It was not a decision with which most of the British political class were inclined to quarrel. Although Edward Heath made a passionate maiden speech arguing that the European cause was one where Britain needed ‘to be in at the formative stages so that our influence could be brought to bear’, a much more typical Tory attitude was that of Major Harry Legge-Bourke: ‘I do not believe that common interests or even common fears are enough; there must also be common sympathies and common characteristics. Whilst those exist in the United Kingdom and in the United States, they do not exist in Europe.’ Gut instincts were similar on the Labour benches, where (to his subsequent mortification) a young Roy Jenkins voted against British participation. Some weeks later, Mamaine Koestler was present at a notably cosmopolitan, intellectual dinner party where the line-up included her husband Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron and Arthur Schlesinger Jr, as well as two of the more cerebral Labour politicians, John Strachey and Richard Crossman:
Very lively discussion about the isolationist line of the Labour Government, and of the British in general. John and Dick defended this against everybody else; their line is that they’d be delighted to see France, Germany, Italy and Benelux getting together so long as Britain doesn’t have to be in, submitting to the authority of shady foreigners and having the welfare state corrupted by immoral inhabitants of non-socialist countries.10
The echo of ‘socialism in one country’ – the old Soviet battle cry – was unmistakable.
‘The press, on the whole, approved of the cautious reserve of the British reply,’ reported Mollie Panter-Downes in her The New Yorker ‘Letter from London’ on 6 June; she might have cited the still inordinately powerful Beaverbrook papers, which were positively vitriolic about the French initiative (‘Let us say No, No, a thousand times No,’ screamed the Sunday Express). Nor was there any significant enthusiasm from the captains of industry, to judge by the cool response of the Federation of British Industries: with Britain’s share of world trade holding up well, there was no appetite for novel solutions to as yet unidentified economic decline. As for the attitude of the man in the street, Herbert Morrison’s reaction at the start of June, when told that the French were demanding to know the British position, arguably said it all: ‘It’s no good. We cannot do it; the Durham miners won’t wear it.’11An impressionistic assessment no doubt; but the prevailing, deeply entrenched mixture of insularity and ‘Britain is best’ in society at large hardly suggests that Morrison and his colleagues were acting against the popular will.
The other major foreign-policy decision concerned Korea, after the tanks of Communist North Korea had crossed the 38th parallel on 25 June and proceeded to invade South Korea. The British reaction could hardly have been more instant: not only did Britain at once join with the United States in supporting the UN resolution condemning North Korea’s aggression, but within 48 hours the decision had been taken to place the British Pacific Fleet under American command, following President Truman’s offer of military aid to the South Koreans. Thereafter, as the Korean War unfolded (including serious Chinese involvement on the side of North Korea), the Anglo-American alliance gave – and was intended to give – every impression of being rock solid.
Such unflinching commitment to a policy of intervention, notwithstanding the undeniable absence of any direct British economic or strategic interest in Korea, inevitably had a profound impact on defence expenditure. As early as August, the three-year estimate for defence spending was increased from £2.3 billion to £3.6 billion, while in January 1951, under continuing American pressure, that figure was raised to £4.7 billion. ‘The Prime Minister’s defence statement yesterday displayed a greater sense of realism and urgency than the government’s critics had expected,’ the Financial Times grudgingly conceded after this second drastic hike. ‘It reflects a determination, at last, to match the vigour of the United States in defending Western security.’ The veteran American diplomat Paul Nitze was more generous some 40 years later. ‘You can call it hubris or you can call it courage,’ he told the historian Peter Hennessy. ‘I think we had much to admire the British for [for] what you could call hubris, but which I consider to be breathtaking courage.’
Why did the Attlee government make this huge and arguably irrational commitment? In part because of a mixture of unhappy memories of Labour and appeasement in the 1930s and the haunting fear – persistent since the late 1940s – of Soviet tanks rolling across Western Europe. ‘Mr Bevin does not believe that the Russians will venture on aggression against Europe if the European Powers show their determination to fight,’ the Foreign Secretary informed his ambassadors in August, ahead of the announcement that National Service was to be extended from 18 months to two years. Memories of appeasement were particularly sharp for Gaitskell, who succeeded Cripps at No. 11 in October and thereafter was primarily responsible for sanctioning, even encouraging, the massive rearmament programme. ‘The deep conviction which Hugh had formed in the Munich years played a dominating part in his mind,’ his close friend and fellow-minister Douglas Jay recalled. ‘He did not make the crude mistake of confusing Stalin or Mao with Hitler. But he did believe that military dictators were usually arbitrary and often expansionist.’ Accordingly, ‘he became convinced that, as in 1938–40, we must take some deliberate economic risks to defend basic freedoms.’12
Even so, the nub of the matter, taking the government and its advisers as a whole, was the nature of the Anglo-American relationship – and in particular the deep British desire to be treated by the Americans as something like equals. ‘There could not be a more useful demonstration of the United Kingdom’s capacity to act as a world power with the support of the Commonwealth and of its quickness to move when actions rather than words are necessary’ was a Foreign Office view of intervention only days after the 38th parallel had been crossed. Not long afterwards, on 17 July, the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Oliver Franks, warned Attlee that the capital was in a mood of such ‘emotional overdrive’ that the Americans would undoubtedly ‘test the quality of the partnership’ by the whole-heartedness or otherwise of the British military response. And a week later, he stressed again that any signs of negativity ‘could seriously impair the long-term relationship’.
Nevertheless, British intervention in Korea was not only about impressing the Americans; it was also about restraining them. The Americans, reflected Kenneth Younger (Bevin’s deputy) in his diary in early August, ‘seem to have decided that a war with “the communists” is virtually inevitable and likely to occur relatively soon, say within 3–5 years. They regard all communists alike, no matter what their nationality, and assume that they are all dancing to Moscow’s tune and are bound to do so in future . . .’ By contrast, the British, ‘despite growing pessimism, still give first place to the effort to prevent war. We do not accept it as inevitable . . .’ It was in the context of such fears, argues the historian Sean Greenwood on the basis of a close study of the records, that ‘the British found themselves sucked into seeking closer collaboration with Washington in order to find out more precisely what American intentions were as well as to douse an over-enthusiasm which might have perilous ramifications’.13It was, of course, a strategy based on an illusion about the rewards of sacrifice, but at least it was not held in defiance of more than half a century of evidence showing it to be a chimera.
A bipartisan consensus endorsed the government’s approach, as did Florence Speed in Brixton. ‘Situation in Korea “grave”,’ she recorded on 5 July, before going on with what was probably a fairly typical mixture of resignation and pride: ‘Reds still having it all their own way. Mr Churchill in a speech yesterday, said, if we do not win in Korea it is the beginning of the Third World War which so many people don’t want but think inevitable. It will end I expect in British soldiers replacing the Americans. Britain seems in all wars to carry the heaviest burden.’ Soon afterwards, with the first British casualties being announced, the pacifist diarist Frances Partridge, living in Lytton Strachey’s old house o
n the Wiltshire Downs, was struck by how ‘a sort of excitement seemed to possess our weekend visitors at the thought of the bravery of soldiers in wartime’, one of those visitors being a fellow-member of the Bloomsbury Group, Quentin Bell. ‘Talk is quite openly anti-foreign: all Germans are monsters impossible to shake by the hand, the Italians beneath contempt, and the French and Russians as bad as the Germans. Nor is this by any means meant as a joke.’
On 30 July the Prime Minister solemnly broadcast to the nation. ‘War creeps nearer and Mr Attlee points out our help in Korea will mean sacrifices,’ noted Judy Haines in Chingford that Sunday evening. ‘More rationing? and scrambling for food? Oh lor! Better that than bombs.’ Predictably, Gallup found in August that no fewer than 78 per cent backed the increased government spending on defence, even though 61 per cent accepted that this would lead to a reduced standard of living. Over the next six months, there remained from the government’s point of view an adequate degree of broad-based, patriotic support for the British intervention. ‘Our poor boys in Korea with the Americans are getting out of the jam they are in and I hope will reach the coast safely’ was how Vere Hodgson put it shortly before Christmas. That, though, was not quite everyone’s perspective. After a reference to ‘the filthy bomb-drunk Yanks’, Kingsley Amis went on in a letter to Philip Larkin early in the New Year: ‘Anybody over here now who is not pro-Chink wants his arse filled with celluloid and a match applied to his arse-hairs.’14Amis by this time was probably no longer the fervent, card-carrying Communist he had been during the Second World War, but he still broadly held the faith.
The Korean War intensified the Cold War atmosphere. Typical was the reaction in August 1950 of the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, to the Stockholm Peace Petition, endorsed by church leaders in the Communist bloc and demanding a ban on nuclear weapons. ‘I am suspicious of the origin and motive of this particular petition,’ he told his diocese, ‘it is widely believed its promoters are communists or fellow-travellers, if this is so its purpose would be to weaken the resolution of the nation, and to encourage appeasement.’ With the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, similarly hostile, clerical support for the petition soon dropped away sharply. That autumn, the government, under pressure from the fiercely anti-Communist TGWU leader Arthur Deakin, considered banning the Communist Party before rejecting the idea as impractical. However, two episodes showed the extent to which freedom of speech was fraying at the edges.
The first concerned Picture Post, for which the journalist James Cameron filed a story in September that, accompanied by graphic Bert Hardy photos, highlighted the ill-treatment of prisoners by the South Koreans. The anti-American implications were too much for the magazine’s increasingly right-wing proprietor, Edward Hulton, who not only refused to let the story appear but sacked the longstanding editor, Tom Hopkinson. Thereafter, Picture Post never regained the cutting edge that for 12 years had made it such a unique, agenda-setting phenomenon. The other episode was the semi-farcical story of the Second World Peace Congress, due to take place in Sheffield City Hall in November. Between them the government (denouncing it as a Communist front and refusing to issue visas to ‘undesirable’ delegates) and the local Council managed to prevent it taking place – though some delegates, including Pablo Picasso, did turn up. There were no such problems for the British Society for Cultural Freedom, which met for the first time in January 1951 (two months before the London County Council banned all Communists from its employ) and whose very purpose was to try to counter the influence of Communism. The venue was the Authors’ Club, Whitehall, with the poet and critic Stephen Spender in the chair. Just over a year earlier, he had contributed to Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed, a widely read anthology of intellectuals describing how they had fallen out of love with Communism; now he was poised to emerge as the emblematic, ubiquitous Cold War liberal.15
For the Communist Party of Great Britain, the early 1950s were difficult times. In the February 1950 election it managed a pitiful 0. 3 per cent of the popular vote, in the process losing its two MPs. And when, a year later, it published The British Road to Socialism, the impact was at best muted. ‘Its leaden formulas,’ observes the biographer of the party’s leader, Harry Pollitt, ‘did not so much distil the lessons of the British experience as plagiarise those of Eastern Europe.’ Or, as one party member subsequently remarked, an apter title would have been The Russian Road to Socialism, Done into English. Moreover, the document’s claim that the party was now independent from Moscow met for the most part with well-justified scepticism. Indeed, for one member, the writer Mervyn Jones, this was the point at which several years of private doubts came to a head; he left the party after witnessing a draft being changed as a direct result of pressure from Moscow.
Another writer also had her moment of epiphany. ‘It is the spring of 1951,’ the poet and critic John Jones remembered over half a century later:
Iris and I are in the Lamb and Flag pub in Oxford. We have finished our game of composing a joint sonnet, writing alternate lines. She looks across the dark silent public bar at a solitary drinker of Guinness and says, ‘I want to tell you my ancient mariner tale.’ She begins, making no sense to me, with ‘Roy Jenkins was right and I was wrong’. Then she plunges into an account of Communist Party organisation . . .
Iris Murdoch was referring to ten years earlier, when her fellow-undergraduate at Oxford had started a Democratic Socialist Club as a breakaway from the Labour Club, which was loyally Stalinist and had Murdoch as chairman. For the young Lionel Blue, himself an Oxford undergraduate by the time of the pub confession, the scales had already fallen. ‘Early in 1950, marching in a procession which was bawling the names of Communist leaders, I suddenly asked myself what I was doing in it,’ he recalled. ‘This wasn’t rational. This was idol worship and all the Jew in me revolted. It was cruder juju than poor old Grandma’s. I left the procession, dived into an Indo-Pak restaurant and – fortified by two portions of curry – ceased to be a Stalinist/Marxist and never marched for anyone again.’16
Lawrence Daly – in his mid-20s, still working down the Glencraig pit in Fife, assiduously selling the Daily Worker there every day, recently elected chairman of the Scottish TUC Youth Advisory Council – felt no such qualms about the Communist faith into which he had virtually been born. If anything, the Korean War served to redouble his zeal and sense of certainty. His papers include a letter written to him in October 1950 by James Callaghan, by this time a junior minister at the Admiralty, in reply to Daly’s ‘long letter’, apparently about whether the blame for what Callaghan called ‘the present tension’ rested with the United States or Russia. ‘I am bound to say that I have reached the conclusion, with great regret, that the major responsibility lies with the U.S.S.R. and I disagree with what you say that their attitude has remained unchanged,’ wrote Callaghan. ‘Is it not clear that Russia has got to the stage now (which I believe to be different from her position in 1945) when everyone in every other country must subordinate his own views to the interests of the U.S.S.R.?’ And he cited Russia’s build-up of ‘the largest submarine fleet that the world has ever seen’.
None of which perturbed young Daly, to judge by his diary soon afterwards:
3 November (Friday). Renée [his middle-class wife] & I set out to listen to ‘Venus Observed’ – I fell asleep. Then read some of Stalin’s ‘Leninism’. Renée said play was excellent.
5 November. Read some of Joe’s ‘Marxism & National & Colonial Question’ – delightfully sensible.
6 November. Went into Cowdenbeath at 4 p.m. for meeting with M. Taylor to discuss work of Party Branch. M. presented powerful analysis of cause of defects in our work – in a blunt & insulting fashion – rightly so.
9 November. Tonight I started to read chapter of Marx’s ‘Capital’ &have been delightfully surprised by its readability & wealth of information.
10 November. Put bills for Pollitt meeting in canteen & baths [ie at the pit] this morning. As expected baths one
was torn down by finishing time. This inevitably happens with Party notices & even TU ones which are suspected of being Communistic. The culprit or culprits must be violently intolerant, probably miserably cowardly, & pitiably ignorant.
Daly was only a spasmodic diarist, and a week later the final entry in this sequence was more personal: ‘Lady gave Rannoch [his son] shilling just after we got off the train this morning for being such a well-behaved boy!’17
There was an economic as well as an ideological dimension to the war. Here at least, ministers could hardly be accused of going in with their eyes shut. ‘Rearmament will compete with exports for our production, and at the same time the rapidly rising price of imported raw materials is causing a further deterioration in the terms of trade,’ Bevin and Gaitskell noted solemnly in their October 1950 joint assessment of the financial aspect. ‘It will therefore become increasingly difficult to avoid a deficit on the United Kingdom overall balance of payments, which will show itself in a rise in our overseas sterling liabilities.’ So it proved: not only did Britain’s balance-of-payments situation sharply deteriorate over the next year, but there was also a major stockpiling crisis, in the context of the rapidly rising price of imported raw materials. It did not take long for the conventional wisdom to emerge that Britain’s post-war export-led recovery had been halted in its tracks by the decision to intervene in Korea. ‘Important sectors of the engineering industries are heavily engaged in defence work when they might otherwise be concentrating their main energies on the export trade,’ lamented the Economic Survey in 1953 (by which time the war was drawing to an end). Five years later, Andrew Shonfield, in his survey of post-war economic policy, reckoned that the rearmament programme, by having ‘used up all the resources in sight and more’, had ‘continued to exercise an unfavourable influence on economic development long after the event’.
Austerity Britain Page 67
