eternumviti
Insufficient privileges to reply.
Sorry, that’s weapons-grade manure. For starters, there is no European superstate, 50 years later.
Another 'ism', this one denialism. You've done it before, too, the complete denial that the ultimate objective of the European project is and always has been a USE. The progressive centralisation of power has taken place treaty by treaty, crisis opportunism by crisis opportunism, ECJ directive by ECJ directive. Click, click, goes the ratchet.
You made me think of Jean-Claude Juncker, who a couple of weeks ago denied that there was any intention to create a European superstate. It was in the same interview in which he claimed that he'd never been drunk in his entire life.
Apologies for having missed this before.
Paragraph 1 is just wrong: the UK actually got more money from the Marshal Plan than any other country in Europe, bar none: more than France and more than double what Germany got.
https://historyincharts.com/breakdown-of-the-marshall-plan-aid-by-country/
The challenges overcome by Germany were monumental. The scale of real estate destruction was colossal, there were millions of refugees from the East to deal with, and a lot of the leadership was dead or in jail. France had the same decolonization issues as the UK, including two nasty wars in Vietnam and Algeria, a lot more smashed up real estate to repair, a hopelessly dysfunctional 4th Republic, etc. Italy was also in a sorry state.
I love it when you do that, you take yourself off on a tangent of indignant 'just plain wrongness' (remember the border down the Irish Sea) over something that I didn't say. In this case, I didn't say that the UK had received less Marshall Aid than Germany, not least because I was perfectly well aware that she'd received the largest share. In fact, I didn't even mention the UK's Marshall Aid funds. The important point is what was done with the funds, and in Germany's case they were intelligently recycled in loans in setting up businesses, the repayments going straight back into new loans. Her shattered infrastructure, something of a blank canvas in 1945, was completely rebuilt to the latest standards - autobahns and electrified railways. France and Italy too electrified their rail systems.
You also, probably conveniently, missed the most important point that I made about France's difficulties in extracting herself (or trying not to) from her colonies. America paid the bill.
I repeat, both Germany and France had instigated radical supply-side reforms by the early 1950s, and growth was subsequently rapid. Broke Britain's Labour (and subsequently conservative) government was still engaged in colonial pretensions, financing a vast standing army (2 million men) in both Germany and scattered far and wide across the world, attempting to underpin the Sterling area, and engaging in a massive programme of social transfer - the Wefare State. Investment in modernising industry and infrastructure was well down the list. Our last steam trains were retired in 1968!
The result of all this was that Britain's growth in the 1950s and 60s was slower than that of her European counterparts, whose process of 'catch-up' came to an end at about the same time as the UK went into the Common Market.