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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a way that
it can easily be reached by the majority of the population and can easily
service large masses of people. At
least 50% of the population of Britain can go
to London on business and return home on the same day.
“Things might have
been different if, as Paris is to most Frenchmen, London had been as distant
to
most British people as it is to the Scots.”20

There is
another important factor beside location of London and the
conurbations which has made the United Kingdom a
homogeneous society.
Unlike other European countries and even North American, Britain does not
possess a
‘peasant class’, which lives separately from the rest of the community
with its own traditions. First
of all, the agricultural population in Britain is small.
This is because in the course of the nineteenth
century agriculture diminished so
rapidly that, around 1930, it appeared on the point of disappearing
altogether.
Secondly, the agricultural community in Britain is much more integrated to the
social
structure of the nation than in other countries. The reason for this is that,
while British agriculture was
transformed by an economic revolution in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the type of social
revolution which took
place on the land in other parts of Europe never took place in Britain. From
1789
onwards, in France as well as in other parts of Western Europe, the main political
battle was
agrarian reform. There was, almost everywhere, mounting tension
between landlords and farmers. Landlords
voluntarily renounced their rights or
were forced to abandon them. The traditional hierarchy between
landlords and
farmer in Western Europe consequently broke, but in Britain, the pressure on the
landlords
did not materialise. “In fact, the landlords were often the originators of
the economic revolution of
the eighteenth century. They introduced new methods.
Stock raising and sheep farming were often substituted
for agriculture proper.
Manpower was saved and many rural workers were forced out of the land.
The
farmers who remained were not only probably more prosperous than their
counterparts on the
Continent; they also continued to accept the traditional social

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