The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  After 1950, the virtues and value of the Commonwealth became part of that centrist British political consensus which accepted unquestioningly the virtues of the mixed economy and the welfare state. Senior Labour and Conservative politicians were committed to perpetuation of the Commonwealth, and publicly proclaimed it as a manifestation of Britain’s residual influence in the world. It was, according to one defender, ‘a logical outcome of our own development’, the heir-general, as it were, of the empire and, in moral terms, infinitely preferable.37 The conventional, bipartisan wisdom was expressed by Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to one of its newest members, Ghana, in November 1961. She defined the body of which she was head as: ‘A group of equals, a family of like-minded peoples whatever their differences of religion, political systems, circumstances and races, all eager to work together for the peace, freedom and prosperity of mankind.’38 What was needed for the Commonwealth to flourish was an act of ‘faith’ by all its members. This must have been an extremely difficult speech to deliver, and harder still to believe in, for her host, Dr Nkrumah, was currently arresting and locking up opposition politicians.

  The tough lessons of the past fourteen years had dented this rosy and optimistic view of the Commonwealth. There were a handful of dissidents unprepared to make the leap of faith necessary for belief in the Commonwealth. In 1956, the year when Britain’s global pretensions were tested to breaking point, a few isolated voices were prepared to ask searching questions about the practical value of the Commonwealth in an increasingly unfriendly world. In a mordant analysis, written shortly after the June 1956 Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference, the veteran diplomat Lord Vansittart argued that apart from the old white dominions the Commonwealth gave no advantage to Britain.39 South African apartheid made a mockery of claims that the Commonwealth stood for racial equality; Pakistan was a republic, but at least lined up with the West against Communism, while India and Ceylon, who had just evicted Britain from her bases, were obstructive Cold War waverers. The conference’s communiqué was full of ‘colourless platitude’ and the Commonwealth was, in Menzies’s words, ‘just a scattered group of nations, unattached but friendly’.

  At the other end of the political spectrum, the New Statesman was equally dismissive. The Commonwealth was ‘entirely formless’ for it lacked ‘any basis of unity’, being without even rudimentary machinery for political, economic or military cooperation.40 Britain might congratulate itself on the largely peaceful metamorphosis of empire into Commonwealth, and draw some moral satisfaction from it as a glowing example of goodwill between nations, but it was not a makeweight for the power and prestige of empire. Nevertheless, it helped protect the British people from suddenly coming face to face with the fact that after 1947 their country’s power was dwindling. With hindsight, it is possible to see that the Commonwealth enabled Britain to accept the loss of India without too much heartache. Strange to say, the Labour government which had engineered the liquidation of the Indian empire continued to act as if Britain was still a formidable global power. It was left to the Conservatives, inheritors of this hubris, to come to terms with reality.

  3

  The World as It Is: Middle Eastern Misadventures, 1945–56

  ‘We have to make a policy on the assumption that there is not an Indian army to send to Basra,’ argued Labour MP Richard Crossman. He was defending his party from charges of irresolution during a debate on the Middle East in July 1951. According to the Conservatives, the past six years had witnessed the sacrifice of British interests in an area where previously they had been upheld with the utmost vigour. And yet, during the same period, Attlee’s government had been channelling large sums into the development of a British atomic bomb, possession of which would uphold Britain’s claim that it still was a world power.

  It was easier for Labour to acquire the sinews of power than it was to exercise it. In 1945, Attlee inherited all the pre-war problems of the Middle East: the worsening Arab-Jewish conflict; the simmering resentment of the Egyptians against alien domination; and the widespread feeling that Britain was the greatest hindrance to Arab national aspirations and unity. Labour was instinctively sympathetic to liberation movements; it was an internationalist, progressive party which thought itself in harmony with the trends of the modern world. The Conservatives were locked into the past and hosts to atavistic concepts of racial superiority and thinly disguised xenophobia. During a debate in which the subject of the Burmese came up, the volatile George Wigg shouted at the Tory benches, ‘The Honourable Gentleman and his friends think they are all “wogs”. Indeed, the Right Honourable Member for Woodford [Churchill] thinks that the “wogs” begin at Calais.’

  High principles and ideals of international brotherhood were not always compatible with the pursuit of British interests, particularly in the Middle East and under the conditions imposed by the Cold War. The government had constantly to heed the demands made by its partner, the United States. During 1946, Pentagon and Whitehall strategists began to plot the course of a hypothetical war against Russia and both concluded that control of the Middle East was vital for victory. If the Soviet Union was to be beaten, a substantial part of its war machine would have to be destroyed by atomic bombs. Nuclear attacks on Russia’s industrial heartlands required bases relatively close to its borders. So, in the summer of 1946, Britain secretly agreed to allow B-29 bombers to fly nuclear sorties from airfields in East Anglia and Egypt.1 The latter were crucial, for they made possible a concentrated nuclear assault on the oilfields, refineries and industrial centres of the Caucasus and Don basin. With these levelled, Russia’s capacity to wage a war in western Europe would be severely curtailed. Atomic weapons alone would redress the imbalance between Russia’s massive ground forces and the West’s.

  Working from this premise, Pentagon experts revised and amended their plans during the next few years. The 1947 and 1948 versions, with the innocuous codenames ‘Broiler’ and ‘Speedway’, gave the USAAF fifteen days in which to deploy their bombers and their atomic payloads on the runways of the Canal Zone airfields.2 Local defence, indeed that of the entire Middle East, was entrusted to British and Commonwealth forces.3 The scale of the offensive against Russia’s ‘soft underbelly’ increased as America’s stock of atomic bombs rose from fifty in 1948 to three hundred in 1950. In 1949, plan ‘Dropshot’, outlining a war scenario for 1957, proposed an attack on southern Russia by ninety-five bombers flying from Egypt.4 Like its predecessors, this warplan took for granted that Britain would still be in control of the Canal Zone.

  Egyptian airfields were also an essential part of the RAF’s nuclear programme. This had its genesis in 1946, when the chiefs-of-staff, particularly Air-Marshal Lord Tedder and Field-Marshal Montgomery, persuaded an initially lukewarm Attlee that it was imperative for Britain to maintain its old predominance in the Mediterranean and Middle East.5 Their argument was simple: Britain would remain a first-rate, global power and enjoy a measure of independence from the United States if it acquired atomic bombs and the means to deliver them against the Soviet Union. In the event of war, a substantial part of Britain’s nuclear strike force would fly from the Canal Zone towards southern Russia. During the next six years, Britain implemented an ambitious nuclear programme. Work went ahead on the development of the long-range, jet-powered V-bombers and the first, the Valiant, was operational by 1955. Three years before, Britain’s first atomic bomb was tested off Monte Bello island on the north-west coast of Australia.

  According to Britain’s warplan ‘Trojan’ of 1952 (codenames became more belligerent as the Cold War intensified), the Monte Bello bomb’s successors would be dropped on Russia and, if the sums had been added up correctly, could reduce Russia’s industrial capacity by 30-40 per cent.6 By the beginning of 1956, major changes had been made to targeting policy. A large-scale Russian land and air offensive was expected in the Middle East against eastern Turkey and the Iraqi and Persian oilfields. Given a three-week warning before the outbreak of hostilities, B
ritain would be in a position to mount a counter-attack which would include nuclear sorties against concentrations of Soviet forces, their airfields and lines of communication.7

  None of these prognoses assumed that a nuclear exchange would bring outright victory to either side. Although crippled, the antagonists would, it was believed, still retain the will and some of the wherewithal to fight on with conventional weaponry. In this situation, Britain would have to defend the world’s sealanes which provided it with access to food and oil. Data gathered from the Monte Bello test was used to discover the possible effects of a nuclear attack on a large port, Liverpool, and this study was extended to the Suez Canal. The boffins were remarkably confident that both Liverpool and Port Said could be restored to a semblance of working order within four months. The problems of contamination could be overcome and, if a Russian atomic bomb exploded over the Suez Canal, it was estimated that earth-moving equipment operated by a ‘rotation of men’ could open a navigable passage within several months.8 This astonishing information, presented in a report of July 1956, assumed that sufficient men and machinery would be on hand for what would have proved an extremely hazardous enterprise for those whose job it was to shovel sand.

  The Canal Zone became a vital integer in the sombre arithmetic of nuclear war. If such a conflict was winnable, and the strategists who drew up the various warplans believed it was, then Anglo-American control of the Middle East had to be maintained. Even without schemes for launching potentially war-winning nuclear attacks against southern Russia, the region would have had to be kept within the western camp and defended for the sake of its oil. The Second World War had seen the transformation of the world pattern of oil consumption. By 1951, the Middle East was providing 70 per cent of the West’s oil, and all its reserves for the future were thought to be concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

  Oil and airfields had replaced the defence of India as Britain’s reason for paramountcy in the Middle East. In a sense, the old strategic and geopolitical catchwords of Disraeli and Curzon still held true. They were heard frequently during the late 1940s and early 1950s, largely from the Conservative benches and in the committee rooms of the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry. But had Britain kept its old nerve and was it, when faced with difficulties, prepared to act boldly? On paper at least, Britain was as formidable a power in the region in 1945 as it had been twenty or so years before when the young Nasser had cursed the RAF biplanes that flew over his house. In 1945, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and the sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf were still in Britain’s thrall. So too was Egypt, the sullen host to the vast Suez Canal Zone complex of barracks, storehouses and airfields which straddled the Canal. This strip, 120 miles long by 30 wide, was the largest military base in the world, and the pivot of British power in the Middle East and Africa. Radiating from the Canal Zone was a web of satellite garrisons, aerodromes and naval bases in Malta, Cyprus, Haifa, the ex-Italian colony of Libya (which Russia had briefly coveted), Jordan, Iraq, Aden and the Persian Gulf.

  These scarlet specks on the War Office’s map offered little comfort to Bevin. He was aware of a new, uncompromising and anti-British mood abroad in the Middle East, and it was being encouraged by what was widely seen as Britain’s retirement in the face of Indian nationalism. Britain could be undone and, on the first day of 1947, he warned Attlee of troubles ahead. ‘You cannot read the telegrams from Egypt and the Middle East nowadays without realising that not only is India going, but Malaya, Ceylon, and the Far East are going with it, with a tremendous repercussion in the African territories.’9 Five months later, as Britain faced another financial crisis, Bevin candidly admitted to some of his staff that he would have ‘to bluff his way through’ in handling the Middle East’s affairs.10

  These were presently in an appalling mess. Since the end of 1944, British forces had been vainly attempting to contain the Jewish revolt in Palestine. It was a guerrilla campaign of assassination and sabotage waged by partisans as elusive, intrepid and ruthless as the IRA. Like the Irish campaign, the Palestinian one earned Britain opprobrium abroad, particularly in America, and used up scarce treasure. The lack of funds was now dictating policy. Paupers did not make convincing dissemblers, and at the beginning of the year Bevin had had to withdraw subventions from the anti-Communist governments of Turkey and Greece, which were subsequently rescued by American subsidies. At the end of September 1947, the cabinet washed its hands of the embarrassing and costly Palestinian imbroglio. One hundred thousand servicemen had not broken the cycle of terror and counter-terror, and the province was clearly ungovernable. Britain surrendered its mandate to the United Nations with a promise of evacuation by May 1948.

  This announcement was tantamount to a victory for the Jewish partisans, who were quickly embroiled in a civil war with the Palestinians. During the next eight months, the United Nations tried unsuccessfully to arrange a partition of the country between two races who were each set on the other’s extinction. It was bad enough that Britain had had to scurry out of a protectorate which it had ruled for barely thirty years, but worse followed. The last days of the mandate witnessed the massacre of 240 Arabs, including women and children, by a Jewish unit at Deir Yassim. This incident helped trigger a mass exodus of Palestinians and, by 1949, 720,000 refugees had fled either to Gaza or Jordan. Their legal statelessness and bleak camps were a reproach to Britain, and a reminder to the Arab world of her impotence and perfidy. After 1948, Britain and the infant state of Israel became symbols of alien domination and Arab powerlessness. It was left to the United States to offer the refugees financial assistance and, where possible, attempt their resettlement.

  Whatever post-war official spokesmen said to the contrary about Britain’s future good intentions in the Middle East, it had not shaken off its pre-war reputation for high-handedness and Machiavellian intrigue. Lawrence of Arabia may have been a hero in his own country, but for the Arabs he was just the first in a line of imperialist tricksters who had coveted their resources and land. ‘The British position in the whole area is hopeless. They are hated and distrusted almost everywhere,’ concluded a Time survey which appeared at the beginning of 1952. A fortnight after, the magazine noted the ‘old game of baiting the British’ was being played with relish in Egypt and Persia; it could have added that the players were feeling more confident than ever of eventual victory.11

  In April 1951, Dr Mohammed Mussadiq’s Nationalist party had won the general election in Persia, or Iran as it now called itself, having plucked a name of antique glory from the history books. The frail, elderly Mussadiq had come to power on a programme of anglophobia and national regeneration. He captivated the masses by the power of his eloquence, sometimes fainting in mid-flow, physically overcome by the emotion of his rhetoric. He saw himself as his country’s saviour, once telling an audience in New York that Iran in 1951 was doing what America had done in 1776: freeing itself from an arbitrary and rapacious overlord. In January 1952, the general assembly of the United Nations heard an extended recital of Britain’s misdeeds in Iran, Mussadiq’s favourite theme. The embarrassed British representative, Sir Gladwyn Jebb, pooh-poohed this catalogue of iniquities as ‘the profitless and indeed sterile interpretation of past events’, and asked Mussadiq to look towards the future.

  No amount of bland requests to forget and presumably forgive the past could expiate Britain’s guilt in the eyes of Iranian, or for that matter Arab and Egyptian, nationalists. Memories were long and bitter; Mussadiq was old enough to recall Indian troops marching through his country during the First World War, unequal treaties, governments which rose or fell according to the whims of bureaucrats in London or Delhi, and, in 1942, the return of British forces. Iranians, like other peoples of the Middle East, had had their destinies decided for them; now, Mussadiq believed, they were about to make their own history. It was futile to explain to him and those who cheered his speeches that Britain had changed, and that it was now ready to help them in the development of their country as friend
ly partner, or that British companies were progressive and philanthropic employers. They may have been, but they were also the beneficiaries of past injustices, and this was how they appeared to Mussadiq and millions of other Iranians.

  In May 1951, Mussadiq kept faith with those who had voted for him by nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s assets. This firm was a symbol of Iranian subservience and British power, a leech which had been sucking Iran’s life blood, leaving its people poor and hungry. The riches generated by the oil company had been unevenly distributed; in the year before nationalisation, Iran received £9 million in royalties, a million more than the Inland Revenue took from the company’s profits. In purely commercial terms, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company might have saved some of its profits by adopting a 50-50 deal, which its American counterparts had recently made with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, although this would have been painful, and not to the liking of the company’s chairman and presumably his stockholders. As the crisis unfolded and details of Anglo-Iranian’s record became known, there was much muted criticism of its past selfishness in the corridors of Whitehall.12 But in public, ministers and the press presented the company as a model of commercial generosity.

  More than Anglo-Iranian’s contractual rights were at stake. Iranian oil provided 31 per cent of Europe’s imports, and 85 per cent of the fuel used by the Royal Navy. Moreover, and this animated everyone on the right and quite a few on the left, Musaddiq had snapped his fingers at Britain, setting an example which, given the present temper of the whole area, might be followed elsewhere. ‘Once upon a time Asiatics would be cowed by a show of force,’ announced the Economist, echoing Conservatives who thought that this still ought to be the case. The trouble was that nowadays Iran would protest to the general assembly of the United Nations about British aggression, and win support from Middle Eastern, Asian and Latin American countries, and, of course, the Communist bloc.13 Nonetheless, Bevin’s successor and fellow devotee of Palmerston, Herbert Morrison, ordered the cruiser Mauritius to heave to off Abadan Island. In the meantime, staff officers gathered and produced two aptly-named exigency plans, ‘Buccaneer’ and ‘Midget’, one for armed intervention, the other for the evacuation of the 4,500 British technicians who ran the refinery. If they left, the installations would quickly fall into desuetude for the Iranians lacked the expertise to operate them. Like silly children who meddled with what they could not understand, the Iranians would learn a lesson. As the Economist disdainfully explained: ‘Nationalisation is a mid-century fashion. Even though it is demonstrably unprofitable, nationalists will want to try it.’14