The pock-marked and smog-blackened architectural pomp of the metropolis was the stage set for this world of dreams and romantic delusions. The broad avenue of Whitehall was abutted by a Colonial Office, a Dominions Office (renamed the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1947) and a separate bureaucracy for India, not to speak of the Foreign Office in its pseudo-Italianate palace. These were conveniently situated for the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall, where the Establishment did things with a quiet word over indifferent school food. The business of government was carried out by an allegedly Rolls-Royce civil service, consisting of men who had been to the same public schools and Oxford or Cambridge, with a few numerate interlopers from the London School of Economics. Britain was not unique in being governed by a cosy club – witness the salience of énarques from the Ecole National d’Administration in France – but at least the French were trained in Cartesian logic and did not celebrate the amateurism of classicists. Elsewhere there was still evidence of burgeoning productive capacity in the post-war years. Britain produced such successful brands as Massey Ferguson tractors and Land Rovers, which one could find from Africa to Australia. Viewed from the Dominions, London was also a major cultural mecca.38
Complacent ignorance was just as well represented among Labour’s gritty trade unionists as among the Tories, particularly if they represented constituents with defence-sector jobs at stake. The working class, which Labour nominally represented, was the most resistant to change, with its trade unions defending the most corrupt and retrograde practices. Thirteen of Attlee’s twenty-strong Cabinet had no experience of industry whatsoever, with the trade unionists, who specialized in frustrating change, balanced by members of the left-liberal progressive Establishment, whose backgrounds were in academia and journalism. The preferred modus operandi was the committee, vividly described by the British scholar Correlli Barnett as a ‘claustrophobic hell of boredom imagined by [the author of the sentiment “hell is other people”] Jean-Paul Sartre’, as well as the ability to hone a well-written essay – as if that could alter deep cultural and structural realities.39
Although Britain imagined it was a great power, the role was impossible to sustain. The wartime Sterling Area was one liability misconstrued as a national asset, as an international currency to rival the US dollar. Huge quantities of ‘unrequited exports’ flowed to India or the Middle East, in return for British debts incurred fighting the Germans and Japanese. Britain also assumed occupation responsibility for the least agricultural part of Germany, into which millions of refugees from the East poured. That involved spending a further £80 million a year and providing this zone with 70 per cent of its food. One consequence was that in July 1946 bread rationing was introduced for the first time to Britain itself, as wheat was exported to its defeated foe. Soon it was anticipated that potatoes and other essential foodstuffs would be rationed too. Then there was the cost of maintaining armed forces four times the size, and at between two and three times the cost, of those extant in 1939, despite the intervening loss of 25 per cent of the nation’s wealth.40 The breaking point came in early 1947 when the country froze up in one of the bleakest winters on record. Here is The Times on 20 February 1947:
From many parts of the country there were reports of renewed snowfalls threatening roads cleared after days and nights of work by thousands of troops and German prisoners of war, of Lincolnshire villages still isolated by snowdrifts, and of other villages in West Stirlingshire whose water supply is endangered by frost blocking the feeder streams in the Campsie hills. Ice floes in the North Sea are proving a menace to British trawlers and other shipping. As they drift westward they are carrying away buoys marking wrecks and shipping channels between mined areas. One huge floe was reported to be about 40 miles east of Great Yarmouth and gradually drawing nearer. A radio warning to shipping has been broadcast from the Humber. Shortly before noon yesterday the sun penetrated the clouds over London [for the first time in seventeen days] but an official at Kew Observatory said it was not strong enough to record on their instruments.41
Electric power ebbed and flowed, gas pressure for ovens and fires fell to scarcely perceptible levels and the railways juddered to a halt under deep snowdrifts driven by Siberian winds.42 The spring thaw in 1948 brought catastrophic flooding. In that year, rationing reached its nadir. The weekly food allowance for an adult was thirteen ounces of meat, one and a half of cheese, six ounces of butter, one of cooking fat, eight of sugar, two pints of milk and an egg. Pallid, putty-faced people patiently and resentfully waited in line for hours for these basic foodstuffs.43
The sixteen-year-old J. G. Ballard debouched into this grim and grey environment, after being interned by the Japanese for two years in Shanghai: ‘The whole nation seemed to be deeply depressed. Audiences sat in their damp raincoats in smoke-filled cinemas as they watched newsreels that showed the immense pomp of the royal family, the aggressively cheerful crowds at a new holiday camp, and the triumph of some new air-speed or land-speed record, as if Britain still led the world in technology. It is hard to imagine how conditions could have been worse if we had lost the war.’44
There was little investment in modernizing the railways, the road network, bridges and tunnels, the docks, telecommunications or, in fact, any industries of future importance, such as machine tools and plastics, even though British scientists had made many important wartime breakthroughs. All resources were devoted to avoiding deflation and maintaining full employment, which reduced the welfare bill at the cost of suffocating the price signals that guide a healthy economy and the productive reallocation of labour.
In the industries kept on politically driven life support, amateur managers faced militant trade unionists who opposed all innovation. When new labour-saving machines were grudgingly accepted, the surplus labour was retained to do nothing, notably in the thieves’ kitchens located in the nation’s docks. Then there were the illusions of ‘punching above our weight’, of sustaining a global role beyond having to choose between being with the US or being in Europe.
The Foreign Office regarded having a belligerent son of toil in their midst with some trepidation, until Bevin became their trade union spokesman. Early on, Assistant Under Secretary Gladwyn Jebb (Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford) found himself summoned to Bevin’s office where, after a contrived silence, the new Secretary of State said in his West Country burr: ‘Must be kinda queer for a chap like you to see a chap like me sitting in a chair like this?’ George III gazed down benignly as Jebb shrugged off this jibe, forcing Bevin to continue: ‘Ain’t never ’appened before in ’istory.’ Jebb smilingly reminded Bevin of Henry VIII’s Chancellor Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a butcher’s son, ‘and incidentally he was not unlike you physically’. From then on Bevin determined to like the British upper classes, finding common ground in detestation of the ‘self-righteous and narrow-minded’ middle. He and they probably had in mind people who ran businesses that made and sold things.45
Bevin was a burly fellow and plug-ugly with it. He had about three years of schooling before starting life delivering water on a little truck. He had risen to command the Transport and General Workers, Britain’s largest trade union, equivalent to the US Teamsters, in which capacity he travelled widely. While he had no objections to the Bolshevik Revolution, he did mind the Communists trying to take over ‘his’ TGWU. He had first been elected to parliament aged sixty, allowing him to be, from 1940 onwards, Churchill’s Minister of Labour. By 1943 he was already a very sick man, with his doctor ‘finding not a sound organ in his body, apart from his feet’. He had angina, cardiac trouble, arteriosclerosis, an enlarged liver and kidney damage. He was obese and smoked and drank to excess, sleeping poorly and taking no exercise.
After 1945 Bevin maintained the bipartisan spirit of the wartime coalition, regularly consulting his Conservative predecessor and opposition shadow Anthony Eden – the joke of the moment was: ‘Hasn’t Anthony grown fat?’ Many of Bevin’s troubles stemmed not from t
he Conservatives but from the Labour left, and especially the Hampstead intellectual contingent of caviar leftists. Bevin stood for a more pragmatic approach based on a keen awareness that international alliances were the only way of compensating for Britain’s diminished role in the world, a role which emphatically included a reformed empire. Bevin was a patriot who believed in the hard-headed pursuit of national interest – albeit construed in misguided terms of world power – rather than socialist internationalism. He had no time for those who saw no moral difference between the USA and the USSR, let alone those whose self-delusion about the ‘Workers’ Paradise’ made them Soviet stooges. He disliked the Germans, telling General Brian Robertson, ‘I tries ’ard, Brian, but I ’ates them.’ This was a widespread view, in a party nominally affiliated with the Social Democrats, but which preferred to divide rather than unite Germany. A united Europe was a Pandora’s Box concealing what Bevin called ‘Trojan ’orses’.46
The Labour Party also had long-standing ties with socialist Zionists, both in the diaspora and in the Palestinian Yishuv. In 1944 the Party’s National Executive Committee had called for unrestricted Jewish immigration, and the subsidized transfer of the Palestinian Arabs elsewhere, but in office the Party did no such thing. Whether Bevin’s hatred of Germans extended to Jews is controversial. Since Bevin had never obtrusively commented on Jews in his sixty-five years, it seems unlikely that he somehow revealed this animadversion once ensconced in King Charles Street, where, admittedly, there was much class sentimentality about Arab sheikhs and fondness for Arab boys. Palestine grated on account of the time and effort it required, and because the creative ambiguity embodied in the Balfour Declaration disintegrated on Bevin’s watch. Unsurprisingly, Bevin objected to being called an anti-Semite or a Nazi by Zionists whose terrorist arm attempted to murder him. He also resented the way Jewish voters in New York seemed to be holding Truman’s Democrats to ransom. Bevin was in no doubt that a stable Middle East was doubly important to Britain in terms of imperial defence and strategic oil supplies.47
Then there were the parts of the world that really mattered to British self-esteem and sense of family kinship, for after the war hundreds of thousands of British people flooded into the white Dominions. Relations with Australia or New Zealand were smoothed by the fact that until 1949 they also had Labour governments and, along with Canada, majority populations who strongly identified themselves as British, by allegiance to the King, culture, ethnic origins and common institutions. The trouble was that the Dominions did not want to fall in line behind some general British foreign policy and were as far away as the planet could devise. Canada rejected centralization of defence and foreign policy, and never joined the Sterling Area, while the (many hyphenated Irish) Australians were defining their sense of nationhood in anti-British terms. Both concluded defence treaties with the US before the war was over. Dealing with Nehru’s independent India was like trying to grasp fog. Even though the rise of Afrikaner nationalism had ousted the Anglophile President Smuts, only South Africa remained a dependable ally.48
There was also Labour ‘racism’. Whatever their fraternal ties with Black African nationalist leaders, the private views of leading Labour Party members were like any Tory dilating about the fecklessness of ‘Mr Woggy’. Herbert Morrison, who in March 1951 would succeed Bevin as foreign secretary after he was stricken with cancer, insisted that granting self-government to black Africans was akin to giving a ten-year-old ‘a latch-key, bank account and a shot-gun’. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, wrote in his diary that he declined the office of colonial secretary because ‘I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty-stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run, and now, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful; [and] . . . of white settlers, as reactionary and troublesome in their own way as niggers.’49
The First World War pacifist Arthur Creech Jones, a leading light of the Fabian Society Colonial Research Bureau, became colonial secretary in 1946 and focused the Labour Party’s own humanitarian and missionary zeal on the eradication of ‘tropical East Ends’ (the East End of London being synonymous with slums).50 He and his advisers were responsible for the oxymoronic ethical colonialism, based on economic improvement and political advancement, more recently and grandiosely called nation-building. From 1948 onwards, £100 million was pumped into Africa, Asia and the Caribbean through a Colonial Development Corporation. This resulted in such lamentable failures as producing eggs in the Gambia, or clearing huge tracts of Tanganyika to produce groundnut oil as a substitute for scarce fats. £38 million were expended clearing the wrong trees (some sacred) with machines that constantly broke down.
An Overseas Food Corporation had more success in bulk-purchasing staples such as cocoa, cotton and tobacco, either to earn precious dollars or to satisfy domestic British consumers. In truth, the only colony to be of any value in terms of earning US dollars was Malaya, but this was slighted in the cause of promoting Africa as a fall-back for a lost India. Bevin dreamed that ‘If we only pushed and developed Africa, we could have the United States dependent on us, and eating out of our hand, in four or five years . . . The US is very barren of essential minerals, and in Africa we have them all.’ The eminent historian Ronald Hyam coined the term ‘cosmoplastic’ to describe this degree of magical thinking.51
Initially, Labour imagined no major difficulty in funding its vast domestic welfare project at the same time as defending and maintaining a sprawling overseas empire, both of which, together with the cost of supporting its temporary German colony, soaked up resources even as conditions at home became ever bleaker. In the minds of Britain’s elites, even when shorn of India the empire was what kept Britain Great. To become ‘little’ Sweden was the cauchemar that many of us can only dream of nowadays. For the essence of Bevin’s foreign policy was to prevent Britain becoming either the forty-ninth state of the Union or the Soviet Union’s seventeenth republic, coupled with resentment towards the US for demanding its pound of flesh for wartime aid. The US desire to see Britain integrated into a restored Western Europe, particularly in the field of defence, was resisted by cunningly submerging the traditional concerns of imperial defence within the new parameters of the Cold War. Yet this was to ignore the fact that, Malaya apart, with India gone the empire was nothing more than a colossal burden.
The first breaking point came in 1947 when, having pumped £132 million into supporting the Greek government over the preceding two years, Britain told the US that it could no longer bear the cost.52 As we have seen, the same economic imperative led Britain to liquidate its presence in Palestine with unseemly haste. Yet in the same crisis year the British decided to retain military conscription and, without public fanfare, to develop their own atomic bomb. They may have been facing financial ruin, but the Labour government was going to maintain Britain as an independent great power. At the same time, through the creation of NATO, Bevin succeeded in locking the US into the immediate defence of Western Europe against the Soviets, denying itself the luxury of letting the Western European nations ruin themselves once more before joining the war. The payback came a few years later in Korea, when the British felt compelled to respond to US calls for military solidarity in an area of no geopolitical concern to Britain whatever.
Bevin took Britain further down the road of a ‘special relationship’ at the expense of what might have been an Anglo–French-dominated Europe, which developed instead around a Franco–German axis, in which a powerfully revived Germany allowed the French to play the dominant political partner. His belief that Britain might enjoy a special status as a bridge between Europe and the US failed on both sides of the divide, with the rest of Europe regarding Britain as a US Trojan horse – as a continental Bevin might have put it – even though the Americans had no interest in any such subterfuge.
One way in which the British liked to highlight the virtues of their empire was to denigrate those of everyone
else as cruel and despotic. In reality they burned or buried their own files on atrocities committed in the colonies in the bowels of the Foreign Office, much as the Italian Ministry of Defence did with documentation regarding colonial Ethiopia and Libya.53 Leaving aside whatever responsibility adheres to Britain for the bloody partitions in India and Palestine, its activities elsewhere contributed to the restoration of regimes it purported to deplore. As we have seen, General Gracey played a significant role in the restoration of French rule in Indochina, though when he withdrew his forces in January 1946 he declined the decorations a grateful French nation offered to pin on him.
Nearly sixty Labour MPs were sufficiently exercised by British support for the French in Indochina and the Dutch in Indonesia to sign a letter denouncing it. More worryingly for Bevin, Asian nationalists in Burma, Ceylon, India and Malaya refused to allow ports and airfields to be used to supply the French with either troops or munitions. Some of them even attempted to enlist with the Viet Minh. Gracey had withdrawn partly because of Nehru’s objection to his use of Indian troops to restore the French in Saigon and elsewhere, and for the same reason the British restricted French transport flights through New Delhi to one per week.
While Bevin maintained the public fiction that France was merely restoring order to build conditions ‘in which her liberal programme can find its realisation’, in secret Attlee’s government shipped weapons to France for reshipment in French vessels to Indochina, such that a British official boasted that ‘sten guns in Tonkin are as common as umbrellas in Piccadilly’. They did this partly to bolster France’s position in post-war Europe, but mainly because of a version of domino theory more usually applied to the Americans. If the French overseas empire went down, the thinking went, it was likely to be contagious. The alternative and equally erroneous view, expressed by such as Malcolm MacDonald in Malaya, was that the Viet Minh were nationalists who had only turned to the Communists for want of an alternative, a misreading of the likes of Ho Chi Minh, whose entire biography told a different story.
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 15
