The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (97 page)

The National Government never actually put through many of the economies which had caused so many Labour ministers to resign. Alarmed by a peaceful ‘mutiny’ by 12,000 sailors at Invergordon, the government modified the pay cuts. But because no more money could be borrowed, while £200 million in gold had been withdrawn from London since July, the government went off the gold standard in September 1931. It was feared that this might be disastrous, but in fact it was a great success as it made the pound cheap and British goods cheaper. The export trade began to revive.

Later that year MacDonald went to the polls to seek legitimacy, and the election produced an overwhelming mandate for the National Government, which won 558 seats (471 of these were Conservatives). The Labour party, which had only fifty-two seats, was led in opposition by George Lansbury. Though MacDonald remained prime minister, the National Government became increasingly Conservative in tone. With Neville Chamberlain back as chancellor–Snowden became lord privy seal–protection was adopted as a remedy for the economic crisis, a 10 per cent levy being slapped on most imports, especially manufactured goods. This resulted in the resignation of the Liberal free traders from its ranks.

In 1932 at the Imperial Conference in Ottawa Britain hoped to establish the policy of imperial preference in trade, giving advantageous tariffs within the empire. The Dominions, however, agreed only where it would not hurt their own produce. Ottawa thus achieved very little. But the national government managed to balance the budget and revive the national credit, so in 1934 the unemployment pay cuts were restored, and by 1936 Britain had come out of recession. At its height, just under three million people had been unemployed. Meanwhile the lack of American investment in Europe had been making it harder to pay reparations and war debts, so in 1931 the American president Herbert Hoover accepted a one-year moratorium. The following year Germany’s reparations payments were permanently suspended after the Lausanne war-debts conference. Unable to repay the United States without being repaid herself, by 1933 Britain waived her allies’ old debts and abandoned repayment of the £900 million she owed to the United States. This only increased America’s view that meddling in the old world did her no good, and she continued to be strongly isolationist.

An extremely powerful disarmament movement took hold of the British people in the first half of the 1930s. In 1935 the Peace Ballot organized by the League of Nations Union and distributed by enthusiasts found that 90 per cent of the British people still favoured multilateral disarmament. There was more belief than ever before in ‘collective security’ and of submitting all disputes to the League of Nations to prevent the suffering of another war. In 1933 when the Oxford Union, the university debating society, passed the motion ‘This House will not fight for King and Country’, it was the high point of a distinctly anti-war feeling. People passionately believed that peace was the only option. But the early 1930s were also the time when it became clear that the Paris peace settlement based on collective security and orchestrated by the League would not last in its present form. For the system to work everybody had to obey the rules. In 1930 MacDonald presided over a London Conference on Naval Disarmament attended by Britain, the USA, France, Italy and Japan. Yet a year later Japan had seized Manchuria in China and pulled out of the League of Nations when it condemned her.

Despite the promises embodied in the Covenant of the League, no further action was taken against Japan. With most economies at a standstill League members could do nothing except express moral disapproval. The League’s creators had not imagined that by the 1930s there would be governments which did not subscribe to the honourable conventions of the past and did not care if they lost the good opinion of the world. Once Japan had led the way the whole rationale of the League of Nations dissolved. Even so, people still believed in it, and the Word Disarmament Conference which met in 1932 at MacDonald’s urging was the high point of the British government’s acceptance of that belief.

But the conference was a dismal failure. The French would not agree to their arms being reduced to equality with Germany’s official quota, unless British troops patrolled her eastern frontier. They were tormented by the prospect of German militarism reviving, for it was an open secret that Germany was rearming. Britain was in no financial position to send troops to guard the Franco-German borders and rejected the proposal. Meanwhile the Germans and their new leader Hitler, who had come to power in January 1933, chose to represent themselves as insulted by the French. By October that year Germany had withdrawn from the Disarmament Conference and left the League of Nations.

Adolf Hitler had been elected on a very clear programme: to destroy the humiliation of Versailles and to reclaim the land removed from Germany. In his book
Mein Kampf
(‘My Struggle’), he had openly described his plans to exterminate races he believed were either evil like the Jews or stupid like the Slavs. He outlined a policy of occupying territory in the east to give the superior German race living space, or
Lebensraum
. But at the time the book was written in the 1920s no one could take
Mein Kampf
seriously. Hitler was then a would-be painter and political activist who had been imprisoned for a failed coup in Munich. Yet only a few days after he took over as chancellor he had removed civil liberties for Jewish people, and two years later racist laws were in place forbidding Jewish people to marry non-Jews; by 1938 half the Jewish population of Germany had left in despair.

Hitler’s actions effectively destroyed the principle of collective security based on disarming to the lowest point, but its enthusiasts refused to accept that. For the rest of the decade Winston Churchill was one of the strongest voices urging action against Nazi Germany. As early as April 1933, he warned Parliament, ‘One of the things which we were told after the Great War would be a security for us was that Germany would be a democracy with Parliamentary institutions. All that has been swept away. You have dictatorship, most grim dictatorship.’ If Germany was allowed to rearm, he said, she would soon snatch back her lost territories–territories which bands of unemployed German youths were aggressively campaigning for, ‘singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army, eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland’. Churchill believed that MacDonald’s ideas, for all their nobility, were a load of hot air, that while he talked of Britain dropping four air-force divisions, European factories were filling with arms. ‘I cannot recall any time when the gap between the kind of words statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now,’ he told the Commons.

After Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference the government acknowledged to some extent that the ideas of disarmament and reduction of armaments to the lowest point were no longer viable. In 1934 a new air-defence programme was announced, increasing the RAF by forty-one squadrons, and the following year the government published a White Paper which recognized the need for greater military provision. Nevertheless, at a popular level disarmament went on being the remedy for the world’s ills. There was a general reluctance to contemplate the possibility of war. Moreover the British government, like many Britons, felt that Germany had been treated too harshly and was sympathetic to Hitler’s revision of Versailles. For that reason, nothing happened in 1935 when Hitler told the world that he had created an air force, or when he started military conscription again to add another thirty-six divisions to his army. The British had thought they had protected themselves by signing a treaty with Hitler that limited the German navy to 35 per cent the size of the British, and submarine strength to 45 per cent.

At the same time, neither the British nor the French wanted to alienate Mussolini, the Italian leader. In April 1935, at the Stresa Conference called specifically to discuss Hitler’s announcement that Germany would no longer be bound by the arms limitations of Versailles, Britain, France and Italy sought agreement on forming a common front against German rearmament. Nevertheless Mussolini had more in common with Hitler as a fellow dictator whose regime was based on violence than with the western democracies of France and Britain.

Despite joining the Stresa Front in October that year Italy, which had been very disappointed by the territories she had gained in the peace treaties, flouted the precepts of the League of Nations and invaded Ethiopia in pursuit of her dream of a north African empire. Reluctantly, because she still wanted Mussolini as an ally, Britain along with the rest of the League imposed sanctions on Italy. But the Italian forces did not withdraw.

The French and British governments now behaved very curiously: they decided to ignore the League of Nations and make a deal with Mussolini. By the secret Hoare–Laval Pact, signed by the British foreign secretary Samuel Hoare and the French prime minister Pierre Laval, they offered Italy a partition plan that gave her two-thirds of Ethiopia. In December the agreement leaked out and aroused such anger in Britain that Hoare had to resign. Italy nevertheless remained in possession of most of Ethiopia. The Anglo-French policy of appeasement, of allowing dictators to take chunks of territory at will in preference to fighting a war, had begun to take shape.

MacDonald the idealist grew too ill to remain in office and at the general election in November 1935 Baldwin became prime minister, his National Government winning a majority of 245. The public-school-educated barrister Clement Attlee had been elected to lead the Labour party, which, though it remained out of office, now had 154 seats in Parliament, a gain of one hundred.

Having seen that nothing had happened to Mussolini over Ethiopia, on 7 March 1936 Hitler moved his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, proclaiming that Germany would no longer abide by the peace treaties. Versailles was at last visibly dead in the water. France was devastated by this move. The buffer between her and Germany had been removed, and she was left staring at a militarized frontier with Germany that now bristled with soldiers.

But Britain, France’s ally, did not share her fears. British ministers were distracted by the many other issues demanding their attention which seemed just as important as containing the European dictators. In Mandated Palestine, British troops were required in greater numbers because of clashes between the indigenous Arabs and Jewish settlers. As the decade went on, growing numbers of Jewish refugees fled there from Germany, though a 1930 government White Paper on Palestine emphasized the resulting plight of the Arabs. It warned of the possibility that they might be swamped by a Jewish majority if there was not a temporary end to Jewish immigration.

But the real issue preoccupying British statesmen and British newspapers was India. In 1931 the architect Edwin Lutyens completed his masterpiece, the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, little knowing that it was only to be used for another sixteen years. All kinds of excuses continued to be found for preventing India from obtaining independence or even reaching Dominion status. There was now an articulate party called the Muslim League under Mohammed Jinnah, who like Gandhi was a lawyer. Jinnah was beginning to call for the partition of India to surmount the racial hatred between Muslims and Hindus.

With the great business of India linking so many members of the British middle classes, the subject of Indian independence obsessed Britain in the 1930s. Generations of Britons had been Indian civil servants, tea-brokers, planters and district commissioners; they were incensed at the way their businesses were being ruined by Gandhi’s boycott of British goods.

By 1927, with Congress refusing to recognize the provincial legislatures because they would be satisfied with nothing less than full responsible government, Indian discontent produced a new Parliamentary Commission. Members of all three British political parties were sent to India to investigate her grievances. Though it was headed by the distinguished Liberal Sir John Simon, former attorney-general and home secretary, it did not contain a single Indian member. The viceroy Lord Irwin, the future Lord Halifax, who had become friendly with Gandhi, had already stated in 1929 that Dominion status was the ultimate goal of the British government for India. But this was not good enough for the militant Indian politicians, nor did the Simon Commission promise it when the report was published in 1930.

Neither did the Government of India Act of 1935. This act was brought in when it was at last acknowledged that talks with Gandhi were the only solution, after 100,000 people had been imprisoned for taking part in his civil disobedience campaigns. It created a federal structure so that the national administration could reflect the diversity of the provinces within the country, an arrangement which the Indian princely state rulers led by the Maharajah of Bikaner agreed to participate in. But, although this gave responsible self-government to the provinces, it still was not the self-government of a Dominion. At national level despite a federal legislature to which Cabinet ministers were responsible, the ultimate say on foreign affairs, defence and religion continued to lie with the viceroy. The new constitution was considered not to have taken into consideration properly the rights of the Muslims and to have given too much power to the Indian princes. It had nonetheless just begun to be implemented when the Second World War broke out.

The Cambridge don E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
, which highlighted the uneasy relationship between the British and their colonial subjects, was published in 1924, and soon reached classic status in Britain. Nevertheless complacency was an overwhelming characteristic of the empire in the 1930s. This was partly because the empire and British influence seemed as prevalent as ever. A treaty of 1936 put an end to the occupation of Egypt, but British troops still guarded the Suez Canal, and there was a clause allowing Britain to reoccupy the country in the event of any threat to her interests.