by A. N. Wilson
‘The Berlin Wall’, wrote the greatest historian of that city, ‘sealed off the last escape route from what had now become a giant 100,000-squarekilometre prison called the German Democratic Republic.’ In the le Carréish balancing game played by the foreign ministries and governments of Washington and London it was considered ‘suitable’, ‘acceptable’, ‘preferable’ that millions of human beings should be compelled to live in poverty, fear and servitude.
Macmillan was a much-travelled Prime Minister who saw his role primarily in terms of foreign affairs. Indeed, like subsequent Prime Ministers, he could even savour foreign problems, the more intractable or dangerous the better, since they enhanced his self-estimation as a statesman, whereas problems at home, ranging from day-to-day wage disputes with trades unions, to more general matters such as the implosion and ultimate collapse of Western culture itself, were less attractive. Within weeks of taking office, as has been said, he was off to Bermuda to ‘mend the fences’ with President Eisenhower. Six weeks during the wintry early months of 1958 were devoted to a tour of the Commonwealth–starting in India where, to Anthony Sampson, one of the journalists in his entourage, ‘he seemed an apparition from the imperial past’, with his dark blue suit in the blazing heat of Delhi airport, his Old Etonian tie and his shy, stilted manner. In fact, the Commonwealth tour was in many senses restorative. Always hypochondriac and prone to winter colds, he could escape the English winter. After a long period of estrangement from his wife he could become her friend, dependent, as the tour went on, to Pakistan, Ceylon, New Zealand and Australia, upon her exuberant and aristocratic ability to talk to strangers, and able to enjoy her company without the ever painful phenomenon of her disappearing, for a part of each month, to be with her lover Boothby.
Politically, moreover, the Commonwealth tour was wonderfully easy. Indeed, it was more in the nature of a royal progress than a political tour, since none of the problems facing the countries he visited were ones to which the British Prime Minister was being asked to provide a solution. India and Pakistan, sure enough, had their local difficulties, but since independence more than a decade ago, they were not looking to Westminster for the impossible business of decisions. As for the white Dominions of New Zealand and Australia, they possessed, at this date, almost no inhabitants who wished to be independent of the British Crown. They were parodies of Britain itself, without any of the threats to Britain’s happiness or security–threats such as a collapse of labour relations, or housing shortages.
Never slow to note newspaper items about himself which could be construed in a favourable connotation, Macmillan quoted in his memoirs from a journalist–‘Whatever Macmillan may have done for the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth has certainly done for Macmillan.’
But it was not in the independent states of the Indian subcontinent, nor in the happily self-governing white Dominions, that the problems of British colonialism, or post-colonialism, were to be found. These boiled and festered in the vast continent upon which, until he became Prime Minister, Macmillan had never set foot: Africa.
Chronologically, the colonies of West Africa were the first to go the way of India and Pakistan, and achieve self-government. To many Africans at the time, as to the huge majority of everyone else in the world once history had unfolded, it was a transparent demographical fact that one day, majority rule, and rule by the indigenous population, would follow. In the late 1950s, however, this notion was by no means obvious, and was indeed hotly contested, especially in three African areas–in the huge, fertile, mineral-rich and beautiful East African Kenya; in the southern-central cluster known as the Central African Federation–Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland–and South Africa. The more right-wing members of Macmillan’s own Cabinet, most notably Lord Salisbury, as well as the white inhabitants of these regions, all believed that it was desirable, and possible, for white minority rule to continue in these areas. Successive British governments since the Second World War had displayed conflicting and contradictory policies over the matter. In 1957, then, the Gold Coast was granted independence and, as the newly named country of Ghana, it enjoyed an in many ways successful decade under the premiership of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, with a single-chamber, elected parliamentary system, and with local government conducted in four regional assemblies. Nigeria became independent in 1960, and in spite of much more complex tribal and religious divisions than those in Ghana, it enjoyed a measure of stability under Sir Abubakar Balewa. Sierra Leone, effectively independent since 1958, became formally so in 1961.
Kenyan nationalists, on the other side of the continent, could look forward to no such smooth handover of power from the hands of the white men. It had been the policy of the post-war Labour government in Westminster, as of the Conservative governments, to treat Kenya rather as if it were Australia or New Zealand, a fertile land in which whites from the old country could be encouraged to settle. British ex-servicemen had received money from Attlee’s, Churchill’s and Eden’s exchequers to help them establish farms in Kenya. The colonisation of this hugely rich country was not, then, the inheritance of some casually made Victorian decision to settle the land with Europeans. It was a living colony, and the Imperialist expansion in East Africa was going on even as the British withdrew from India and from West Africa.
The resistance movement to all this came from the Kikuyu tribe, which formed about 20 percent of the Kenyan population. Under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, they had pursued a course of terror, in the hope of driving the whites from Africa out of sheer horror. The secret Kikuyu society which committed itself to his murderous policy bore the name of Mau Mau.
The government in London had begun to recognise that Kenyan independence, and the end of white supremacy, was an inevitability, but they could not bring themselves to admit as much, either to the inhabitants of Kenya or to their own right wing. The Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, as late as January 1959, could hold a conference in London in which he promised independence to the two other East African colonies–Tanganyika (independent 1961) and Uganda (1962)–while claiming that Kenyan independence would either not happen at all or was a long way off. Later that year, at Hola detention camp in Kenya, eleven Mau Mau detainees were beaten to death by the warders. It was initially claimed that they had died from lack of water. Lennox-Boyd was sacked and replaced by Iain Macleod, a very different sort of Conservative, who enraged his colleagues, and the white Kenyans, by stating the obvious–that Jomo Kenyatta the terrorist would be released from prison, and that majority rule in that country would soon become an inevitability. Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963. Some white settlers were richly compensated by British taxpayers’ money and came home. Most of the 30,000 Europeans (compared with the five and a quarter million Africans) decided to stay on, unharmed by Kenyatta or his former Mau Mau fighters.
The weight of sheer majority, or the Law of Time, would make it inevitable that Africa would be ruled by Africans. But even this fact, becoming obvious to Macmillan and those around him, was not immediately apparent to those who lived in African countries, particularly those in the southern part of the continent. And here, if one is to paint a fair picture of history, it is necessary to think not of two groups–Africans who wanted independence at any cost, and white supremacists–but a third, comprising Africans and Europeans who found, particularly for example in Southern Rhodesia, that a system of law and order, in which more and more Africans were being educated, and entering upon responsibilities formerly exercised by whites, was perhaps preferable to a violent or sudden transition from all-European to all-African government.
And then again, further south there was the unique and extreme example of South Africa. When Macmillan arrived on the last lap of his African tour at Durban, he found sunburnt, happy whites, waving Union Jacks as they came from their tennis courts and their swimming pools. But he also found a group of black protesters who, adapting his own famous political cliché at home, carried banners which read, ‘We’ve never had it s
o bad’.
As the move towards African independence spread across the continent, the southern African countries hardened in their colonial attitudes. In Rhodesia, the Law and Order Maintenance Bill, passed in 1960, greatly strengthened the hand of what was in effect an all-white one-party system of government, giving the authorities powers of press censorship which by European standards would have been fascist, and allowing brutal police treatment of suspects. In South Africa, things were more extreme. Though sixty years had passed since the Boer War, the old Dutch Boer religion had not gone away. Nor had resentment among the Afrikaans population at being pushed around by the British. South Africa was poised to leave the Commonwealth. Even as Macmillan visited them, Nelson Mandela with 155 others was on trial for treason. A month after Macmillan’s visit, sixty-seven black demonstrators were shot at Sharpeville. And the danger, ever-present in Macmillan’s mind (not least because so many members of his own party at home supported the right-wing line), was that Southern Rhodesia would follow the South African line and move towards white-ruled independence.
Speaking to the all-white South African Parliament in words written for him by a diplomat called David Hunt, Macmillan once again demonstrated the blurb writer’s zest for the memorable cliché, with his famous Wind of Change speech:
Ever since the break-up of the Roman Empire one of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations…
Today the same thing is happening in Africa, and the most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it takes different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact and our national policies must take account of it.
To say that there was an element of humbug in the speech is not to deny that Macmillan, in common with many liberal-minded Englishmen of the period, was genuinely shocked by the system of apartheid, whereby, as in the United States, segregation between human beings on the grounds of skin pigmentation was formally written into the system. In Britain, segregation existed, and would go on existing, through the invisible veils of class snobbery, economic segregation and taboo. Macmillan and his kind would have been amazed had a group of blacks turned up on one of their shooting parties or at Pratt’s Club, but the many unwritten rules of English society made such an event impossible to envisage. Therefore, when he met old Dr Verwoerd, the President of South Africa, who spelt such things out in print and made them into fixed laws, Macmillan was shocked, having the not especially original insight that for Verwoerd apartheid was ‘more than a political philosophy, it was a religion; a religion based on the Old Testament rather than on the New’.26 The Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, drawn up in February 1962, began with the assertion that ‘Immigration officers will of course carry out their duties without regard to the race, colour or religion of Commonwealth citizens who may seek to enter the country’, but no one had any doubt as to its aim, namely to limit the number of black people coming into the country. It was a piece of fine old British hypocrisy from first page to last, since it was carefully designed to keep out the blacks, while not being seen to do so. In the words of Macmillan’s official biographer, Alastair Horne, ‘one of the principal complications…was how to preserve non-discrimination while not closing the door on members of the “white” Commonwealth’.27
Quite apart from the ideological problems facing the Commonwealth, its economic relationship with the former mother country was to be the serious underlying question of the Macmillan years. Would trade with the Commonwealth be enough to sustain economic growth at home and allow Macmillan to purvey to the British people a situation in which, he could tell them they had ‘never had it so good’?
When attacked for the cliché, and for the philosophy which lay behind it, by no less a person than Dr Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, Macmillan responded hotly and with passion. Fisher, at a sermon in Croydon of all places, said that it was ‘a dreadful’ phrase, and added some humbug of his own in which he wondered, ‘will it always stay good if we do not keep our minds on the love of God?’28
Macmillan retorted, in a private letter:
I also share your view as a Churchman that the material condition of a people must by no means be the only criterion. Unless it has the spiritual values it will fail. Nevertheless it is the function of Governments to try to improve material conditions and I have always thought that the Church had supported us in this effort.
The attack on poverty, the attempts to clear the slums, to deal with low wages, to remove unemployment, all these were always impressed upon me by your great predecessor Dr Temple, as truly Christian duties. At any rate, when I put my mind back to the conditions of the great slums, with three million unemployed, with the means test, with the state of health and housing conditions, and indeed with the general level in which many of our people were condemned to live, I rejoice that it is now so good…
On my African tour [he was writing from Nigeria] I am more and more impressed by the need which I have always put strongly before the country, especially at the last General Election, for the ‘good neighbour’ policy, that is that they should use their growing material strength for the assistance of development overseas, especially in the Commonwealth. But I have also reminded them that they cannot do this out of poverty. They can only do it out of wealth.29
The burgeoning prosperity of post-war Europe, and the large free-trade area of the Common Market, was not something from which Britain could afford to exclude itself. Indeed, for some British observers, it was vital, if economic prosperity was to continue in Britain, that membership of the Common Market be sought as soon as possible. For others, however, Europe was a spectre to be dreaded: from the left, it was seen as a capitalist club, and from the right as a federalist trap which would neuter national sovereignty.
The Treaty of Rome was signed on 25 March 1957, at a moment when Britain was still reeling from the Suez debacle and the new Prime Minister was primarily concerned with repairing the wreckage of Anglo-American relations.
The signatories to the original treaty were those who, in different ways, had suffered defeat in the Second World War, who had known at first hand, and at far greater cost than the victors, the devastating effects of war, but who had also known, before the war, a much greater degree of short-term economic success than the laissez-faire economy of Britain. Germany (now only West Germany) and Italy had both had what could be termed state-enforced Keynesianism which had led to the conquest of unemployment, and a programme of public works–the building of modern road systems, railways and infrastructure which had no comparison in Britain. It was the aim of the former fascist countries of Italy and Germany, together with their satellites Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands (which had been largely fascist in sympathy in the 1930s), to recover what had been achieved in the 1930s, without, naturally, a revival of the repressive structures of the police state. The other great inspiration of the European idealists was to bring about peace between France and Germany, whose conflicts since 1870 had led to the loss of so much European life. Here, once more, France, which had effectively been governed from Berlin from 1940 to 1944–half directly under German occupation and half, in so-called Vichy France, under the satrapy of Marshal Pétain. Clearly, it was impossible so soon after the war to admit that the arrangement had been advantageous to France, especially since France was now under the benign dictatorship of General de Gaulle, whose Free French gesture had done little to further the defeat of the Third Reich but much to hearten those Frenchmen and women who felt the humiliations of the 1940–44 years. So it was that de Gaulle signed up to the Treaty of Rome, seeing it as a convenient way of enjoying the economic advantages of federalism while telling his electorate, and perhaps actually believing, that the new Common Market, with its ultimate
aim of laying ‘the foundation of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’, was really a way of France dominating Europe without using military force.
It was perhaps not surprising that the basically fascist idea of a United Europe was not pursued by many British politicians in their election manifestos of 1959, the first election after the Treaty of Rome was signed. The only British politician who embraced the idea of ‘Europe a Nation’ with public enthusiasm was Sir Oswald Mosley, a fringe figure since his imprisonment during the Second World War under the 18B regulations, and, being natural flypaper for the crackpots, not a man likely to be brought back into the fold of either main party, even if he had shown signs of wishing this. Nevertheless, he was the first British politician to make public use of those arguments which would later be familiar on the lips of the ‘pro-Europeans’ in British politics, namely that in a competitive economic world it was no longer viable for small nation states to ‘go it alone’. In Europe: Faith and Plan–A Way Out from the Coming Crises–Mosley asked, ‘Can these relatively small, isolated, individual nations of Western Europe face for fifteen years on world markets the competition of America’s normal production surplus, plus the deliberate market-breaking dumping of the Soviets at below European production costs?’ No, because ‘they are dependent on external supplies of raw materials for their industries…they are forced to pay for these necessities by exports sold in open competition in world markets, under conditions where they have no influence whatever’.30