A History of Britain, Volume 3 (72 page)

That, at least, was the idea inaugurated with such idealistic energy in 1945. Earlier generations had been taught that the British Empire would last for ever. My own generation, born with the welfare state, was taught that this new empire of British social benevolence would also last for ever. This conviction became even stronger when successive Conservative governments in the 1950s and 1960s, including Churchill’s own from 1951 to 1955, and from 1957 to 1963 that of his old disciple Harold Macmillan (he who had spoken of British miners as ‘the salt of the earth’ and who in 1938 had published a little book,
The Middle Way
(1938), advocating, among other things, the abolition of the Stock Exchange), decided against reversing most of the essential institutions of this new Britain: the National Health Service created by Bevan in 1948; the public ownership
of
railways, steelworks and mines; and especially the commitment to building publicly owned, rented council housing. Seen from the perspective of 1970, it seemed a good bet that this reinvented Britain would see out the 20th century.

But the British welfare state turned out to be much more ephemeral – lasting perhaps two generations – than its founders and tutors, like Professor Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, could possibly have imagined, and the answer to why that was the case is not just Margaret Thatcher. From the very beginning, the Labour government was not insulated from the perennial headaches and imperatives of 20th-century British government – monetary viability, industrial over-capacity and, especially, imperial or post-imperial global defence. The odd thing was that it showed no signs of wanting to be liberated from those constraints. What choice, after all, did it have? The only option, other than shouldering these familiar burdens with a sigh and getting on with the new Jerusalem as best they could, was to plunge into a much more far-reaching programme of collectivization, Keynesian deficit financing, disarmament and global contraction, as indeed those like Laski heartily recommended. But that was never actually on the cards, for the reason that the members of this Labour government, like those of the Liberal administration of 1906, were not cold-blooded social revolutionaries; nor in the sense of a Lenin-like Brest–Litovsk (the treaty that took newly Bolshevik Russia out of the First World War), committed to a wiping of the slate. The slate was Britain; its memories, traditions, institutions, not least the monarchy. Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison were emotionally and intellectually committed to preserving it, not effacing it. They were loyal supporters of what Orwell called
The Lion and the Unicorn
(1941).

Ernest Bevin, the Somerset farm labourer’s boy risen to be foreign secretary, turned out to be almost as much of an imperialist as Churchill and at least as much devoted to the chimera of British military independence from the United States. The decision to keep an independent nuclear deterrent, and to sustain the projection of British power in Asia (through Hong Kong) and even more significantly in the Middle East, came at a huge price: $3.5 billion, to be exact – the amount of a US loan. Britain was estimated to have lost in the region of £7000 million ($10.5 billion in American numbers) or a quarter of the economy as a result of fighting the war. Now that defence costs had risen to fully 10 per cent of gross domestic product – incomparably higher than for any other European state – that American help was desperately needed. So Bevin’s goal of keeping independent of the United States had the effect of actually deepening long-term dependence. But the capital infusion, it was
thought
by Cripps and others, would jump-start the economy as well as pay for investment in new infrastructure, after which surging economic growth would take care of the debt burden. The most idealistic assumption of all was that public ownership of key industries, the replacement of the private profit incentive by cooperative enterprise, would somehow lead to greater productivity. There were periods in 1948 and again in 1950 when, in export-led mini-surges, it looked as though those projections were not as unrealistic a diagnosis of human behaviour as they were, alas, to prove in the long term. Britain was benefiting from the same kind of immediate post-war demand that it had experienced after 1918; the eventual reckoning with the realities of shrinking exports was merely postponed rather than structurally reversed.

The American loan and backing for the stability of the pound – an indispensable condition for the preservation of London’s continued dominance as a world centre of finance – came with strings of steel attached. Its condition was that Britain should continue to play a leading (that is, cripplingly expensive) part in the Atlantic Alliance but also bear its share of costs and responsibilities for resisting the communist threat, or nationalist threats that looked like communist threats, in the regions of its old imperial dominance. Hence the obligation to take part in the Korean War of 1950–3 and to combat communist insurgents in Malaya in the 1950s; and, above all, to remain active in the Middle East where Britain and the USA had become corporate partners in the exploitation of oil. That fateful switch that Churchill had made from coal to oil as the fuel of choice for the Royal Navy in 1914 was now bearing bitter fruit.

In any case, though, Bevin and Anthony Eden after him turned out to be eager partners for US secretaries of state Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles in fighting the Cold War and resisting any attempt at contraction in the Middle East. It was almost uncanny how exactly the map of Middle Eastern oil reserves resembled the old Disraeli-ite map of strategic links between the Mediterranean and India; and how ardent Bevin was to keep that map red or at least pinkish. Bases were built or consolidated along the Persian Gulf and round to the southwestern tip of the Arabian peninsula, from Iraq to Aden. Until 1948 Palestine was still under the British mandate set up after the First World War and, despite everything that had happened to the Jews of Europe and the terrible distress of the survivors in refugee camps, Bevin did his level best to reverse Churchill’s commitment to a Jewish homeland as a way of strengthening the strategic ties with the oil states of the Arab world. He even proposed that former Italian colonies in Libya and Somalia be put under British trusteeship as a way of extending this zone of influence. And it was Attlee’s
government
that created the ‘Persia Committee’ to consider the implications of the Iranian prime minister Muhammad Mossadeq’s nationalization of the country’s largely British-owned oil industry. The Americans were encouraged to think of some sort of defensive response – the kind that led, two years later in 1953, to a CIA-engineered overthrow and the reinstatement of the Pahlavi ‘imperial’ monarchy.

So even though the Labour government did live up to its obligation to see the Union Jack come down on the flagstaff of the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, and to hand over, as if in a Macaulayite dream of redemption, Lutyens’s and Sir Herbert Baker’s great ensemble of parliament and secretariat buildings to Jawaharlal Nehru and his government in August 1947, welfare-state Britain was deeply committed to replacing an old empire with a new one. The far-flung stations of Bevin’s empire, to be sure, were called things like the Overseas Food Corporation and the Colonial Development Corporation, but it was designed to finance the British economy in ways that did not look all that different from its 19th-century predecessors. The flow of crucial raw materials, now including oils of all sorts – palm from West Africa, ground nut from East Africa, petroleum from the Gulf and Iran – would be guaranteed in return for the blessings of receiving Morris Minors; Sanderson’s wallpaper; Liberty soft furnishings; sterling payment accounts; an aircraft fleet, humming with Rolls-Royce engines, on which the countries could paint their ‘flagship’ colours; for the sheikh a Bentley, also humming with a Rolls-Royce engine; a visit from Yehudi Menuhin, courtesy of the British Council; and good seats at the coronation in 1953. Charles Trevelyan would have had no difficulty recognizing this at all.

As the bill for maintaining pseudo-great power status
and
welfare-state benevolence mounted, so did doubts and misgivings about the premises on which it had been thought the armed new Jerusalem could be funded. Stafford Cripps, who had once been the most ardent of the collectivizers, became, after 1949, an equally determined advocate of the mixed economy. A hard pound, that other fixture of the inter-war period, likewise became orthodoxy after the decision had been taken not to float it in 1951. The decision of the next Labour party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, to oppose nationalization and Harold Wilson’s pragmatic switch from Bevanite advocate of unilateral disarmament to determined opponent of it were bound to put a hold on any return to the socialist idealism of 1945–8. It also meant that the threshold of post-imperial panic, whenever ‘vital interests’ (the buffer between Britain and late 20th-century reality) were threatened, was much lower.

For the Conservatives, the temptation to invoke the great days of
post-Munich
defiance (conveniently forgetting the part they had played in Munich in the first place) became irresistible every time Britain was faced with an inconvenient nationalist who threatened to repatriate imperial assets like the Suez Canal. Egypt’s president Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser was thus absurdly portrayed as a Levantine Mussolini, whose violation of treaty agreements and ‘grab’ of the canal must at all costs be resisted if the torch of freedom were not to go out in the Middle East. The result, of course, was the pseudo-empire’s most ignominious fiasco, a farcical replay of Gladstone’s worst moment in 1882, when, in the name of preserving free trade and civilization from the threat of ‘anarchy’ unleashed by a nationalist revolt, a British military occupation was imposed on Egypt. In 1956 the fraud was even more egregious, for the pretence was that red-beret paratroops would be loftily ‘separating’ the belligerent armies of Israel and Egypt from a confrontation that the British and French had planned in the first place. So aghast was even the Republican administration of Eisenhower at this independently planned campaign that an exercise which had been planned to demonstrate how the British lion could still roar retreated in a mouse-like squeak in the face of a US-led United Nations ultimatum.

After Suez – with the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson, scrambling to dismantle what was left of the post-imperial presence, Hong Kong excepted – Britain was forced to come to terms with its loss of status, assets and, in an intangible way, national swagger. The occasional Happy Event, like England’s World Cup victory in 1966, royal jubilees and weddings, even the 1982 Falklands War in the south Atlantic, which Margaret Thatcher represented as a triumph of ‘freedom and democracy’ over Argentinian dictatorship, was no real compensation. But the satire culture of the 1960s turned the mournful fatalism of retreat into a reason to celebrate, not grieve; the disconsolate arm round the shoulder became the gleeful punch in the ribs. The second-coming of mutton-chop sideboard whiskers, droopy moustaches, neo-Victorian steel-framed glasses and heavily embroidered, brilliantly coloured ‘Nehru jackets’, half imperial military band, half Hindu
swami
, popularized by The Beatles, was exactly the moment at which the loss of empire turned from a massive case of denial into affectionate acceptance.

There was, in fact, still one empire left: Britain indisputably survived as a dominant centre of world finance. But even this advantage turned into a liability when the defence of sterling forced successive governments, especially Wilson’s, into accepting humiliating conditions, either from the United States or the International Monetary Fund, usually involving deep spending cuts. Yet again, a policy intended to arrest the
shrinkage
of sovereignty only ended up accelerating it. This would go on – with increasingly brutal battles over slices of an ever-diminishing economic pie, fought out between unions and management or between unions and government – so long as the original post-1945 Labour party assumptions to keep Britain as a substantial military power and a fully funded welfare state remained in being.

All the alternatives mooted and attempted from the 1960s to the 1980s ran into trouble. Relying exclusively on the United States for nuclear defence was ruled out as anathema by both Labour and Conservatives: seen as an abdication, not just of great power but of any power status, equivalent to a transatlantic recolonization in the opposite direction. A European solution, through membership of the EEC, was vetoed by General (now President) de Gaulle twice, in 1963 and 1967, over what he described as Britain’s incorrigible insularity and post-imperial mentality (rich, coming from him, embroiled as his country had been in its own colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria). Particular irony was attached to his emphatic ‘
Non
’ on the second occasion, since this was precisely the moment when Harold Macmillan was determined to abandon both attitudes. In 1967 – a year before egg was to fly into his own face in the Paris riots – de Gaulle loftily instructed ‘this great people’ to embark on the economic and social transformation that would qualify them to be truly part of Europe rather than a satellite of the United States.

The third way in 1970, initiated by free-enterprise, anti-collectivist Tories like Anthony Barber, Edward du Cann and Keith Joseph at the Selsdon Park conference during Edward Heath’s ascendancy (although Heath himself had mixed feelings about it), would prepare the way for Margaret Thatcher’s attempt in the 1980s to liquidate what was left of the welfare state. Billed as a return to the values that had made Victorian Britain great, it was not in fact a revival of Gladstonian liberalism, nor even of the Palmerstonian anti-continental gunboat-sending and chest-thumping (or handbag-swinging) which at times it rhetorically resembled. Thatcher’s government, elected in 1979, was a reversion, rather, to the empire of the hard-faced 1920s, when war socialism had been energetically dismantled, leaving industries that could survive and profit to do so and those which couldn’t to go to the wall. As in the 1920s, resistance to brutal rationalization through closure or sell-off of uneconomic enterprises, or by wage or job reductions, was met by determined opposition, never tougher than in the confrontation in 1984–5 between Thatcher and the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill – a battle, however, in which the Iron Lady comprehensively routed the King of Coal.