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.
Elizabeth II (1952–)
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 imper
ial 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.
The 1950s saw real growth in the British economy. With much of the rest of Europe still in ruins, for the present Britain had few competitors, and the retreat from empire and overseas responsibilities greatly reduced her costs. Like Disraeli, Macmillan never underestimated the importance of the nation’s comfort; his government built hundreds of new houses with the end-of-empire dividends. By 1959 Harold Macmillan’s boast that the British people ‘have never had it so good’ was evidently felt to be accurate. The Conservatives increased their majority by a hundred seats in the general election of that year.
Macmillan also addressed himself to defence options for Britain herself in a post-imperial age. Now that the atomic bomb had been invented, nuclear missiles offered a far cheaper way of defending Britain than conventional forces. Not having to support men and their families on military bases
would save a great deal of money. It would end the unpopular and un British conscript ‘national service’ which had been in operation since the Second World War. But, although there was some experimentation in Britain with nuclear warheads, it became clear that America had perfected nuclear weapons to a higher degree than Britain could afford.
Britain’s abandonment of her own nuclear-weapon research and the Nassau Agreement of 1962, which signalled her dependence on America for such weapons, alarmed France. When Britain decided to apply for membership of the EEC in 1963, President Charles de Gaulle felt that Britain–and through Britain, America–would try to dominate the organization. The proudly nationalist de Gaulle did not accept France’s reduced role in the world and feared British power at the centre of Europe. He had no wish to encourage America as a superpower. Britain’s application was accordingly vetoed by France.
The humiliation inflicted by the EEC’s rejection as well as the mockery made by Labour of the much vaunted ‘independent British deterrent’, which was ‘neither independent, British nor a deterrent’, was the beginning of the end of thirteen years of Conservative rule. At the height of the Cold War there was one spying scandal after another. Britain’s security seemed deeply compromised in the early 1960s: there was the Portland spy ring, the Admiralty clerk William Vassal, as well as the intelligence officer George Blake who got forty-two years in prison for spying for the Russians. Questions were still being asked about the identity of the third man involved in the defection to Moscow of the high-ranking British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. Then the Profumo affair in 1963, when the secretary of state for war John Profumo was accused of sharing a call-girl mistress Christine Keeler with a Russian naval attaché, confirmed a growing suspicion that there was a careless decadence at the heart of the upper-crust government.
The Story of Britain Page 93