ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the approach of those on the Right of the British political spectrum to the issue of decline. It deals with an issue that has played a varying but usually significant and sometimes central role in the declinism of the Right, that of trade unions and their alleged ‘restrictive practices’. The chapter assesses the emergence of a virulent kind of right-wing declinism that prospered in the Thatcherite years of the 1980s, all in the writings of Correlli Barnett and Martin Wiener. The First World War demonstrated to many observers the weaknesses of British industry. The central thrust of the Conservatives’ economic arguments in the late 1940s was that Britain’s problems were mainly the consequence of Labour’s ‘socialism’, with its red tape, bureaucracy and disincentive to effort through penal taxation. Everything would come right once the Conservatives had ‘set the people free’.
