A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Yet what made Gaitskell truly interesting as a politician of this era was that he accepted and even revelled in the new consumerism. Bevan and his friends deplored the ‘affluent society’ and the ‘crass commercialism’ of the time and claimed to feel nostalgic for the colder if nobler vision of the forties. Gaitskell danced, and listened avidly to jazz records, and liked good food and clothes. He had few hang-ups, ideological or otherwise. Gaitskell and those in his set believed you could have a more equal society without it being cheerless or lacking in fun. The essence of this was set out in a hugely influential book The Future of Socialism, published in 1956. Its author, Tony Crosland, was one of the wilder spirits of Frognal who had fought in the war as a paratrooper and was busy rebelling against the harshly puritanical standards set by his well-off parents, who belonged to the Plymouth Brethren sect. Crosland argued that increasing individual rights should be as great an aim for reformers as abolishing capitalism, which was already mostly tamed. Education, not nationalization, was the key to changing society. Socialists must turn to issues such as the plight of the mentally handicapped and neglected children, to the divorce and abortion laws, and women’s rights in general, to homosexual law reform and the end of censorship of plays and books. Many of these things would dominate the Home Secretaryship of his friend Jenkins. He was against ‘hygienic, respectable, virtuous things and people, lacking only in grace and gaiety’. He concluded with a famous swipe at the puritanical Webbs, those Edwardian saints of Labourism: ‘Total abstinence and a good filing-system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist’s Utopia; or at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside.’ This was a message that would prove popular with the new middle-class voters Labour needed, if not with the intellectuals and journalists around the party’s fringes. It was the moment, really, when for Labour the forties ended and, with no intermission, the sixties began.

  Gaitskell himself was forgiven by the party for losing the 1959 election. Had he survived to lead Labour into battle in 1964 he would surely have won then and the story of Labour politics would have been strikingly different. By 1962 he was utterly dominant inside his party and increasingly seen outside it as a fresh start – letter-writers and newspaper journalists used language about him which anticipated what was said about Tony Blair before the 1997 election. Like Blair, he managed to come across as less of a party man, and more ‘normal’ than his great rival, a truly interesting Prime Minister in waiting. None of this was to be. In January 1963 after years of grossly overworking, suffering from a rare and little-understood disease of the immune system, he suddenly died. Though there were rumours afterwards that he had been killed by the KGB as part of a plot to put in Harold Wilson, whom the conspiracists believed was a Soviet agent, it seems more likely that this was mere biology interfering with politics, as it does. With a little more medical and other good-fortune, the prime ministers of post-war Britain could well have included Herbert Morrison, Rab Butler, Hugh Gaitskell and Iain Macleod, rather than Attlee, Macmillan, Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson. But Wilson it would be. The long-lasting significance of the struggle between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites was that when he became Prime Minister, he was so crippled by trying to placate the various gangs that he could offer no clear direction for the country.

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  Leaving Mayhem: the British in Africa

  A year after Macmillan’s triumphant re-election, he made a speech unlikely to be forgotten. One of the bitterer ironies of Suez had been that London, accused by both the Americans and Russians of being a nest of reactionary imperialism, was actually in the middle of frantically trying to get rid of the Empire. Indian independence was followed by swift dismantling in two other places, Africa and the Middle East. The Sudan, scene of British cavalry charges in an early war against militant Islamists, had become independent in 1956. The Gold Coast, one of the most prosperous African colonies, followed a year later as Ghana and they were followed in turn by a bewildering stream of former African possessions during the sixties – Somaliland (Somalia), Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Uganda, Nyasaland (Malawi), Swaziland and Basutoland, as well as the islands of Mauritius and the Maldives. Some of these countries had been British only for a short time, others had had large white settler populations who either returned home or tried, uneasily, to accommodate themselves to the new governments, but the scale and speed of the British scuttle produced remarkably little debate at home. On the far right of British politics, the League of Empire Loyalists protested but most of the country regarded it all with boredom or amusement.

  In the late forties it had been felt both that Africa might become the core of Britain’s new world position and that her countries were far from ready for independence. Within ten years all this was forgotten. There was a rush to independence, urged on from London. No single speech made more of an impact in seeming to settle the argument than the one Harold Macmillan made in Cape Town in 1960, known for ever as his ‘wind of change’ speech. It was brave not because of what he said, but because the British Prime Minister chose to make it in the white supremacist South African parliament, in front of men who would be architects of apartheid, horrifying them and appalling a large swathe of Tory opinion back in England, where the right-wing Monday Club was formed in protest. Macmillan announced that there was an awakening national consciousness sweeping through Africa. He told his startled audience; ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent’ and like it or not, this was simply a fact. Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African Prime Minister retorted that the Englishman was appeasing the black man, adding that they had enough problems in Africa without his coming to add to them.

  Why had London lost its nerve? Partly, it was the mere experience of looking about. The French were getting out of Africa. So too were the Belgians, leaving behind an appalling and very bloody civil war in the Congo. Private correspondence of Macmillan’s suggests that he also thought the two world wars had made a fundamental change in the position of the whites around the world: ‘What we have really seen since the war is the revolt of the yellows and blacks from the automatic leadership and control of the whites.’ It need not, however, be a bloody revolt. The experience of the Gold Coast, which became independent under Dr Kwame Nkrumah in 1957 with relative ease, suggested to London there was a gentler way of quitting.

  On the other side the vicious war of terrorism against white settlers and blacks who supported them in Kenya, a revolt by the mysterious organization Mau Mau, showed the dangers of hanging on. The Mau Mau rebellion was not an attractive liberation war. It lasted for years, and involved gruesome mutilation, dismemberments, rape and bizarre oaths, claimed to be linked to black magic. Very few whites were killed, but there was a terrible black toll. It did not help that the more experienced leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta, whom we will meet later in a less heroic role, was then locked up, leaving Mau Mau to be run by the young and the angry. The white settlers of the area, who had been among the richest and most self-confident colonials in Africa, responded with vicious militia tactics, taking cash bets for the number of Africans shot or ‘bagged’, and keeping scorecards, as if they were grouse. The security forces came between the two and suppressed the revolt with classic anti-subversion tactics, though its general found the settlers shady people: ‘I hate the guts of them all; they are middle-class sluts,’ he told his wife. By the end of the fifties, government forces had killed around 10,000 Kikuyu tribesmen and hanged another thousand. Some 80,000 had been put into grim so-called rehabilitation camps. Eventually only a hard core of Mau Mau were left and at one camp, Hola, eleven were murdered by the guards. The story went round the world and caused extreme embarrassment to the government; Enoch Powell made what some thought the greatest parliamentary speech of the century denouncing British behaviour. Meanwhile in Nyasaland, another bout of violent repression was going on, with fifty-one black protesters killed. So by the time Macmillan made his spee
ch, it seemed that trying to hold on, to protect white settlers he anyway despised, was even more dangerous than getting out.

  Macmillan and his liberal Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, have had a good press ever since. They have been seen as liberal, fair-minded and realistic politicians, who realized that the time had come to push ahead even faster with decolonization, to hit the accelerator and forget the brake. They were undoubtedly influenced by the humiliation of Suez. It was the way the world was going. Yet the story of modern Africa should make anyone look harder at the timing and methods of British decolonization. This is the failed continent. Lines drawn on the map by British imperial administrators were left to help provoke appalling civil and tribal wars. Men trained at Sandhurst, brought up inside the British Empire, turned into corrupt dictators and in the worst case, that of Uganda’s Idi Amin, a monster. Few of those liberal, highly intelligent liberation leaders feted in London by the left during the fifties and sixties turned into great progressive figures back home in Africa – perhaps the only great exception being Nelson Mandela himself. Military coups, the imprisonment of opposition leaders, tribal feuds and famines followed and for all this, the former British rulers must take some responsibility. Did the British scuttle from Africa happen too fast, in a mood of political hysteria and without proper thought for what would follow? The sheer speed may not be as admirable as we have been taught to think.

  Was there no example of successful British action in withdrawing from old commitments? Luckily for national pride, there is another story. It is not simply the tale of the other former colonies, from Singapore to the Caribbean, which thrived, or the prosperity of the so-called White Commonwealth nations. Not all wars were lost; in Korea, for instance, though Kim Il Sung survived to create a bleak and murderous dictatorship behind the armistice line, Mao was frustrated. But the best example of a war eventually won through intelligence, in every sense, is the one known simply as the ‘emergency’. It ran from 1948 to 1960 – which must make it the longest emergency ever.

  Malaya had become a crucial part of the world’s industrial system thanks to seeds from a single tree, brought from Brazil to Kew Gardens in London and grown in a tropical plant house. From there, the rubber plants were taken to Malaya in the 1870s, and grew very nicely. By the post-war years, Malaya was producing a third of the world’s supply of rubber. With tin, this made it Britain’s most profitable colony, a rare exception to the rule. But by the late forties there was, almost inevitably, a Communist and nationalist insurgency against British rule. It went on for a dozen years and was, to all intents and purposes, a war. It has not been remembered as the Malayan War for a curious reason. The insurance policies of local businesses had clauses in them suspending cover in time of war; hence ‘emergency’.

  After a bad start during which the Communists tied down a huge British force, murdered many rubber planters and their workers, and when atrocities were committed on the other side including by the Scots Guards against Chinese villagers, a new strategy was developed. It was the achievement of one of the British Empire’s last and least-known heroes, a clipped and driven soldier called General Sir Gerald Templer. He used helicopters as they had not been used before in warfare. He also moved entire villages away from the jungle to keep them from supporting insurgents and imposed curfews. But beside the unpopular measures Templer introduced a new ‘hearts and minds’ approach to win over Malaya’s Chinese villagers. Roads, clean water, schools, medical centres, elected village councils and relatively restrained policing did more to confound a Communist insurgency than the machine guns and helicopters. Eventually after the Communists were defeated, Malaya became independent under a friendly government. As Malaysia it has thrived. It showed what could be done by a thoughtful and intelligent departing imperial power. After Malaya, no Communist insurgency succeeded against British forces in Africa or Asia again. Had the Americans studied Malaya a little more closely, who knows what might have followed in Vietnam.

  44

  Notting Hill

  From 1948 until 1962, roughly the period of the Malayan emergency, there had been virtually an open door for immigrants coming into Britain from the Commonwealth or colonies. The British debate over immigration had been hobbled by contradiction. On the one hand, overt racialism had been discredited by the Nazi enemy. Britain’s very sense of herself was tied up in the vanquishing of a political culture founded on racial difference. This meant that the few unapologetic racialists, the anti-Semitic fringe or the pro-apartheid colonialists, became outcast. Official documents would refer to the handful of MPs who were outspokenly racialist as ‘nutters’. So unthreatening were they thought to be that Oswald Mosley, who had been funded by Mussolini before the war and would have been a likely puppet-leader had Germany invaded Britain, was promptly allowed out of prison after the war, to strut on the back of lorries and yell at his small number of unrepentant fascist supporters. Ignoring him, the public propaganda of Empire made much of a family of races under the British flag all cooperating, loyally together.

  In Whitehall, the Colonial Office strongly supported the right of black Caribbean people to migrate to the Mother Country, fending off the worries of the Ministry of Labour about the effects on unemployment during downturns. When some 500 Caribbean immigrants arrived in 1948 on the converted German troopship SS Windrush, the Home Secretary declared that though ‘some people feel it would be a bad thing to give the coloured races of the Empire the idea that, in some way or the other, they are the equals of people in this country,’ the government disagreed: ‘we recognise the right of the colonial peoples to be treated as men and brothers with the people of this country.’ Britain, in short, believed herself to be the logical opposite of Nazi Germany, a benign and unprejudiced world-connected island. The Jewish migration of the thirties had brought one of the greatest top-ups of skill and energy that any modern European state had ever seen. The country in fact already had a population of about 75,000 black and Asian people and labour shortages suggested it needed many more. The segregation of the American Deep South, and the arrival of the ideology of apartheid in South Africa were treated alike with high-minded contempt.

  And yet everyone knew this was not really the whole story. Prewar British society had never been as brutal about race as France or Spain, never mind Germany, but it was riddled with racialism nevertheless. Anti-Semitism had been common in popular novels and obscure modernist poetry alike. The actual practice of the British upper and middle classes had been close to the colour bar practised by Americans. Africans were tolerated as servants and musicians while in Britain, little more. White working-class people hardly ever came across someone of another colour: during the war, black GIs, though welcomed, had been followed around by awestruck locals simply wanting to touch them or hear them speak. Almost as soon as the first post-war migrants arrived from Jamaica and other islands of the West Indies, popular papers were reporting worries about their cleanliness, sexual habits and criminality: ‘No dogs, No blacks, No Irish’ was not a myth, but a perfectly common sign on boarding houses. The hostility and coldness of native British people was quickly reported back by the early migrants. And Hugh Dalton, a cabinet colleague of the high-minded minister quoted earlier, was also able to talk of the ‘pullulating poverty stricken diseased nigger communities’ of the African colonies.

  For most people, questions of race were obscure and academic. The country remained overwhelmingly white and only tiny pockets of colour could be found until the sixties, most of them in the poorest inner-city areas. A quarter of the world was in theory welcome to come and stay. There were debates in the Tory cabinets of the Churchill, Eden and Macmillan years but for most of the time they never got anywhere. Any legislation to limit migration would have kept out white people of the old Commonwealth too; and any legislation which discriminated would be unacceptably racialist. Conservatives as well as socialists regarded themselves as civilized and liberal on race. By this they meant pick-and-choosy. For instance in the fifties
, the Colonial Office specifically championed ‘the skilled character and proved industry of the West Indians’ against ‘the unskilled and largely lazy Asians’. Immigration from the Indian subcontinent had begun almost immediately after independence and partition, as a result of the displacement of Hindus and Muslims, but it had been very small. Sikhs had arrived, looking for work particularly in the industrial Midlands, and in the west London borough of Southall, which quickly became an Asian hub. Indian migrants created networks to buy and supply the corner shops which required punishingly long hours, and the restaurants which would almost instantly become part of the ‘British’ way of life – there were more than 2,000 Indian restaurants by 1970 and curry would become the single most popular dish within another generation. Other migrants went into the rag trade and grew rich.

  So immigration continued through a decade without any great national debate. Much of it was not black but European, mostly migrant workers from Poland, Italy, France and other countries who were positively welcomed in the years of skill and manpower shortages. There was a particularly hefty Italian migration producing a first-generation Italian community of around 100,000 by 1971 to add to the earlier migrations which went back to the 1870s. There was constant and heavy migration from Ireland, mainly into the construction industry, three-quarters of a million in the early fifties and two million by the early seventies, producing little political response except in the immediate aftermath of IRA bombings. There was substantial Maltese immigration which did catch the public attention because of violent gang wars in London between rival Maltese families in the extortion and prostitution business (though to be fair to Malta, many of these people had arrived there from Sicily first). There was a major Cypriot immigration, both of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, as the divided island became more politically violent. Again, apart from the enthusiastic adoption of plate-smashing and moussaka in ‘Greek’ restaurants in British cities, there was no discernable public fuss. Chinese migration, mainly from the impoverished agricultural hinterland of Hong Kong, can be measured by the vast rise in Chinese fish-and-chip shops and restaurants, up from a few hundred in the mid-fifties to more than 4,000 by the beginning of the seventies. The Poles, carefully resettled after the war, were joined by other refugees from Stalinism, Hungarians and Czechs, again without any national response other than warm enthusiasm.