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The tradition of the amateur has other far-reaching effects on Britain's ability to compete in the world today, suggests the Royal Institute of International Affairs' Andrew Shon-field. "Upper-class manners—and it is these manners which set the tone for the whole community in Britain—are unsympathetic to the crudity and explicitness of performance." The result affects everything from the quality of technical education to precise manufacturing standards, and helps explain why the atavistic apprentice system persists, with its "myth of the craftsman and his incommunicable skills." Arthur Koestler agrees that "psychological factors and cultural attitudes are at the root of Britain's economic evils."
Archaic work attitudes, ingrained class divisions, the tolerance of amateurism and inefficiency, governments unable or unwilling to keep shop—the list of Britain's ills goes on and on. Britain, which once ruled the world, now commands admiration for the poignant knack of "muddling through." In the current crisis the British may, or may not, muddle through again. But simply surviving it like all the previous ones, without effecting a revision from top to bottom of Britain's approach to the business of earning its way in the world, would be a hollow victory. Better perhaps would be a defeat and devaluation that might force the surgery of fundamental change. As the British know better than anyone else, somehow the way to a second Industrial Revolution must be found. The alternative is to sink slowly toward the status of Sweden—prosperous and placid perhaps, but hardly the England that was.