The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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problems
as they shared similar backgrounds and beliefs. This important factor
which determines class in Britain (as
Chapter One explained) is occupation.
However, occupation largely depends on education. Only 4 or 5 per cent
of the
school population go on from school to higher education, and only one-eighth of
the total student
population in the UK find their way to Oxford and Cambridge,
which have played crucial roles in integrating
the political elite. Public schools
moreover, superimpose a further distinction in the social system of
stratification.
As public schools have greater academic – especially scientific – facilities,
students
are taught and educated on a more individual basis; thus only parents
with large incomes are able to send
their children to public schools.
Consequently, as well as the better education that the public schools
provide for
the children of the upper strata of society and the greater access to Oxford and
Cambridge,
public schools successfully shape a socially integrated elite by giving
contacts to the children which in
future facilitates their careers and influence, in
the post to which they eventually accede. Those who go to
the ancient universities
and public schools, and thus occupy the top positions in the state
departments,
comprise the core of the political elite – a network of a dominant status group
which has
stemmed from work income, family contacts, but essentially education.
As the work in Chapter One of the book
explained, the political elite of the
Conservative Party and the Labour Party have tended, in the past, to
share similar
paths through education and often similar walks of life which would lead them to
similar
attitudes and approaches in seeking to safeguard the British national
interest, in this case during the
decolonisation of the British Empire 1945-63.

Although
it was the economic crisis which largely influenced the
ideological adjustments of the British political
elite in accepting and undertaking
the process of decolonisation, the trading method that Britain had
increasingly
adopted, since the first half of the nineteenth century, both as a model and a policy
that
had been successfully practised – namely free trade – did have helpful impacts

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