The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (104 page)

After the furore of the Berlin Blockade, western attitudes towards Russia hardened. A military alliance became a necessity. Anxiety about Russian intentions thus created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. A visible sign of the Truman Doctrine, NATO bound America in an unprecedented military alliance to protect western Europe. Britain had already attached herself to the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and France in a mutual defence treaty. Now America, Canada, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Portugal joined up with their own troops to create what became a formidable military system.

The formation of NATO put Russia on notice to tread more carefully. The United States, which had spread her wing over Europe, had the bomb and the dollars. In August 1949 the Soviet Union exploded her first atomic bomb, its programme greatly accelerated by the betrayal of critical data by the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs. The western alliance and the strength of the Cold War truce was to be tested only the next year by the outbreak of the Korean War. Once again this could have led to a mighty conflagration in the Far East, but all powers concerned were anxious to prevent it getting out of hand.

Korea descends from mainland China into a peninsula opposite Japan, her former ruler. From 1945 she was occupied by American troops in the south and Russian troops in the north. But on 25 June 1950 the communist government of North Korea sent troops into South Korea, armed with Russian tanks and supported by Russian aircraft. The brand new United Nations sprang into action and asked its fellow members to support South Korea by sending a defence force to help her. Britain naturally contributed troops, though she could scarcely afford to. She continued to have important imperial commitments in Malaya and was anxious about Chinese communist influence there–for Chiang Kai-shek, China’s nationalist leader, had been defeated and expelled by Mao Tse-tung the previous year.

The United States had a large number of troops in the region already owing to her occupation of Japan. At first US and UN troops under General MacArthur chased the North Koreans almost to their border with Manchuria. But communist China now began to throw her weight behind North Korea. Although there was a moment when it seemed that the world trembled on the edge of its third global conflict as American soldiers were directly engaged with Chinese troops, the conflict was contained–it never explicitly became an out-and-out war between China and the United States. The Americans did not attack Chinese territory, and did not use the atomic bomb. Russia too restrained herself. Despite the initial aid to the North Koreans, she did not send troops to the battle zone.

Seventy-five thousand South Koreans and United States servicemen died during the Korean War, but the conflict ended inconclusively. All concerned were anxious to show that they did not really wish for war. In 1951, a ceasefire was agreed upon and the country reverted to the
status quo ante
. The old frontier between North and South Korea at the 38th parallel was retained in a treaty agreed in 1953. That was also the year of Stalin’s death, which caused the world to heave a collective sigh of relief. Nikita Khrushchev, who took over as secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, denounced Stalin’s dictatorship and his cult of personality. There seemed to be a distinct thaw in the Cold War: the Communist party congress in 1956 recommended a deStalinization process, as long as it did not go too far. Controls over Russia’s client states in eastern Europe were loosened.

The expense involved in sending British troops to the Korean War was the final straw that broke the back of the Labour government, despite its remarkable achievements. It had made huge strides in changing the fabric of Britain, but the austerity measures it required of the public were very harsh because the costs of those changes were so huge. Nationalizing the coalmines cost hundreds of millions of pounds to acquire them from the private owners, and similar costs were incurred in nationalizing the railways, the utilities (that is, gas, electricity and water) and the iron and steel industries. Although they lost the 1951 general election (there had been another election the year before in which their majority had been drastically reduced), Labour had an enormous amount of which to be proud. There had been relatively little disagreement about their reforms. Many Conservatives agreed wholeheartedly with nationalization if it benefited the country as a whole as opposed to a few wealthy private owners. They too felt that the National Health Service was a benchmark of what the most enlightened twentieth-century democratic civilization could achieve.

And what twentieth-century governments represented was of course at the forefront of British politics in the aftermath of the war. The shame of the Nazis’ treatment of minorities and of the vulnerable gave an additional edge to considerations of what post-war society ought to be like. In fact in the 1950s national politics were marked by their consensual nature: Labour and Conservative tended to implement programmes that moderates in all parties could approve of. This consensus politics came to be called Butskellism, taken from the names of the progressive Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, R. A. Butler (author of the 1944 Education Act, which created universal free secondary education for all to the age of fifteen) and Hugh Gaitskell, his predecessor as chancellor, who became leader of the Labour party in 1955 when Attlee retired to the House of Lords. Their policies were remarkably similar, and (to a much lesser extent) elements of consensus were maintained until the arrival of Mrs Thatcher.

The most important contribution to national life made by Labour was the creation in 1948 of the welfare state, set up by two statutes: the National Insurance Act and the National Health Service Act. Its architect Sir William Beveridge, the ‘People’s William’, proudly explained that this all-encompassing plan for national insurance would look after everyone ‘from the cradle to the grave’. Every adult in Britain would contribute to it by paying national insurance, to ensure that everyone in British society was provided for. Every British citizen would be entitled to free medical care in free hospitals provided by the National Health Service. Child benefit was to be paid for every child after the first. There was to be cover for industrial accidents. State pensions were to be given to all citizens–to women at sixty and men at sixty-five.

Labour also took important decisions to reduce Britain’s responsibilities overseas. India had been promised independence, but the division between Muslims and Hindus was so deep that it became clear that only partition would work–that the country was on the point of civil war. The Labour government announced that India’s new viceroy Lord Mountbatten, a distinguished naval officer and member of the royal family, would hand over rule in June 1948 to an Indian government which would be set up by local parties. But once Mountbatten had arrived in the country he decided that independence had to be brought forward to a much earlier date, 15 August 1947. He believed that, if the subcontinent were swiftly divided into Muslim and Hindu states, this would cut down on the mounting death toll.

Pakistan, the new Muslim state, was to comprise those regions with large Muslim communities, concentrated in the north-west corner of India and above the Bay of Bengal, east of Calcutta. Unfortunately the two halves of the new state (known as West and East Pakistan) were a thousand miles apart. Worse still, the nine weeks during which Mountbatten organized partition saw the number of deaths rise to perhaps 200,000. Meanwhile the short period of time given to the Muslims of India to cross into Pakistan and the Hindus of the new Pakistan to cross into India created separate difficulties. During that two-and-a-half-month period, ten million people of rural origins, their bedsteads and belongings loaded anyhow on to oxen and carts, were on the move across the huge Indian subcontinent. They had to be within the freshly established frontiers before the stroke of midnight on 15 August. This vast movement of peoples, for whom shelter had to be found, was an additional source of strain for the brand-new governments of Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.

The second enormous headache for the Labour government was Israel, another ancient country struggling to be born anew in the late 1940s. The problem of Israel and Palestine was as complicated as that of India. In the 1930s Nazi persecution of the Jews greatly increased their immigration into Palestine. By 1936 the Jewish population was almost 400,000 or a third of the whole. Conflict in Palestine brought about the Peel Report’s 1937 recommendation of partition, but this was rejected by both sides. The last British government investigation into what was best for the mandate of Palestine in 1939 had produced the recommendation in a White Paper that the final number of Jewish immigrants be limited to 75,000. The mandate would be given up, Palestine would become independent under Arab majority rule. Previously Jewish emigration between the wars had been of an individual and unofficial nature. The situation, however, was dramatically changed after the Second World War by the sufferings of the Jews under the Nazis. From 1945 onwards the immigration into Israel threatened to become a flood which would upset the balance between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, when the American government asked Britain to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine.

The British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin felt that if the Jews were allowed to immigrate into Palestine in the numbers the United States was proposing they would swamp the original Arab inhabitants. The Palestinian Arabs in any case refused to accept further Jewish immigrants. Britain had been entrusted to rule in the Palestinians’ best interests by the League of Nations mandate, and Bevin believed she could not simply abandon them.

There were also the wishes of the Arab leaders of the Middle East to consider. These were important allies for Britain of long standing whom Bevin was anxious not to offend, who were already opposed to the Jewish National Home. Their importance was made greater by the west’s increased reliance by mid-century on the motor car, fuelled by petrol converted from oil beneath the desert kingdoms of Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and, since 1938, Saudi Arabia. So when boatloads of illegal Jewish immigrants began to arrive in Palestine often visibly sick from their treatment by the Nazis, Britain felt compelled to use force to stop them from disembarking, though this was greatly deplored by the rest of the world.

Meanwhile a guerrilla war was being fought between the Palestin Arabs and Jewish terrorist gangs. Jewish terrorist attacks were also carried out on the British army, which was trying to keep the peace between the two warring sides. The British resident minister Lord Moyne was assassinated in 1944, the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British army) was blown up without warning in July 1946, killing ninety-one people, and two young British sergeants were hanged in July 1947. British public opinion became increasingly disenchanted with remaining in Palestine. Britain’s duty towards the Arabs was offset by the high cost to an impoverished Britain of enforcing the mandate, in the year of austerity 1947. Britain could no longer afford to play the world’s policeman. Moreover, with India gone in August 1947, the importance of Palestine to British interests fell away. Earlier that year Britain had referred the problem of Palestine to the newly founded United Nations in America, as an international arbiter. The UN recommended partition. In September the Labour government decided that British forces would leave in mid-1948, for Bevin would not use British soldiers to enforce partition on the Arabs who did not want it.

The day that the British mandate in Palestine expired, 14 May 1948, as the last British troops pulled out of the country, the Jews declared the existence of the independent State of Israel. It was to be open to any Jew throughout the world. David Ben Gurion became the first Israeli prime minister, while Chaim Weizmann was president. The Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, was set up in 1949. The reappearance of the State of Israel with all its historic biblical resonances for Jews and Christians, almost 2,000 years after vanishing from the map of the world, caused great rejoicing among many sympathizers. But the Arab leaders whose lands surrounded Israel on all sides were furious. Three days after the new state had been declared, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and others declared war. Astonishingly, in the tradition of David and Goliath the infant state defeated her mighty Arab neighbours and enlarged her territory by a quarter. The war ended in January the following year with the sacred city of Jerusalem divided in two between Israel and Jordan, which also occupied most of the UN-designated Palestinian state, and many of the 650,000 Palestinian Arabs homeless.

By 1951 Labour had run out of money for further domestic reforms–the first year of free dental and eye treatment alone had cost £400 million. Shortage of funds was so severe that all the medical centres the government wanted to build for free health care had to be postponed, while many people had started to live permanently in their ‘pre-fabs’ because there still was not enough money to build the promised new houses. When Labour realized that the only way out of these costs after the Korean War was to charge for medical prescriptions, Aneurin Bevan, the fiery health minister, and Harold Wilson resigned from the government in protest.

Some of Labour’s spirit evaporated with the death in 1951 of Ernest Bevin, and by that time the British would have been superhuman not to have wanted an end to the rationing, hard times and retrenchment which they associated with Labour. They had had enough of sacrifice during the Second World War. At the 1951 election the Conservatives got in again with a majority of seventeen seats. That meant the return of the seventy-seven-year-old Winston Churchill. He was not quite Britain’s oldest prime minister–Gladstone held that distinction, having been premier at the age of eighty-three–but he was made to seem distinctly elderly when King George VI died the following year, and his twenty-five-year-old daughter succeeded as Queen Elizabeth II.

Wind of Change (1952–1964)

To have Winston Churchill as prime minister gave the new queen Elizabeth’s reign a wonderful beginning and sense of continuity. Elizabeth had been popular with her subjects ever since the war. In the service tradition of the British royal family she had gone into uniform and served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, enabling her to change vehicle wheels with the best of them. In 1947 she had married her Greek cousin Prince Philip Mountbatten, and they soon had two children, Prince Charles (born in 1948) and Princess Anne (born in 1950).

A few days before Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in Westminster Abbey in June 1953, the New Zealander Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest. A year later the Briton Roger Bannister became the fastest man in the world when he ran the mile in less than four minutes. It seemed that an age of New Elizabethans had begun, ruled over by a new Gloriana who was photographed looking radiant and regal by Cecil Beaton. On the South Bank of the Thames a huge arts complex was rising like a strange modern city to house the nation’s astonishing creative output. It would eventually contain the Royal National Theatre and the Hayward Gallery. The opening of its first building, the Royal Festival Hall, in 1951 had been the highlight of the Festival of Britain, organized by the Labour home secretary Herbert Morrison to demonstrate British cultural achievements a hundred years after Prince Albert had arranged the Great Exhibition to celebrate Victorian invention.

The 1950s would be a prosperous decade for Britain, as Japan’s and Germany’s industrial muscle would take another decade to rebuild and the British could export to their former markets. Britain continued to be an important world power, despite the increased acceptance that the days of the largest empire in the history of the world were coming to an end. There were bases and British administrations from Gibraltar to Malta, from Egypt and west Africa to Aden and Malaya. Educational and trade links reinforced a sense of common belonging between the far-flung countries of what was now called the Commonwealth. Britain was one of the three countries in the world to be sufficiently advanced to have built an atom bomb. As one of the Big Five on the Security Council she was able to veto the proposed actions of the United Nations.

Nevertheless the lands over which the young Queen Elizabeth II ruled were greatly diminished from Queen Victoria’s day and about to diminish further. Under Labour, India had become two independent republics, the British mandate for Palestine had become the State of Israel, and the 1950s and early 1960s would see a speeded-up process of decolonization in the face of independence movements throughout the old British Empire in Africa. Britain simply could not afford to maintain what had become a very reluctant empire.

Even so, from the late 1940s she had to fight a jungle war in her colony of Malaya, which held two-thirds of the world’s rubber plantations, and which had been badly battered by the Japanese invasion during the war. Now communist guerrillas from the native Chinese population threatened Britain’s hold on the country. By 1956 the communist threat had been defeated but local antagonism to Britain made it pointless to delay independence. In 1957 Malaya became an independent state but remained within the Commonwealth.

But it was in 1956 that it was brought home to Britain how altered her position was in the post-war world. British power had been so substantial and so long-lived that the prime minister Anthony Eden–who had succeeded Churchill the year before–had assumed that Britain could continue to use military force if her interests were threatened. Eden was a conscientious, gentlemanly, Conservative politician of great integrity who had resigned over Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators of the 1930s. Unfortunately the need to stand up to later dictators in case they should prove to be another Hitler obsessed him. When the new leader of Egypt, Colonel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal–which was still owned by France and Britain–Eden decided that the move had to be resisted by armed force, at the risk of war with Egypt.

The Arab nationalist Nasser had seized the Suez Canal zone when America and Britain had withdrawn an offer to fund the construction of a dam at Aswan on the Nile. In the midst of the Cold War America had become alarmed by the Nasser government’s carelessness about its finances and about an arms deal it had agreed with the Soviet Union. Nasser seized the Canal zone declaring that its income would pay for the Aswan Dam. But Eden and much of the British public could not accept this. Although it had been agreed between the two countries twenty years before that British troops would leave the Canal zone in 1956 and that British influence over Egypt was at an end, Eden made plans to retake it with the connivance of the French government. The latter was closely involved with Israel, which had been buying French arms in quantity and saw this as a good opportunity to expand her territory at Egypt’s expense. France was especially keen to see Nasser deposed because he was the chief source of arms for nationalist rebels in the French colony of Algeria.

Nasser was a dictator, yet he did not, as Eden believed, threaten the whole of the Middle East. However outrageous it was to seize the Canal, which had been built with British and French funds, it would have been wiser to accept it as a hazard of the post-colonial world. Though America warned Britain to hold herself back when dealing with Egypt, Eden was soon deep in a complicated plot with the French and Israelis to attack Egypt.

On 29 October Israeli troops marched into the Sinai Desert in Egypt, and a day later the French and British issued a pre-agreed call for both sides to withdraw ten miles from the Canal zone. When this was not done within twenty-four hours, French and British forces bombed Egyptian airfields. Four days later, to the world’s amazement, French and British soldiers parachuted successfully into Egypt and captured Port Said. But within a further twenty-four hours, to France’s fury, the Anglo-French action had been halted: the Canal zone had not been seized by the French and British paratroopers as planned because Britain had decided to withdraw from the operation.

Eden had been taken aback by the strength of world condemnation. Russia had threatened to launch rockets at the Anglo-French force, Australia had refused to back Britain’s action, and Britain and France had been condemned in the United Nations by sixty-four votes to five. American pressure on Britain to withdraw from Suez, which she could not ignore because she needed another large loan from the US-controlled International Monetary Fund, brought the episode to an ignominious end. Eden ordered a ceasefire and a UN force took the place in the Canal zone of the British and French troops.

‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role’, was the former US secretary of state Dean Acherson’s much quoted epithet six years later. Britain and France were both humiliated by Suez, which had underlined the fact that they were not the great imperial powers they had been for two centuries and could no longer interfere in other countries’ affairs when it suited them. Meanwhile the Soviet Union had taken advantage of the world’s attention being focused on Egypt to move her tanks into Hungary to crush an uprising against communism prompted by Moscow’s relaxation of controls over Iron Curtain countries after the death of Stalin. Britain’s international reputation had been damaged because she had lost her moral edge. Arab countries were bitterly angry, and Nasser’s stock had risen. Anglo-French diplomatic relations took two decades to heal, with the French feeling that they had been betrayed by Britain, which they saw as having become a poodle of the United States. This breach contributed to France’s decision to veto Britain’s application to join the Common Market in 1963.

The European Economic Community, or Common Market, had developed out of schemes in the late 1940s in the three Benelux countries and France to find a way of integrating German industry into Europe. Its forerunner was the Schuman Plan devised by the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, which in 1951 became the European Coal and Steel Community. By this treaty France and Germany were to produce their iron and steel under a joint higher authority. Despite the parlous state of Germany at the beginning of the 1950s, Schuman and the French statesman Jean Monnet believed that a country as large and resourceful as Germany would always revive. It was therefore important to absorb her within a federalist Europe.

Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were all attracted by the scheme, and so was Germany. Its very successful implementation for iron and steel was followed in 1957 by the Six (as they had become known) creating the European Economic Community (EEC) in order to include an agricultural policy. Although Britain was approached about joining, she regarded the insistence of the Six on the imposition of a single tariff towards the rest of the non-European world as incompatible with her preferential tariffs with the Commonwealth. Although Britain had been satisfied with the OEEC (the organization set up to implement the Marshall Aid plan) as a forum for communication between European countries, in 1960 she became a founder member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) with Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Austria and Switzerland. This was a loose customs union between those countries which left all of them free to regulate their external trade.

At the beginning of the 1960s, however, the British government’s attitude to the Common Market underwent a sharp about-turn. The ties linking the Commonwealth had been very much weakened by the independence that many colonies had gained from Britain in the previous decade, and statistics demonstrated that trade with the Common Market might offer a great deal more to Britain than trade with the Commonwealth. The catastrophe of Suez had been a salutary experience for Britain. Unlike France she had neither the political will nor the money to fight wars in order to keep her colonies.

Since the turn of the twentieth century much of the Colonial Office in London had tended to the view that Britain governed the colonies in trust for the indigenous populations until they were ready for democracy after a western-style education. But by the 1950s an elite in most of the countries had taken the same higher exams of English boards and the same courses at British universities as the colonial administrators. They had just as much knowledge of western political ideas. They also had experience of Parliamentary democracy, since every British colony (with the exception of the recently acquired Somaliland) featured an elected legislative assembly.

After India led the way there was considerable agitation in Africa for independence. The leader of the independence movement in the Gold Coast, Kwame Nkrumah, was at first imprisoned for his activities. But in 1957 Britain had bowed to the inevitable and he became prime minister of Ghana, the ancient African name of the country. In 1960 Nigeria also became an independent republic. Both elected to remain members of the British Commonwealth of Nations, as they are today.

This was the beginning of a widening process of decolonization that began under Harold Macmillan. Macmillan succeeded as prime minister when Eden resigned after Suez in January 1957. In 1960 in a speech made in South Africa Macmillan spoke of the ‘wind of change…blowing through the continent’. Britain should yield to the strength of African national consciousness, he said. Thereafter, a stream of African countries obtained independence–Sierra Leone in 1961, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Uganda in 1962, Kenya and Northern Rhodesia in 1963, Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1964, the Gambia in 1965, Basutoland (now Lesotho) and Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in 1966, Aden (now South Yemen) in 1967 and Swaziland, the last, in 1968. In all these countries black majority rule took the place of the white colonial administration. This was not true, however, for two former British colonies in Africa: in Southern Rhodesia (see below) and the Union of South Africa.

In 1948 the Boer Nationalist party defeated General Smuts’s United party and began governing South Africa. To the consternation of the rest of the world they instituted a policy of separating citizens of African and Indian extraction from those of European, the white minority, by a system known as apartheid. Segregated schools, public lavatories, even swimming pools, were brought in to create a completely separate existence within one country. In 1961, as the apartheid system became increasingly barbaric and inhuman, South Africa was forced to withdraw from the Commonwealth and became an international outlaw, her goods boycotted for thirty years. Not until after the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994 did South Africa rejoin the Commonwealth.

Other former British colonies outside Africa also achieved rapid independence as part of the dismantling of the empire: in 1962 Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago; in 1965 it would be Singapore’s turn, in 1966 Barbados and British Guiana, in 1968 Mauritius. Most of them paid Britain the compliment of remaining members of the Commonwealth. In Cyprus, which had been a British colony since after the First World War, a long war against the British began in 1954. Despite the presence of a large Turkish minority on the island the majority Greek population led by Archbishop Makarios desired
enosis
, or union with Greece, but Britain was loath to grant their wish and thereby lose an important base in the eastern Mediterranean and also upset Turkey, a no less important ally in the Cold War. But in 1960, after the rights of Greek and Turkish Cypriots had been guaranteed by both Turkey and Greece, Cyprus was given her independence. Since 1974, however, after an attempted coup by the then military government in Greece, the island has been divided into two.

Harold Macmillan has been compared to Disraeli, on account of his robust romantic patriotism and his historical sense of Britain’s destiny. His wit and élan helped restore Britain’s self-confidence at a time when she was still feeling her way in the post-war world. Despite his aristocratic languor and mournful-bloodhound looks, he was a ruthless personality. When he sacked most of his Cabinet, including his chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd, in July 1962, his action was dubbed the ‘night of the long knives’ after Hitler’s assassination of the Brownshirt leaders in 1934. When his first chancellor and two other Treasury ministers had damagingly resigned a few years before Macmillan had laconically called it ‘little local difficulties’, but this time he was considered to have panicked.