A theorem: In matters of military contingency, the expected, precisely because it is expected, is not to be expected. Rationale: What we expect, we plan and provide for; what we plan and provide for, we thereby deter; what we deter does not happen. What does happen is what we did not deter, because we did not plan and provide for it, because we did not expect it.
SIR MICHAEL QUINLAN, 20081
MICHAEL Quinlan never published his theorem. It was contained in one of the last papers he wrote before his death in 2009. He gave it a very Quinlanesque title – ‘Shaping the Defence Programme: Some Platitudes’. It distilled well over fifty years of largely inside experience of Whitehall’s – and Britain’s – tales of the unexpected. Quinlan’s Law should, like Harry Truman’s ‘The Buck Stops Here’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s White House,2 be converted into a set of plaques to be placed on the desks of all secretaries of state, permanent secretaries, military chiefs, secret service chiefs and Whitehall chief economists as an aid to chiefly wisdom and humility.
Alongside Quinlan’s Law they should place a kind of sub-title plaque – ‘The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow’. The phrase was minted by the great French historian Fernand Braudel in the Introduction to his A History of Civilisations, published in 1987. This is what he wrote:
When it comes to the present day, with all its different potential dénouements, deciding which are the really major problems essentially means imagining the last line of the play – discerning, among all the possible outcomes, those which are most likely to occur. The task is difficult, hazardous and indispensable … forecasting the near future – the ‘futurible’, to use a frightful word beloved of certain economists. The ‘futurible’ is what now can legitimately be described in the future tense – that thin wisp of tomorrow which can be guessed at and very nearly grasped.3
Feeling for those ‘thin wisps’ is quite a powerful impulse in us mortals. Institutions often incorporate a permanent need, a particular human anxiety or aspiration and are driven by a desire for certainty.4 Some reflect the desire to institutionalise social justice (the Department of Work and Pensions), altruism (the National Health Service), national protection (the Ministry of Defence) or public safety (the Home Office and Ministry of Justice). The last century, in fact, has seen a succession of government-led attempts to reduce uncertainty – the intelligence and security services are a classic example – by trying to anticipate events, good and bad, and to increase the chances of the good happening and to reduce the prospects of the harmful.
Today what is called ‘horizon-scanning’ is a trans-Whitehall activity on a substantial scale. Indeed, Braudel’s ‘thin wisps of tomorrow’ problem has absorbed the energies of some of the best-primed clusters of grey cells in Crown service since, as we have seen, the prototypical Edwardian national security council – the Committee of Imperial Defence, the CID – came into experimental being in the early 1900s. The pursuit of top-of-the-range horizon-scanning has been a kind of holy grail for Whitehall ever since, though the subject has still to find its scholar/cartographer. A really good book cries out to be written on this. For in its various guises, the horizon-scanners’ craft has been central to the British state’s preparations for the worst from that day to this.
What might be some of the key ingredients of this still-to-be-written history? By 1909–10, the CID had bequeathed two enduring legacies to the British way of government. The first was the British intelligence community, which emerged in something approaching its recognisably modern form as the Secret Service Bureau in 1909 following a CID report (it split into MI6, the modern Secret Intelligence Service, and MI5, today’s Security Service, in 1911).5 The second was the practice of a prototypical version of modern foresight/contingency planning in the shape of the ‘War Book’.
The ‘War Book’ was the inspiration of a remarkable Royal Marine artillery officer, Maurice Hankey, who joined the CID’s Secretariat in 1908 and became its Secretary in 1912.6 As so often with the British way of horizon-scanning, it took a crisis and a scare to trigger action and follow-through. In this instance it was the Agadir crisis, when the Germans indulged in a dash of gunboat diplomacy off Morocco as part of a dispute with France in July 19117 (more on this in chapter 11), which ‘hastily intensified the work already proceeding [inside the Committee of Imperial Defence] of formulation and codification of plans for immediate action by all departments in case of war,’ as Franklyn Johnson, the historian of the CID, put it.8
It was another swathe of threats (largely home-grown ones in this instance, though the shadow of the Russian Revolution hung heavy over the guardians of national security at the time) that stimulated the next bout of Whitehall horizon-scanning and contingency planning – the rash of trade union militancy and strikes after the Great War in 1919. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, approved the making permanent of the ad hoc arrangements his Supply and Transport Committee had improvised to keep key services moving.9 For twenty years thereafter, the Supply and Transport Organisation was the regular Whitehall provider of foresight and contingency planning to cope with strikes that hit what its legal underpinning, the Emergency Powers Act 1920, called ‘the essentials of life’, which it defined as the ‘distribution of food, water, fuel … light … [and] … the means of locomotion’.10 The Supply and Transport Organisation was the chief instrument which enabled Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to break the General Strike in May 1926.11
It was the Army’s man on the Supply and Transport Committee, Winston Churchill,12 who was the moving spirit behind the creation of the next Whitehall innovation, the Chiefs of Staff Committee with its own horizon-scanning team, the Joint-Planning Committee. Churchill, as Secretary for War and Air, was determined to bring together properly the three chiefs of the armed forces and floated the idea in a debate in the House of Commons on 12 November 1919.13 A CID inquiry, chaired by Lord Salisbury with the ubiquitous Hankey as its secretary, was required before the Chiefs of Staff Committee came into formal existence in 1923 and it fell to the first-ever Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald to implement the Salisbury Report in 1924.14 The Chiefs of Staff Committee remains today the regular weekly Monday afternoon meeting of what since 1958 have been the four Chiefs of Staff (the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chief of the General Staff, the First Sea Lord and the Chief of the Air Staff). In a second burst of institution-building, MacDonald created his Economic Advisory Council in 1929, which he intended to be his economic equivalent of the military Chiefs of Staff, though it was of little use as the economic and financial blizzard engulfed the world after the Great Crash of that year.15
It was the Chiefs of Staff Committee itself which spawned the next innovation, the Joint Intelligence Committee, created in June 1936 and until 1957 itself a sub-committee of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, to coordinate inter-services intelligence. Hankey, once more, was instrumental in persuading the chiefs to take this step.16 The JIC did not seriously become a shaper of the British horizon-scanners’ craft until the pressure of total war finally gave it the bespoke capacity it needed and which neither the chiefs’ joint planners, the Foreign Office nor the individual service intelligence departments wished it to have in the first years of its life, leaving it until the weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War ‘a peripheral body’. ‘Nor’, as the official historian of British intelligence 1939–45, Professor Sir Harry Hinsley, pointed out, ‘did the JIC itself show any initiative in volunteering appreciations on more important questions like the intentions and military thinking of foreign states, partly because there was a dearth of reliable information on such questions and partly because service opinion in Whitehall frowned on speculation.’17
Churchill’s arrival in No. 10 changed all that when he issued a new directive for the JIC requiring it to ‘take the initiative in preparing at any hour of the day or night, as a matter of urgency, papers on any development in the international situation whenever this appears desirable to any member in the light of information that might be received’.18 Yet not until May 1941 was the JIC’s Joint Intelligence Staff created,19 which rapidly developed into a considerable Whitehall player20 and can be seen as the lineal begetter of today’s Assessments Staff, created in 1968, which works to the JIC in the Cabinet Office.21
War is a great examiner and refiner of institutions as well as people. The Second World War was remarkable, too, as a test-bed for postwar institution-building and the special kind of horizon-scanning that required. The most vivid and enduringly significant example concentrated on welfare rather than warfare though wartime conditions and enabled the designer of this particular blueprint, the social scientist and administrator Sir William Beveridge, to declare: ‘A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.’22
Beveridge was not engaged in preparing for the worst – avoiding the worst (a return to the 1930s) or preparing for the best would be a better way of describing his purpose when he seized upon a commission from the wartime coalition government to tidy up existing social insurance provision and turned his inquiry into an extraordinarily comprehensive plan for a postwar transformation designed to tackle and conquer what he called the ‘five giants on the road of reconstruction’ – ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’.23
Horizon-scanning infused Beveridge’s craft because he rightly sensed that unless these ‘giants’ were hammered simultaneously, the tough shell created by interlocking deprivations would not crack. The Beveridge Report was a public document and attracted great political and press attention from the moment it was published in November 1942 thanks, in part, to the ‘People’s William’ possessing a considerable gift for self-publicity and, in various forms, it sold 635,000 copies, quite extraordinary by any standards let alone those of a government-commissioned document.24
Most of the early postwar innovations in horizon-scanning, however, were implemented in intense secrecy. For example, the idea of the ‘War Book’ was extended to the pound sterling in early 1948 lest the (hugely overvalued against the US dollar) currency needed to be devalued in a fast-moving crisis in those days of fixed exchange rates. At the end of January, a senior Treasury official, Ernest Rowe-Dutton, began the preparation of what he called a ‘Sterling War-Book’.25 By mid-February, a first draft was ready covering who should be told if D (for devaluation) Day were imminent, and in what order, and the kind of technical and administrative readjustments that would be needed. It was real ‘need-to-know’ country. The Bank of England, understandably, was brought in on the plan but there is nothing in the file to suggest that ministers were told.26 Work on the ‘Sterling War Book’ lapsed in the summer of 1948 but it was revived, in something of a panic, in the spring of 1949 when sterling came under pressure. D-Day finally came on 18 September 1949 when the exchange rate of the pound against the dollar fell from $4.05 to $2.80.
But the greatest leap in the imaginative capacities of Whitehall’s postwar horizon-scanners was required, as we have seen, on the part of those charged with contemplating a different kind of revolution – the Bomb. Its dreadful potential stretched the craft in several directions and further than anything encountered before.
The potency of the Bomb led Whitehall horizon-scanners to pursue interlocking themes:
The Bomb has been a constant horizon-scanning imperative for Whitehall from August 1945 to the present day. For example, when the Joint Intelligence Committee prepared an assessment in the autumn of 2006 for the Official Group on the Future of the Deterrent and Tony Blair’s Prime Ministerial Group on the same subject (out of which came the decision to upgrade the Trident system29), it looked far further ahead than its normal practice, ffity years, in fact, concentrating on three areas – likely nuclear proliferation; possible developments in anti-submarine warfare; and likely advances in missile defence capabilities.30
But the palm for the finest piece of horizon-scanning of the postwar years must go to the Future Policy Study, briefly mentioned in chapter 3, which Harold Macmillan commissioned as Prime Minister in great secrecy (only the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, knew about it amongst his ministerial colleagues) in June 1959 shortly before he began the glide-path to his autumn victory in the ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ election of 1959 on the ticket of peace and prosperity.31 The Future Policy Study’s horizon-scan was a decade forward – to where Britain would be by 1970 on then current policies.
It depicted a Britain evermore dwarfed by the superpowers; increasingly falling behind the EEC ‘Six’, as they were then, in economic and trade terms; and a country possibly struggling to maintain both a comprehensive welfare state and substantial defence spending. The only thing Macmillan’s scanners got seriously wrong was Northern Ireland. In their treatment of Ireland they did not foresee a recrudescence of the ‘Troubles’.32 The final paper was so gloomy that Macmillan pulled it from the intended full Cabinet discussion in February 1960 and took it to a special Cabinet committee instead.33
Fifty years on, we desperately need an equivalent of the Future Policy Study, which set a still unsurpassed gold standard for width, quality and candour. Though cumulatively, the Foreign Office’s Planning Staff, created in 1964, and now called the Policy Unit, has produced fine work. For example, a particular gem, penned by the young diplomat Donald McLaren (or the McLaren of McLaren, to give him his full title) in July 1988 on the future of east–west relations, foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall.34
Ted Heath, as part of his new style of government after winning the 1970 general election, sought to institutionalise an approach to horizon-scanning with his creation of the Central Policy Review Staff, led by the former Head of Research at Shell, Lord Rothschild. From its inception in 1971, reflecting Victor Rothschild’s background, it kept a close eye on energy problems, especially the supply of oil, to which we shall return in a moment. More widely it sought to meet ministers’ need, most vocally expressed by Willie Whitelaw, to avoid being taken by surprise so often (what Whitelaw actually said was he ‘did not want to read about V and G [Vehicle and General, an insurance firm that collapsed in 1972] in the newspapers in his bath’35).
Rothschild set up an early warning system (EWS) and attempted to persuade Whitehall departments to share their anxieties about the future. The EWS was a brave stab at horizon-scanning but it was hobbled by two things: the Treasury were highly reluctant to pool information on sensitive economic matters, the exchange rate of sterling in particular; and Heath’s unwillingness, given the top secret nature of much of the material, to circulate the EWS reports to all his ministerial colleagues.36 As the pace of leaks has grown from the mid-1970s, fear of disclosure has been a considerable problem for the more candid ‘what if?’ exercises.
In the Heath years anxieties about the security of energy supplies were made still more fraught by the miners’ strike of 1972 (the first national one since 1926). Rothschild had, in fact, submitted his first CPRS paper on ‘Oil Economics and Supplies’ to Heath in September 1971 before the strike began.37 A refined version of the paper was circulated by Heath to ministers in April 1972 which argued that the country should increasingly rely less on coal and more upon a mix of natural gas and nuclear-powered or oil-fired stations.38 In May 1973 the CPRS prepared a report for Heath’s Cabinet Committee on Economic Strategy on the possible rise in oil prices due to growing scarcity over the next decade possibly to what was then an eye-watering $9 a barrel.39 Two months later, a Task Force on Oil Supplies, chaired by Lord Carrington, Heath’s Defence Secretary, warned the Economic Strategy Committee that a war in the Middle East would have a serious impact on the price of oil though such a war was not thought to be imminent.40
It was. On 6 October 1973, Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai on the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur and the fourth Arab–Israeli war began. On 16 October, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of oil from $2.90 a barrel to $5.11.41 In mid-December 1973 they raised it again to $11.65.42 The price had quadrupled in less than four months. The Carrington contingency and Rothschild’s worst-case-by-1985 possibility had met and struck a British economy already reeling from rising commodity prices abroad and growing industrial strife at home.
Each generation of horizon-scanners is shaped by a particular cluster of pacemaker anxieties: Russia and Germany in the early part of the last century; Russia in the 1920s; Germany again in the 1930s; the Soviet Union and the Bomb during the grim forty-year recitative of the Cold War; energy, oil in particular, in the 1970s; jihadi-inspired terrorism from 9/11 on and financial collapses from September 2008 with the cumulative impact of carbon emissions now providing a constant drumbeat, its percussive effect reaching into several other worrying shapes on the horizon.
For example, as George Soros has noted, a future economic shock comparable to that of 2007–08 would, if triggered by a climate change-related event, produce an immense problem for those seeking to put it right.43 It would reflect decades, if not centuries, of chemical accumulations that could not be remedied either swiftly (if they could be put right at all) or by any of the financial instruments to which individual governments or the G20 resorted at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. What Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, called the ‘Panic of 2008’, ‘because of the almost complete collapse of confidence in financial institutions and the flight of funding that ensued’ after the demise of Lehman Brothers in September of that year,44 would be trumped by a loss of confidence, a surge of anxiety and a level of panic that could scarcely be compared to 2008.
One economist, Professor Lord Stern of Brentford of the London School of Economics, had already produced an analysis and a remedial prescription for the economics of climate change almost exactly two years before the Lehman collapse.45 Prepared while he was Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury and written with a style and reach worthy of Beveridge, the Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change scanned the horizon to the period 2030 to 2060 and reckoned that by then there would have been a doubling of pre-Industrial Revolution levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with a 20 per cent probability that the related temperature increase could be over 5°C.
All current Whitehall horizon-scanning that seeks global reach now builds in climate change as both a pacemaker and an omnipresent conditioner of forecasting. For example, the best, in my view, of the regular productions, ‘The Global Strategic Trends Programme’, run by the Ministry of Defence’s Developments, Concepts and Doctrine Centre in London and at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, treats climate change as one of its three ‘Ring Road Issues’ (the other two being globalisation and global inequality).46
By the end of the last decade the UK government, in horizon-scanning terms (certainly in peacetime), probably had more people at work on a wider canvas than ever before as evidenced by the Future Security and Intelligence Network (FUSION), created by the Government’s Chief Scientific Officer, Sir John Beddington, in 2007. Yet the Cabinet Office’s first National Risk Register, published as the ‘Panic of 2008’ was really setting in, in its diagram of ‘high consequence risks facing the United Kingdom’, was completely silent on the financial chaos descending ever more destructively on the UK and the world.47 If you cast your eye across its range of a dozen anxieties and horrors, nowhere do you find the four horsemen of the financial apocalypse requesting landing permission at Heathrow. In fact, Sir Richard Mottram, former Co-ordinator of Security and Intelligence in the Cabinet Office, has spoken about the UK not engaging in ‘own-side’ intelligence and how unwelcome a paper on derivatives would have been during his chairmanship of the Joint Intelligence Committee between 2005 and 2007.48
Yet the horizon-scanner’s craft should blend smartness, and a feel for history enlivened by a sense of the wreckage of predictions past plus an acknowledgement of ‘thin wisps’ missed. A certain promiscuity of approach is valuable, too, because of the necessary humility this brings. There should be no ‘no-go areas’. Horizon-scanning teams should mix insiders and outsiders. The future should not be subject to the Official Secrets Act. It should look for what might be called benign/malign conjunctions. For example, I was very struck by the Shrivenham scanners’ assessment of the possibility of clean, abundant and safe nuclear fusion of deuterium and tritium towards the end of their forty-year forward look. Terrific, you might think, without caveat until you realise what it would do to precarious Middle Eastern countries dependent on oil revenues whose value would plummet.49
I’ll now return briefly to a gap in the Whitehall horizon-scanning machinery which was discussed at a British Academy forum on 15 December 2009, the second of a pair summoned to answer the Queen’s question about the financial crisis, when opening a new building at the London School of Economics on 5 November 2008, when she asked: ‘If these things were so large, how come everyone missed them?’ The first forum resulted in a letter to the Queen from the British Academy signed by myself and Tim Besley, Kuwait Professor of Economics and Political Science at LSE, on the causes and nature of the crisis that had prompted her question, dated 22 July 2009.50 The second letter, signed once more by Tim Besley and myself on 8 February 2010, examined how the Queen’s Crown servants scattered across a host of departments, institutions and agencies might so organise themselves that she would never have to ask such a question again.
As none of the senior Crown servants present at the 15 December 2009 forum had ‘volunteered either individually or institutionally’ to pull all the scattered horizon-scanning financial and economic material together on a regular basis we finished our letter ‘with a modest proposal. If you, Your Majesty, were to ask for a monthly economic and financial horizon-scanning summary from, say, the Cabinet Office, it could hardly be refused. It might take a form comparable to the Joint Intelligence Committee’s ‘Red Book’, which you received each week from 1952 until 2008 when it was abandoned. And, if this were to happen, the spirit of your LSE question would suffuse still more of your crown servants tasked to defend, preserve and enhance the economic well-being of your country.’51 Sadly, Her Majesty did not take up the suggestion, though there’s still time…
There are other, wider problems with the horizon-scanning craft. For example, there is a danger, after a fairly deep immersion into a century or more of the horizon-scanner’s trade, of becoming faintly obsessed with the ‘thin wisps of tomorrow’ and/or growing fatalistic about what can be done about a considerable number of the grimmer contingencies of the kind depicted in the diagram on page 35. Even that great patron of the trade, John Maynard Keynes, was moved to write in September 1931 that ‘it is so difficult to predict what is ahead … some of the things which I vaguely apprehend are, like the end of the world, uninsurable risks, and it’s useless to worry about them.’52 Ministers can get like that when confronted, on top of all their instant preoccupations, with less than cheerful material on what might await. Prediction fatigue has afflicted pretty well every set of political customers in Whitehall over the past century, partly because the pictures painted are so rarely jolly.
I am convinced, however, that there is a duty upon governments (and scholars) to try, for all the difficulties and the caveats in which horizon-scanning must and will always be embedded. As a historian, I am haunted by what we could and should have picked up in the past in terms of its future significance. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, cited some examples from the 1950s whose life-shaping possibilities were not appreciated at the time in his 2008 Ditchley Foundation Lecture, ‘The Next Half Century: A Scientist’s Hopes and Fears’:
It was in 1958 that Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductors built the first integrated circuit – the precursor of today’s ubiquitous silicon chips, each containing literally billions of microscopic circuit elements. This was perhaps the most transformative single invention of the past century.
A second technology with huge potential began in Cambridge in the 1950s, when Watson and Crick discovered the bedrock mechanism of heredity – the famous double helix. This discovery launched the science of molecular biology, opening exciting prospects in genomics and synthetic biology.53
Martin Rees, perhaps the most thoughtful and careful of the UK’s individual horizon-scanners, carries the necessary scepticism with him when he takes to the lectern. Here he is in the shining, gilded Robing Room of the House of Lords in June 2009 delivering the Lord Speaker’s Mile End Group Lecture on ‘The World in 2050’, pointing out that the ‘past record of scientific forecasters is dismal. Lord Rutherford averred that nuclear energy was moonshine; Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, thought there might be a world market for five computers; and one of my predecessors as Astronomer Royal said space travel was utter bilge.’54
Yet, Lord Rees insisted, we owe it to the generations to come to try:
We don’t know what will be the twenty-first-century-counterparts of the electron, quantum theory, the double helix and the computer – nor where the great innovators of the future will get their formative training and inspiration. But one thing seems clear: the UK’s standing depends on sustaining our competitive edge as discoverers and innovators – on ensuring that some of the key ideas of the twenty-first century germinate and – even more – are exploited here in the UK.55
And, as the handmaiden to that aspiration, I would add: sustaining in this era of cuts the UK’s capacity to strive to sense, find and evaluate the ‘thin wisps of tomorrow’ and to face up to what those ‘wisps’ might portend. We owe it to our country, ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, to apply a goodly proportion of our industrial and our collective ‘little grey cells’ to this most constant and vexing of tasks which, as Braudel wrote, is ‘difficult, hazardous and indispensable’, to avoid consigning it to what Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary, calls the ever tempting ‘Too Difficult Box’,56 and to concentrate, in particular, upon that terrain John Buchan described at the opening of his classic The Thirty-Nine Steps as ‘where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’57 while always remembering to cede the last word to Pliny the Elder: ‘Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain.’58
1. I delivered the bulk of this chapter as the Sir Timothy Garden Lecture 2011 at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs on 23 June 2011. I am very grateful to Sir Tim’s widow Sue, Baroness Garden of Frognal, for her permission to include it in Distilling the Frenzy (letter from Baroness Garden, 15 September 2011). Much of the text was originally published in INTERLIB, journal of the Liberal International British Group, No.2, 2011, pp.4–8. Michael Quinlan, ‘Shaping the Defence Programme: Some Platitudes’, 1 December 2008, unpublished paper in Sir Michael Quinlan’s private archive. I am very grateful to Lady Quinlan for her permission to quote from it.
2. Antony Jay (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (OUP, 1996), p.372.
3. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, (Penguin edn, 1995), pp.xxxvii–xxxviii.
4. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Routledge, 1987), pp.21, 25.
5. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2009), pp.27–8; TNA, PRO, CAB 16/232, Conclusion of Committee of Imperial Defence Sub-Committee, April 1909; CAB 2/12 CID (103), 24 July 1909; CAB 161/8, Report and Proceedings of CID Sub-Committee.
6. Franklyn Arthur Johnson, Defence by Committee: The British Committee of Imperial Defence 1885–1959 (OUP, 1960), pp.65, 71, 92, 97, 120–32.
7. Hew Strachan, The First World War, Volume I: To Arms (OUP, 2001), p.25.
8. Johnson, Defence by Committee, p.131.
9. Keith Jeffery and Peter Hennessy, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919 (Routledge, 1983), pp.10–39.
10. The 1920 Act is reproduced as Appendix I in ibid., pp.270–72.
11. Ibid., pp.102–29.
12. Ibid., pp.32–3.
13. House of Commons, Official Report, 12 November 1919, col.143.
14. Johnson, Defence by Committee, pp.192–3; Report of the Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on National and Imperial Defence [Salisbury Committee], Cmd. 2029 (HMSO, 1924).
15. David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Jonathan Cape, 1977), p.523.
16. F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, Volume I (HMSO, 1979), p.36.
17. Ibid., p.37.
18. Percy Cradock, Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World (John Murray, 2002), p.12.
19. Ibid., p.298.
20. Noel Annan, Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany (HarperCollins, 1995); Cradock, Know Your Enemy, pp.12–14.
21. See Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (Penguin, 2001), pp.329, 554; TNA, PRO, PREM 13/2688, ‘Reorganisation of Central Machinery for Politico-Military Planning and Intelligence’, 1967–1968, Trend to Wilson, 13 March 1967.
22. Social Insurance and Allied Services, Report by Sir William Beveridge, Cmd. 6404 (HMSO, 1942), p.6.
23. Ibid.
24. Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (Granada, 1971), p.609.
25. TNA, PRO, T 236 (no piece number), Rowe-Dutton to Eady, 26 January 1948.
26. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (Penguin, 2006), p.370.
27. For the fullest and most up-to-date survey of this see Michael S. Goodman, Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2007).
28. See Catherine Haddon, ‘Union Jacks and Red Stars on Them: UK Intelligence, the Soviet Nuclear Threat and British Nuclear Weapons Policy, 1945–70’, unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2008.
29. Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb (British Academy/OUP, 2007), p.331.
30. Private information.
31. Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (Penguin, 2007), pp.573–95.
32. TNA, PRO, CAB 129/100, FP (60) 1, 24 February 1960, ‘Future Policy Study 1960–70’.
33. TNA, PRO, CAB 134/1929, FP (60) 1st Meeting, 23 March 1960; Hennessy, Having It So Good, pp.591–2.
34. Private information.
35. TNA, PRO, PREM 15/927, ‘Review of Government Strategy by CPRS: Meetings of Ministers to Discuss Strategy in Economic and Foreign Affairs, Part 3’, Rothschild to Heath, 18 July 1972.
36. Jon Davis, Prime Ministers and Whitehall 1960–1974 (Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp.121–4.
37. TNA, PRO, CAB 184/57, ‘International Oil Questions’, Rothschild to William Armstrong, 21 September 1971. I am very grateful to my research student, Rosaleen Hughes, for steering me through the thickets of energy policy and the CPRS during the Heath years.
38. TNA, PRO, CAB 184/58. Rothschild to Heath, 27 April 1972.
39. TNA, PRO, CAB 134/3607, ES (73) 18, An Energy Policy for Britain: A Report by the Central Policy Review Staff, 9 May 1973.
40. TNA, PRO, CAB 134/3609, ES (73) 35, Ministerial Committee on Economic Strategy, ‘First Report from the Task Force on Oil Supplies: Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Defence’, July 1973.
41. Leonardo Maugeri, The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History, and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource (Praeger, 2006), p.112.
42. Ibid., p.114.
43. I recall him saying that at the time.
44. King, ‘Finance: A Return from Risk’.
45. Sir Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change (HM Treasury, 30 October 2006).
46. The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007–2036, 3rd edn (Ministry of Defence, 2007), p.xiii.
47. National Risk Register (Cabinet Office, 2008), p.5. I owe my appreciation of this omission to Sir David Omand, former Co-ordinator of Security and Intelligence in the Cabinet Office.
48. Conversation with Sir Richard Mottram, 23 February 2009.
49. The DCDC Strategic Trends Programme: Global Strategic Trends out to 2040, p.95; for a summer 2011 analysis of the state of fusion research see ‘Fusion power: next ITERation’, The Economist, 3 September 2011, pp.72–3.
50. The 22 July 2009 letter is reproduced in British Academy Review, Issue 14, November 2009, pp.8–10.
51. The 8 February 2010 letter is reproduced in British Academy Review, Issue 15, March 2010.
52. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920–1937 (Macmillan, 1992), p.401.
53. Lord Rees of Ludlow, ‘The Next Half-Century: A Scientist’s Hopes and Fears’, 2008 Ditchley Foundation Lecture, 12 July 2008 (Ditchley Foundation, 2008), p.1.
54. Lord Rees of Ludlow, ‘The World in 2050’, The Lord Speaker’s Mile End Group Lecture 2009, House of Lords, 18 June 2009.
55. Ibid.
56. Charles Clarke, ‘Inaugural Lecture… as Visiting Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia’, 20 January 2011.
57. John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, first published 1915 (Penguin edn, The Complete Richard Hannay, 1992), p.2.
58. Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Vintage, 2011), p.29.