I really don’t think he’s been rude at all, I think he’s absolutely spot on, it’s an excellent analysis. France suffered from the effects of the war far worse than we did and West Germany was almost completely destroyed but even with political systems that could be rather unstable at times they both recovered far better than we did and they both have a more favourable relationship with the US. It would have been very hard for us to try to compete with the Americans in any field post-1945 (the potential to do that was wasted in 1939-41 by missing so many opportunities to noticeably shorten the war) but that didn’t necessarily mean that we had to take on the near-subservient role that we have. There are so many possibilities to kick on from 1945 to 1956, and largely due to incompetence we failed to take advantage of any of them, whereas France did, and by the time Macmillan took charge he’d been so shaken by Eisenhower’s Suez threats that he’d lost any vision of an independent future for Britain.
I'm not trying to be rude or boastful, I'm observing that the trajectory of the United Kingdom and France diverged significantly after 1945. The United Kingdom in 1945 was in a far more stable position than France and a world leader in many fields, but it was rapidly eclipsed. Even just the basic economic figures from the postwar period are striking. There were periods where the per capita GDP of the United Kingdom was significantly behind France and sometimes even behind Italy (
source). The discrepancy can't be down to something as simple as the 1970s energy shock either as the United Kingdom was still a major coal producer and the first nuclear plants built under the
Messmer Plan didn't start to enter service until the 1980s.
It's almost like the United Kingdom entered a malaise after World War II, much like the United States in the 1970s, but unlike the United States it doesn't seem to have been able to snap out of it for several decades. France seems to have had a generally more positive view of the future at the time, with the postwar period even being known as
les trente glorieuses.
There would have been nothing stopping Tube Alloys from having done a Commonwealth nuclear program out of Canada except for financial resources, and the Manhattan Project wasn't even that expensive in the grand scheme of things. The Manhattan Project was only $1.9 billion, the B-29 program was $3 billion (
source), and the German vengeance weapons were about as expensive as the B-29 program (
source). Even an early Cold War nuclear program isn't that expensive. Switzerland and Sweden seriously considered acquiring their own nuclear weapons but the cost would have been on par with other military programs they deemed more essential. In any case France was able to afford to it all entirely from scratch while maintaining a conventional military force on par with if not more powerful than that of the United Kingdom while also developing their own delivery systems. They don't even do any resource exchange with the United States as is done under the 1958 Mutual Defense Pact.
The British had a major share of the uranium resources of Kantanga and a significant percentage of uranium resources are located in the Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia, and South Africa. The percentage of uranium located in Commonwealth countries is on par with the percentage of petroleum reserves held by the OPEC countries. The British government helped British Petroleum become a dominant player in petroleum and something similar could have been done for uranium as well. Those resources were also located in independent nations and could have been secured through simple commercial arrangements, nothing on the level of what happened with the Kantanga Crisis or the French interventions into Africa to help secure their own uranium resources (all located within former colonies).
Canada and the United Kingdom even beat the United States in developing peaceful nuclear technology. The Canadian
NRX was one of the most advanced research reactors of its time and
Calder Hall was the first commercial scale nuclear power station. The Calder Hall complex entered service before the first American "commercial" nuclear reactor did at
Shippingport, but unlike Shippingport it consisted of four nuclear reactors and it used natural uranium (it wasn't even minimally enriched) while Shippingport was literally a naval propulsion unit running on highly enriched uranium and completely unrepresentative of commercially built designs. France actually wasn't far behind the United Kingdom in power reactors, as its first
UNGG reactors (very similar to the contemporary British
Magnox design) entered service shortly afterwards at
Marcoule. If anything it was the United States and the Soviet Union that were actually behind in developing commercial nuclear power, especially the Soviet Union. The United Kingdom is actually still a major player in nuclear energy, but it is doing it with French technology and the proposals usually involve taking on loans from France or the PRC. France is obviously in a better position in that regard.
There are several other fields that the United Kingdom was a leader in only to see a decline, in many cases being surpassed by France. The
Blue Streak rocket was one of the most advanced designs of the 1960s, but the United Kingdom went on to exit rocketry entirely. France has the
Ariane system and had a near monopoly in commercial space launches until a few years ago. The United Kingdom pioneered jet aircraft and built the first military and commercial jet aircraft. Now it just makes jet engines, but France makes jet engines too and uses them to assemble aircraft for the world's second largest commercial aircraft producer. It also uses those jet engines to produce domestically designed and built fighter aircraft.
Successive governments for sixty years were very clear that we wanted to get into the European project and plant a big Union Jack there & have a loud voice within Brussells. That's one of the big coherent decisions about Britain's place in the world and where it wants to go, one of the few things united Wilson and Thatcher.
One of the points I am trying to make is that the United Kingdom did and still does give the United States a lot of influence over its affairs. In some areas that influence is greater than countries that were actually under American military occupation.
De Gaulle didn't want the United Kingdom in the European Community because he saw it as too deeply attached to the United States and it isn't too difficult to see where he was coming from. The United Kingdom of 1961 and the United Kingdom of today have a nuclear arsenal that exists almost entirely at the whim of the United States and have a significant American military presence for a country that wasn't the subject of occupation or military intervention. The
death of Harry Dunn in a car accident involving the wife of an American service member stationed at
Croughton (one of the largest American military bases in Europe) shows that the United Kingdom has a less equal status of forces agreement with the United States than Japan (
source).
Also, the situation with Diego Garcia doesn't even have anything to do with Destroyers for Bases but was in fact done by the British government in the late 1960s of its own volition (
source). Around the same time that Japan was successfully pushing for the United States to return occupied territories to it the United Kingdom went out of its way to create a territory for the United States to operate out of.
Even if we assume that every PM from Macmillan to Cameron was an ardent believer in the European project and firmly believed that we should integrate into it (which I absolutely do not believe), in the end as a result of their decisions and general incompetence they were all failures, because we’ve abandoned the project. In fact, we are worse off now then we were in 1957 from an international perspective: we have lukewarm relationships with both Europe and the Commonwealth (who we turned our backs on for the Americans and then the Europeans) and to top it off unlike in 1957 we’re tied to a superpower on the decline. At least back then the Americans were clearly in the ascendancy, this is very much not the case now.
The United Kingdom and France had three options when World War II ended. They could go with the United States, they could go with Europe, or they could go on their own path. The United Kingdom tried a strange mix of everything and ended up with significant American influence and little influence of their own in Europe. France wanted nothing to do with the United States and was able to move decisively to become the major player in Western Europe.
If the British had been more decisive they might have been able to counter the French influence in Europe or possibly do something with the Commonwealth, but deciding to forge a new path at this juncture leaves the United Kingdom with no options other than Splendid Isolation. That wasn't a viable long term strategy when the United Kingdom was a global superpower in 1900 and it isn't going to be any more viable now.
It's not a matter of GDP, it's due to the United Kingdom losing too many key capabilities that other nations have retained and losing much of its ability to act independently of the United States. France could go it alone if it wanted to. Russia has been going it alone since the end of the Cold War and it has actually made an unprecedented comeback for a former superpower that broke up and went through all the economic, political, and cultural challenges that it has.
