A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  The crisis in public finances in 1951 also reflected Labour’s efforts to fund a major expansion in social welfare. This provided another instance of the tensions between welfarism, military expenditure and financial/taxation considerations already seen with the Liberal government of the late 1900s and early 1910s during the naval race with Germany, and seen again in the late 2000s. Also, in 1950 Britain sent the third largest contingent to fight in the American-led United Nations forces engaged in the Korean War (1950–3), against Communist North Korea and its Chinese ally: although, in July 1953, at 14,198, the contingent was far smaller than the South Korean (509,911) and American (302,483) ones.

  The policy of the Attlee government was supported by the vast majority of the Labour Party and trade union movement. Communist and Soviet sympathizers within both were isolated and the Communist Party was kept at a distance. This situation helped prevent the development of a radical left and was linked to the alliance between labour and capital that was to be important in the post-war mixed economy.

  Britain still saw itself as a major imperial power. When Churchill regained office in 1951, he had no intention of dismantling the empire. Although global commitments were reduced in some areas, elsewhere they were maintained and even expanded. In 1956, however, under Churchill’s Conservative successor, Anthony Eden (1897–1977), the weakness of the imperial response and the limited domestic popularity of empire were exposed in the Suez Crisis. Britain and France attacked Egypt, an intervention publicly justified at the time as a way of safeguarding the Suez Canal, which had been nationalized by the aggressive Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), who was regarded as a threat to British and French imperial interests.

  The invasion was poorly planned, but was a major display of British military power, and it was abandoned not because of failure on the ground but in large part because of American opposition. Concerned about the impact of the invasion on attitudes in the Third World, the Americans, who were ambivalent about many aspects of British policy, refused to extend any credits to support sterling, blocked British access to the International Monetary Fund until Britain withdrew its troops from Suez, and were unwilling to provide oil to compensate for interrupted supplies from the Middle East. American opposition, which underlined the vulnerability of the British economy, was crucial in weakening British resolve and led to a humiliating withdrawal that provided a clear indication of Britain’s loss of world power. Failure in the Suez Crisis can be seen as the end of Britain’s ability to act wholly independently; from then on, there was an implicit reliance on American acceptance.

  Decolonization and greater Dominion autonomy also ensured that Britain could bring less to the strategic table. Indian independence in 1947 was particularly important, as Indian troops had been crucial to Britain’s expeditionary capacity in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The loss of these troops removed an important mainstay of the military dimension of the empire so that, whereas in 1941 Indian forces had played a major role in the successful invasion of Iraq, overthrowing its pro-German government, a decade later, when Britain was in dispute with the nationalist government in Iran over its seizure of Britain’s oil interests, Plan Y, the plan for a military intervention by the seizure of Abadan, was not pursued, in large part because, without Indian troops, and with British forces committed in Germany and Korea, it no longer seemed militarily viable. Political pressures also played a role as both the US and Arab states warned Britain against invasion.

  There were no Indian troops to help in the Suez Crisis, nor to participate in the Vietnam War, had that been a goal. Thanks in part to the fact that Britain could no longer deploy imperial military resources, intervention in the two Gulf Wars (1991, 2003) was very much as a junior partner of the US, and with Britain as much a symbolic partner as a crucial supplier of support. By then, the idea that Britain might have fought in part by deploying Indian troops was no more than a distant memory. It was not only a lack of imperial assistance that was at issue. In addition, the British had been far more successful when they attacked Egypt in 1882 than in 1956, a contrast reflecting a major shift in Western attitudes towards force projection and in the ability to coerce a compliant response.

  Government attitudes to empire changed significantly after the Suez decade. As Conservative Prime Minister in 1957–63, Harold Macmillan set out to restore relations with the US, rather than to preserve, let alone try to strengthen, the empire. There was a wave of decolonization, and much of the empire was dismantled in a rush, especially in Africa, but also in the West Indies and Malaysia, as well as other colonies, including Cyprus and Jamaica. Churchill would have been less willing to abandon the empire at this rate. Decolonization was hastened by a strong upsurge in demands for independence which the government did not know how to confront. Although criticized by some right-wing Conservatives, decolonization was not a central issue in British politics. There was fighting in the last stages of empire, notably resistance to nationalists in Malaya (which gained independence in 1957), Kenya (gained in 1963) and Aden (gained in 1967); but nothing on the scale that the French faced in their attempt to retain Indo-China (1946–54) and Algeria (1954–62), nor that the Portuguese confronted in their African pretensions.

  It is unclear how far a major nationalist rising in, or foreign invasion of, a British colony would have led to a substantial response that might have proved bitterly divisive within Britain. Certainly, decolonization did not prove as divisive for the Conservatives as relations with Europe did from the late 1980s. In part, this was because, despite the anomaly of the Falklands War in 1982, the empire was seen as being transformed into the Commonwealth, rather than lost. Thus, the logic of Britain’s imperial mission, allegedly bringing civilization to backward areas of the globe, allowed the presentation of independence as the inevitable terminus of empire.

  This end to empire was also relatively painless because interest in much of it was limited from the 1950s. This was not the case with some traditional Conservative groups, such as the military, but was the case with much of the party’s middle-class support. The balance between the generations was also important, with the young not experiencing the sense of discontinuity felt by their elders. This difference constitutes an instructive contrast between the historical memory and imagination of the generations.

  As empire receded fast, Britain appeared a diminished power, although it had an enhanced military capability as a result of becoming the third state in the world to develop the atom bomb (1952), followed by being the third with the hydrogen bomb (1957). From 1960, American nuclear submarines equipped with Polaris intercontinental missiles began to operate from the Holy Loch in Scotland, and in 1962 Macmillan persuaded President Kennedy to provide Britain with the submarine-launched Polaris missile system, which offered Britain a global naval capability, although American agreement was dependent on the British force being primarily allocated for NATO duties.

  Indeed, if imperial diehards, such as the Suez Group, represented one critique of government policy and the foreign policy consensus, another was provided by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), launched in 1958. That year, 9,000 people marched in protest from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. In 1960, the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) organized a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience. Its impact, however, was limited.

  Support for joining the EEC became more widespread in British political circles as it became clear that the organization would be a success, especially in terms of the level of economic growth enjoyed by the member states. Rapid growth in the economies of Germany, France and Italy, and, outside the EEC, Japan, helped make Britain appear unsuccessful. The relative decline of the British economy was particularly pronounced in manufacturing, although in some sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, Britain remained a market leader.

  The loss of British influence in Washington was also an issue, as America was keen for Britain to join the EEC, and indeed continues to press Brit
ain to support European integration. However, in 1963, the French President, Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), vetoed the British application, declaring at a press conference, ‘England is insular … the nature and structure and economic context of England differ profoundly from those of the other states of the Continent’. De Gaulle also argued that Britain was too close to America.

  Though there was a degree of opposition to entry in the Conservative Party, the Labour Party was more ambivalent, in part because of fear that Continental workers would accept lower levels of social protection and welfare, and thus price their British counterparts out of work; a process that was to be more clearly the case with east and south Asian competition. Hugh Gaitskell (1906–63), Labour’s leader, declared in 1962, significantly in a television interview, that entry into the EEC ‘means the end of Britain as an independent nation; we become no more than Texas or California in the United States of Europe. It means the end of a thousand years of history.’ From the perspective of 2010, this proved a perceptive forecast.

  There was a rethink when Labour came to power in 1964 under a new leader, Harold Wilson (1916–95). He had initially hoped to maintain Britain’s role as a major independent power, and grandiloquently sought to act as a leading figure on the international stage, not least by revitalizing the Commonwealth. In support of India against China, which had successfully attacked the former in 1962, Wilson declared ‘Britain’s frontiers are on the Himalayas’. However, the attempt to act as a major independent player failed. This goal had to be abandoned in part because Britain lacked the necessary diplomatic strength, for example to mediate over Vietnam, but also in the face of the country’s severe financial problems, which led to a serious sterling crisis in July 1966 and a major devaluation of sterling in 1967. This blow made Britain look weak and Wilson seem ridiculous.

  As a result of a new sense of overreach, the government decided in January 1968 to abandon Britain’s military position ‘east of Suez’. British forces were withdrawn from Aden in 1967, and from the Persian Gulf and (largely) Singapore in 1971. Unlike Australia and New Zealand, Britain did not come to the assistance of the US in Vietnam. Meanwhile, decolonization continued, and by 1971 there was little left of the empire, apart from such far-flung outposts as the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Hong Kong and some small islands in the south Atlantic and West Indies, including Ascension, Tristan da Cunha and St Helena. Instead, Britain’s international commitments and defence priorities were increasingly focused on Western Europe from 1966–7, with the focus on NATO tasks a military equivalent to a drive to join the EEC.

  At sea, a focus on the NATO area was a consequence of the drawing back from imperial commitments east of Suez and of the build-up of the Soviet navy from the 1950s, and much of the British fleet was allocated to the Naval Force Atlantic, a NATO command established in 1967. Multilateralism within NATO, which became the consensus for Britain’s defence in the 1960s, greatly diminished the independent role of British strategy, and this was taken further in 1966 with the cancellation of the planned CVA-01 fleet carrier, which would have been the first large carrier to be built in Britain since the Second World War. The Minister of Defence (Navy) resigned over the decision to end an independent British intervention capability. It was envisaged that, after the existing aircraft carriers, with their distant strike capability, came to an end of their service, naval air power would amount essentially to helicopters designed to act against Soviet submarines in the Atlantic. An ability to support amphibious operations no longer seemed necessary, which amounted to a major shift in military tasking.

  Indeed, British forces were already in Western Europe, in the former occupation zone within West Germany, as the British Army of the Rhine, so that, in the event of a conflict, there would be no equivalent to the need to move troops to the Continent seen in 1914 and 1939 when troops had been moved to France. British defence priorities were focused on Western Europe and the North Atlantic, the British being obliged to maintain 55,000 troops in Germany in order to man 40 miles (65 kilometres) of the West German border. If numbers were reduced, for example to help in the situation in Northern Ireland, it was necessary to seek NATO permission and to promise to restore the agreed strength. The Army as a whole was equipped and trained primarily for this task, with the strategic, operational and tactical emphasis on resisting heavily armed and more numerous Soviet forces. No longer an imperial force, the British military had moved far from its role during Queen Victoria’s reign.

  Joining the Common Market

  Under Wilson, after the serious sterling crisis of July 1966, there was a new bid in May 1967 to join the EEC, but it was rejected anew by De Gaulle in May and again that November. Britain’s options seemed no longer to be those of independence and alliance from a position of strength, but, instead, to be those of joining the American or European system. Not keen on close cooperation with the US, Edward Heath, Conservative Prime Minister in 1970–4, pushed hard for entry into the EEC, seeing this as crucial to his vision for the modernization of Britain, and as a way to play a convincing role on the world stage. De Gaulle’s resignation in 1969 cleared the path, not least as Georges Pompidou (1911–74), his successor, wanted Britain in the EEC in order to balance West Germany, and in 1972 Britain signed the Treaty of Accession, which took effect the following year.

  The negotiations were relatively easy for two reasons. First, Heath was prepared to surrender much in order to obtain membership. In particular, he accepted the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, although it had little to offer Britain. Cheap food from the Commonwealth, especially New Zealand lamb, was to be excluded, in order to create, and then maintain, a market for more expensive, subsidized Continental products. Secondly, there was only limited opposition within the Conservative Party, still less the government. Membership was criticized most strongly on the left wing of the Labour Party, whose dominance forced Wilson to declare that he opposed entry on the terms which Heath had negotiated, although Labour supporters of EEC membership led by Roy Jenkins (1920–2003), were willing to vote with the government, thus providing crucial parliamentary support. Heath pushed membership hard on its economic merits, arguing that it opened up markets, but he said little about possible political consequences, ignoring warnings about the potential impact on national independence.

  When Wilson returned to power in 1974, EEC membership was re-examined, in large part in an effort to quieten critics on the Labour left, although there were prominent Labour opponents of membership who were not on the left, notably Peter Shore (1924–2001). This was not the first occasion on which foreign policy was subordinated to domestic considerations. The government entered into a largely cosmetic renegotiation of Britain’s terms of entry, and then launched a constitutional novelty: a referendum campaign in which the principle of collective Cabinet responsibility would not apply. This was seen as the best way to surmount party divisions and keep the government together.

  In the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EEC, held on 5 June 1975, 67.2 per cent of those who voted favoured membership, the only areas showing a majority against being the Shetlands and the Western Isles of Scotland. The available evidence suggests that public opinion was very volatile on the EEC, implying a lack of interest and/or understanding, and that voters tended to follow the advice of the party leaderships, all of which supported continued membership. Although opposition came from across the political spectrum, it was stigmatized as extreme.

  The referendum result was decisive. Britain stayed in and the EEC was not to become a divisive political issue again until it emerged in the late 1980s as the focus for tensions within the Thatcher government. In the mid-2000s, no comparable referendum was allowed by Blair or Brown on the Lisbon Treaty, a key measure in the development of the European Union, the successor to the EEC, although referenda were conducted elsewhere, including in France, the Netherlands and Ireland. Such an approach encouraged a Euroscepticism that reflected widespread concern, largely in England, abou
t a loss of sovereignty, British identity and national interests.

  Northern Ireland

  In the late 1970s, other issues took centre stage. The economy and trade union relations were more pressing as domestic issues, and there was a sense that the country was ungovernable. This sense was particularly acute in Northern Ireland. It was scarcely surprising in the 1960s, a decade in which there were numerous demands for change, that the situation there should be scrutinized critically. However, the background was not totally bleak. An IRA campaign launched in 1954 had had little success and was formally suspended in 1962. Captain Terence O’Neill (1914–90), who became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland the following year, sought greater harmony between Catholics and Protestants, and hoped that economic growth would help to ease sectarian tensions. In 1968, he launched a programme for the removal of discrimination against Catholics in housing, local government and voting arrangements.

  Nevertheless, despite encouragement and some pressure from the Labour government in London, the pace of change proved insufficient to diffuse a sense of discrimination, and the continued Unionist ascendancy, backed up by the police, led to tension. A civil rights movement, modelled on that in the US, developed, complaining about the position of Catholics. A harsh and insensitive police response led to fighting in October 1968, beginning in Derry (Londonderry) on 5 October, when an attempt to prevent a banned protest demonstration led to violence. The summer of 1969 witnessed a breakdown in law and order, with open communal violence.