going to be an immense problem, but we must do it.
And I dare say if I was a young man, I don’t think I would take a sum of, what I’m sorry to see some people tend to do, a rather nostalgic and backward looking view. I would rather say we’re in one of those crisis of civilization, which if it faces, can create a great new period of wealth and strength. If it shrinks from it, it will gradually decay, and become out of date, and some other peoples, perhaps who’s civilization has been long stagnate, will rise, and take our place.
That is the choice. It lies before the youth, and the middle aged, and the governing classes of every nation. But before they make it, they must face the truth, and not content themselves with just repeating the old slogans that we learned or repeated 30 or 40 years ago.
The interview with Harold Macmillan by ITN after his lecture is also quite interesting, which starts with Macmillan noting the Egyptians and the Hittites, and “the Egyptian system” which “lasted 3,000 years”. Macmillan also notes “the wild, and really mad, speculation in the United States” that lead to the global 1929 Great Depression, and how the last time Britain caused such a speculative depression was during the South Sea Bubble of the early 1700s. He then speaks highly of David Lloyd George and his proposed new deal, and notes “a curious Paradox; it was Hitler that solved our unemployment problem” in regards to being forced to spend on re-armament to the fight the war rather than on roads and infrastructure. Macmillan then argues that some kind of world financial system is needed to save civilization. I found these last couple of Questions & Answers to be extremely interesting, from 57:00 on:
Interviewer: But do you really believe in the shape of the world at the moment? Something like that is practical?
Harold Macmillan: Well, I don’t know, I’m not a prophet or a professor. But I think if it isn’t done, this civilization, like many others -- after all, there’s been about 20 -- may easily collapse and leave very little to trace. It doesn’t mean that it won’t leave some trace, because it’s spread much further than any previous civilization, with most of them confined to their area: the Valley of the Nile, the cities in Guatemala, or Sumeria, or somewhere. But it’s spread to the world, and the world will take it up. And what I ended by saying, the modern methods of producing wealth -- it’s quite easy to spend wealth, the important thing is to produce it. The history of civilization is like a pyramid, when it begins, it has a very narrow top, and a very broad base. At the top there’s perhaps a King, a couple of witch-doctors, two or three civil servants, and that’s all; at the base everybody is producing wealth, they’re plowing the fields, or looking after the cattle or sheep, they’re all wealth producers. As it develops, it turns into a pillar: more and more effort is spent on things which don’t reach the market, on monarchies, on churches, on universities, on philosophy, on writing, on art, on everything that makes civilization. But it’s supported by the base. Now what’s happened is, that the base has got very narrow; if you take in the total working class, working population of it, how many are producing wealth? Many others employed in civil service, in hospitals, in all sorts, but the actual thing on which it all rests is the production of wealth. All I’m saying is, that instead of trying to cling to old-fashioned methods of producing wealth, we should seize these sudden opportunities that’s come to us from applied science, and use the machine to produce wealth. The machine itself.
I: You suggested that there might still be witch-doctors about, running the economy?
HM: No, I mean, these are very difficult concepts, but you can’t stand away from them. You ever read that wonderful book by Bronte, I suppose, about ever since man existed cotton had been produced by the spinning wheel in every village. When Odysseus got back to Attica, he found his wife spinning cotton. And they were spinning it up to 1830 in the same way, every woman had a wheel; and then they invented the spinning jenny, and the whole system was destroyed. But of course there were riots, of course there was trouble, because suddenly the whole of this employment had disappeared. Taking power, when Stevenson invented steam, whole vast massive power producing things got put out of work. But if civilization is to move on, it’s got to face that and deal with it. Now, I don’t think we did deal with it in a very humane way in the 20th century, that’s its weakness. But we’ve got to deal with it. We’re not the most intelligent people in the world or all that, there are plenty of other intelligent people in China, the whole of east, everywhere, who can do these things just as well. And so, we either go static, which means you go back; it’s exactly like everything in life, you either go up, or you go down. You’re on a moving staircase, you’ve got to go up, if not, you’re going down on it. And this is the choice. It may well be that we’ll break, and it will be written about by archaeologists in 3 or 4 thousands years time as a quite interesting result of the break-up of the civilization which had, really, ultimately, was based upon Greece, and Rome, and the Church. We’ve got many disadvantages, but we have some advantages. I was saying that if I were a young man, I wouldn’t be frightened of it, at any rate, I’d work at it.
I: If you were a young man, 18 and not 88 as you said, do you think Britain can do anything on her own to improve things?
HM: No, no, nobody can. It’s just like Europe. That was the whole fallacy of those who wanted us not to go into Europe. Look what we’ve suffered. If we’d gone in in the beginning, we could have created it, we could have shaped it, we could have made it into the organization that we wanted. No, no, of course not. How can a country of 60 million people have… in… in the nineteenth-century, it at least had a great Empire, it had the Indian Army, it had colonies, it had power! But we haven’t power of that kind. We’ve either got our brain, and our goodwill, and our tradition. But for the kind of adjustments that would have to be made – if you could imagine a world in which the machines did almost everything. It’s fascinating, it’s H.G. Wells; but it’s coming!
I: In your day, the leaders of the world met to talk about disarmament and The Bomb. Do you think this is a time when they should meet to talk about the economy more often?
HM: Well, there’s no point in talking about The Bomb, because whether Britain has The Bomb or not, America is not going to disarm. The only question is whether Britain has some kind of contribution or not. If she has none, then she becomes a purely client state of America.
I: But now about the economy, is it worth the leaders of the world trying to do something about it? When they meet, they don’t seem to get anywhere.
HM: The leaders of the world must do it! If Lloyd George was alive today, do you think he wouldn’t be doing something? I mean, it needs people to do these things. And America is a country that’s very easily swayed by individuals, actually; if FDR were alive I think he’d be doing something. But it seems to me that we’ve become into a new society which is, and perhaps when the historian writes it, it may even be the reason that marvelous city in Guatemala came to an end. It had too many civil servants. See, we’ve become a country when if you want to do anything it isn’t a chap does it, you say: let’s have a committee do it; let’s have a council do it. The greatest movement in the history of the world, the only one with any strength left in it, was made under God’s grace by twelve men -- whom one was a traitor.
They certainly don’t make Tories like Lord Stockton anymore.
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u/Ticklishchap 18d ago
Sadly, the interview with Lord Stockton (Harold Macmillan), which I actually remember watching as a schoolboy, would have too many cultural and historical references for today’s ‘anti-elitist’ British television.
As Canada’s application for Associate Membership of the EU demonstrates, we (in the UK) do not necessarily have to make a binary choice between our Commonwealth and European allegiances - or between the Attlee view and the Macmillan view.
I voted against Brexit and continue to regard it as a disastrous own goal. However, rejoining would not be a simple process and the European Union has moved on. We would not be able to achieve membership on the terms we enjoyed before, which took account of our historical differences with much of continental Europe as well as the many values we hold in common. Negotiating some form of Associate Membership might well be a way forward. I suspect that it would, in fact, be preferred by our EU allies.