I’m dead sick of Chamberlain bashing. Absolutely everything was worse after the war from Britain’s perspective: no more empire (if you care about that sorta thing), lack of money, a bigger Welfare State, foreign policy dictated by foreigners, and a menace at least as bad in Central Europe without Germany as a buffer. If Churchill’s so damn perspicacious and Chamberlain so shortsighted, how come the former didn’t see that coming?
Oh, I forgot, the alternative was German global domination and slavery/rape/death for their countrymen. That’s what the “finest hour” speech was getting at. Except it’s malarkey. Hitler didn’t want to fight the West. He was pointed the other way. But France and Britain had to protect their ally Poland, unlike their other allies, and so made war. A handful of years later they actively participated in giving up the Poles to an evil totalitarian regime, only a different one this time.
What Churchill types wanted was to remain preeminent world powers. That’s exactly what they weren’t postwar, partly because of fighting it. And the world was arguably a worse place.
So, uh, how’d you like “Triumph of Will” Mrs. Lincoln?
Of course it's possible that taking over Poland would have brought Germany war with the Soviet Union, but in real history, German and the USSR were willing to form an alliance to carve up Poland and give Hitler an opportunity to expand in other directions.
You know, it's touching to think that Hitler and the Nazis were primarily focused on fighting Russia, Stalin, and Communism, but Hitler was on the Western Front in the First World War, and overturning Germany's humiliation by Britain and France was high on his agenda.
On the welfare state, both Churchill and Chamberlain were ambiguous figures. Neither went as far as Labour, and Churchill tried to make opposition to socialism the defining issue in 1945, but both Churchill and Chamberlain had contributed to the growth of the welfare state when they were in office.
Churchill worship does get out of hand. Britons see Churchill in the round with all his good and bad qualities. Americans tend to co-opt him as a simplistic ideological symbol. We don't see the things about him that really irritated his contemporaries and drove them mad during Churchill's five decades in politics. But understand that it was precisely Chamberlain's government -- not Churchill's -- that decided that Hitler had gone too far and needed to be opposed militarily.