Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  74.‘Defeat or Opportunity’, 24 September 1949.

  75.Davenport, Memoirs of a City Radical, p. 177.

  76.Hugh Dalton, Memoirs: Call Back Yesterday 1887–1931, Vol. I, London 1953; Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs 1931–1945, Vol II, London 1957; Hugh Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs 1945–1960, Vol III, London 1962; Tyerman to Morrison 8 June; Morrison to Tyerman 13 June 1961, Morrison Papers, LSE, 8/21.

  77.Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, London 1951.

  78.Ibid., p. 436; ‘John Maynard Keynes’, 27 January 1951.

  79.‘John Maynard Keynes’, 3 February 1951.

  80.Macmillan diary, 30 Aug. 1951, quoted in E. H. H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism, Oxford 2002, p.187.

  81.Milward, Economic Effects, p. 72; Tomlinson, ‘The Attlee Government’, p. 59.

  82.Tomlinson, ‘The Attlee Government’, pp. 59, 63–64; Allister E. Hinds, ‘Imperial Policy and Colonial Sterling Balances 1943–56’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, July 2008, pp. 36–38.

  83.‘Commonwealth with Solvency’, 1 March 1952.

  84.Davenport, Memoirs of a City Radical, p. 150.

  85.Milward, Economic Effects, p. 72.

  86.‘John Maynard Keynes’, 27 January 1951; ‘The Real Issues’, 13 October 1951; ‘The Next Government’, 20 October 1951.

  87.Extreme centre got a new, vaguer definition (‘moderate and catholic in its aims, but audacious in their pursuit’), perhaps because to endorse a party went against its original premise: ‘In the Sign of the Balance’, 26 May 1955.

  88.Lysaght, Brendan Bracken, p. 256.

  89.Barbara Ward, The International Share-out, London 1938, pp. 69, 173–74.

  90.‘Turks know that a powerful Britain is no menace to their independence; on the contrary, their chief complaint is that Britain has not been powerful enough.’ Barbara Ward, Turkey, London 1942, pp. 112–14.

  91.Planning need not coincide with totalitarianism. Britain might in this way correct both allies’ excesses: too much free trade in the US, too little freedom in the USSR: Barbara Ward, Democracy, East and West, London 1947, p. 52.

  92.Until 1947, liberalism was not above reproach, and even bore some blame for the rise of fascism: ‘The defence of private property and free enterprise helped to produce 19th century parliamentary democracy in the West. But it also induced the German middle classes to support Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik crusade, and this gave the West the infinite horrors of Nazism.’ After 1947, it was a heroic rampart against communism. Ibid., p. 47; Jean Gartlan, Barbara Ward: Her Life and Letters, London 2010, p. 22; ‘Mr. Marshall’s Challenge’, 14 June 1947; ‘Initiative in Europe’, 21 June 1947; Barbara Ward, The West at Bay, New York 1948, p. 143.

  93.Though it found the Greek king’s ministers ‘slippery’, better to defend them, so as to ‘widen and liberalise’ the regime later; perhaps with a technocrat like former central bank head Kyriakos Varvaressos, ‘to create a responsible tax-paying business community’: ‘Strategy for Greece’, 3 January 1948; ‘American Responsibility’, 11 December 1948.

  94.‘Final Settlement for Palestine?’, 26 August 1946. The Economist did not hold out much hope for this deal. Americans were unlikely to send troops nor, for domestic electoral reasons, to respect Arab objections to unlimited Jewish immigration: ‘Realities in Palestine’, 27 March 1948.

  95.‘New Era in India’, 16 August 1947; see also ‘Black Flags in India’, 7 September 1946. ‘Scramble for Power in India’, 10 May 1947; ‘Is It Well with India?’, 19 July 1947; ‘Farewell to India: The Heritage’, 17 January 1948; ‘India’s Mountbatten Year’, 26 June 1948.

  96.‘Test Point in Malaya’, 12 November 1949; ‘Sideshow in Malaya?’, 25 March 1950; ‘Struggle in Malaya’, 6 January 1951.

  97.‘Britain, Persia and Oil’, 23 March 1951; ‘Persia’s Road to Ruin’, 5 May 1951;

  98.‘Persia’s Road to Ruin’, 5 May 1951.

  99.Searching in vain for a firm commitment from Truman to remove Mossadegh from the very start, the paper had some of its sharpest words for Washington since 1945. ‘If the Americans deserted the British in the first real test of their relationship in the Middle East, then the North Atlantic alliance will have suffered a blow from which it might never recover.’ Ibid. In the meantime, it backed those measures Britain could take, removing Persia from the sterling area and blockading the oil it had ‘expropriated’: ‘Persians and Foreigners’, 29 August 1953.

  100.‘British Guiana and Self-Government’, 27 October 1951; PPP. leaders ‘must realise British Guiana needs foreign capital, which will not be forthcoming in a Communist state’. ‘Troops for Guiana’, 10 October 1953; ‘Doubts on Guiana’, 24 October 1953; ‘Implications of Guiana’, 31 October 1953.

  101.The British enclosed 800 or more Kikuyu villages as well as running a camp system, in which torture was officially sanctioned and routine, for a total detainee population of 1.5 million: Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, New York 2005, pp. xii, xvi, 344.

  102.See ‘Kilawara, Kikuyu and Kenya’, 29 November 1952; ‘Kenya’s Future’, 8 August 1953; ‘More Liberalism’, 21 November 1953; ‘Life in Kenya’, 21 March 1953. Much later: ‘Disquiet over Kenya’, 9 June 1956; ‘Fair Play for Mau Mau’, 28 February 1959; ‘Censure on Whom?’, 20 June 1959; ‘Hola Verdict’, 1 August 1959.

  103.For the central place of Kenya in British plans for colonial development, and their effects on the shift from settler to plantation agriculture controlled by expatriate capital, see Gary Wasserman, The Politics of Decolonization, Kenya, Europeans and the Land Issue, 1960–65, Cambridge 1976; and of the Colonial Development Corporation in getting multinationals like Shell, Unilever, and Imperial Chemical to invest: Robert L. Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, Princeton 1989, pp. 293–386.

  104.Ward despaired ‘of finding any modus vivendi with a power which claims everything and gives nothing’, or with a people who mixed ‘arrogance and fear, contempt and distrust, scorn and inferiority’: Barbara Ward, Policy for the West, New York 1951, pp. 89–93.

  105.‘Divided China’, 13 January 1945; ‘China’s Tepid War’, 20 December 1947. By 1948 the Economist was considering partition, with the Communists getting Manchuria: ‘China without Chiang’, 20 March 1948. The leader on 28 May 1949, ‘South East Asia’, was a call to remain vigilant, even as the Communists’ victory over the Kuomintang looked inevitable.

  106.‘French Fears in Indochina’, 12 November 1949. Progress had been in part due to ‘moral support from the British base in Singapore’: ‘Paris Views Indochina’, 7 July 1951.

  107.‘Strength with Speed’, 8 July 1950; ‘Cost of Defence’, 29 July 1950; ‘Tithe for Safety’, 5 August 1950; ‘Questions for Stalin’, 25 November 1950; see also, ‘Arms and Diplomacy’, 20 January 1951; ‘Cold Class War’, 4 August 1951.

  108.‘War through the Looking Glass’, 26 June 1954; ‘Guatemalans Take Stock’, 24 July 1954. See also ‘Guns for Guatemala’, 29 May 1954 and ‘Banana Split’, 10 July 1954.

  109.A stick with no carrot had led to the ‘debacle’ of the Chinese Revolution, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang had ‘lost the support of the people because its economic and social outlook was too conservative and static’: ‘Policy for Asia?’ 15 April 1950.

  110.And to head off the capitalist crisis to which the Soviets so looked forward: Ward, Policy for the West, pp. 89–93.

  111.In Accra, she saw a model in which investment empowered ‘reasonable nationalists’ like Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister at independence, with whom she used to chat for hours as the Volta River Project got underway. He was ‘very intuitive, very sensitive, with many sound and wise instincts, and under tremendous pressure from the extreme wing of his own party’: Gartlan, Barbara Ward, pp. 65, 92–93, 117.

  112.Ibid., pp. 92–93, 117; Barbara Ward, Faith and Freedom, London 1954, pp. 189, 231–33, 269; Alastair Burnet, ‘After Ten Years’, 26 Octob
er 1974.

  113.Crowther to Layton, 28 June 1955, Layton Papers, TCC, Box 82.127.

  114.Crowther to Layton, 15 August 1955, Layton Papers, TCC, Box 82.131.

  115.Crowther to Warburg, 21 July 1958, Warburg Papers, LSE, /11/13: Mercury Securities was the holding company through which Warburg maintained his family’s control over the merchant bank S. G. Warburg & Co. He was also instrumental in pushing the Treasury and the Bank of England to expand the City’s Euromarkets business: Niall Ferguson, High Financier: The Life and Times of Siegmund Warburg, New York 2010, pp. 216–18, 259.

  116.‘Barbara Ward’, 6 June 1981.

  117.‘Tyerman, Donald (1908–1981)’, Norman Macrae in ODNB; Hugh Brogan, interviewed by the author, November 2011; Barbara Smith, ‘Not So Hard Labour’, Economist, 20 December 2003.

  118.Charles Jones, ‘“An Active Danger”: E. H. Carr at the Times, 1940–46,’ in E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Michael Cox, New York 2000, pp. 68, 76. In the Times, Tyerman rejected Churchill’s assertion that the EAM in Greece were ‘a gang of communists and bandits’. Rather it encompassed ‘the whole range of opinion from centre to extreme left’. Any provisional government ‘must be built around the active and mostly turbulent resistance movement which has kept the flame of nationhood alight under enemy occupation, privation and terror’: John Sakkas, ‘The Times and the British Intervention in Greece in December 1944’, Balkan Studies, 2012, pp. 32–33.

  119.Keith Kyle, Reporting the World, London 2009, pp. 88–89.

  120.Taylor set an example for unpredictability: ‘notoriously on the left’, but as likely to defend the pretender to the French throne as to criticize Soviet fiction. ‘It was not necessary to agree with Alan politically – indeed, as a Liberal, I belonged to the party he most despised – to enjoy his company.’ Kyle, Reporting the World, pp. 18–21.

  121.Ibid., p. 53.

  122.Ibid., p. 21.

  123.Kyle, Reporting the World, 95; Irvin Molotsky, ‘Edwin Dale Jr., Reporter and an Expert in Economics’, New York Times, 11 May 1999; Neil A. Lewis, ‘Adam Yarmolinsky Dies at 77; Led Revamping of Government’, 7 January 2000. Watson’s daughter, Susan Barnes, married Labour frontbencher Tony Crosland in 1964: Julia Langdon, ‘Susan Crosland’, The Guardian, 28 February 2011.

  124.Kyle, Reporting the World, p. 94.

  125.Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, Phoenix Mill 1998, pp. 117–18.

  126.Ibid., pp. 9, 13, 16. For the IRD in the wider context of Western liberal propaganda, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York pp. 49–50, 139 and passim.

  127.Hugh Brogan, interviewed by the author.

  128.Communist subversion remained the ultimate threat for Crozier: ‘His specific target was Leninism. “What about Marxism?” I asked. He looked grave. “Marxism is a philosophy. It has a right to existence. Leninism is activism and a threat to the State.” I owed much to Bonnemaison’: Crozier, Free Agent, pp. 28, 33. Salan, the commander of French forces in Algeria, had tipped off Bonnemaison to de Gaulle’s intentions in 1958.

  129.Ibid., p. 39.

  130.Neo-colonialism (1964), based on a ‘thick folder of IRD documents’, South-East Asia in Turmoil (1965) and The Struggle for the Third World (1966) followed. Ibid., pp. 36, 51.

  131.‘It is by no means certain that the Germans bombed Guernica at all’: Brian Crozier, Franco, Boston 1967, p. 247.

  132.Forum World Features began as the media offshoot of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. Crozier took it over in 1965: Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, p. 134. Crozier kept a meticulous record of the scandal that ensued after Time Out’s revelation, defending himself there and elsewhere. See ‘Conflicting Accounts’, Time Out, 29 Aug–4 September 1975 and Brian Crozier Papers, HIA, Box 1, Folder 3 and Box 6, Folder 1.

  133.Western governments had been hamstrung since 1972 when, ‘egged on by unelected “investigative” journalists’ in the aftermath of Watergate, the US Congress passed Privacy and Freedom of Information Acts, which ‘destroyed US intelligence gathering capacity’ and ‘protected terrorists and political subversives’. Ibid., pp. 111, 126, 257.

  134.Barbara Smith, interviewed by the author; see also ‘The Life of Brian’, 31 July 1993.

  135.Crozier, Free Agent, p. 294.

  136.Ibid., pp. 36, 74, 149.

  137.Midgley wrote this leader. ‘Europe’s Achilles Heel’, Economist, 4 August 1956.

  138.Kyle, Reporting the World, pp. 111–12.

  139.‘French ministers stung to fury by Egyptian support for the Algerian rebels are not the best councillors for a British Prime Minister smarting at his betrayal by an Egyptian president whose advocate he once was.’ ‘Splenetic Isolation’, 3 November 1956.

  140.Elizabeth Monroe, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, 1914–1956, Baltimore 1963, pp. 197–201.

  141.‘The Prime Minister’, 10 November 1956.

  142.Crowther to Tyerman, 13 November 1956, Layton Papers, TCC.

  143.Crozier thought the US could be naïve: mistakenly backing Nasser in 1952, they now halted a brilliant military campaign by their allies, which would have kept Egypt from falling to the Soviets. Crozier, Free Agent, pp. 24–26.

  144.‘The Alliance’, 17 November 1956.

  145.The run began in late October. The first week of November saw £31.7 million depart: Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East, London 2003, pp. 464–65.

  146.Ward had argued that 15 per cent of GDP should be devoted to defence, with 3 per cent for development. In the event, 9 per cent was too much, especially absent US support: Nicholas Mayhew, Sterling: The Rise and Fall of a Currency, London 1999, pp. 246–47.

  147.10 November 1956.

  148.24 November 1956.

  149.Kyle, Reporting the World, p. 116.

  150.Smith, 20 December 2003.

  151.Kyle, Reporting the World, pp. 146–47.

  152.See Keith Kyle, Cyprus: In Search of Peace, London 1997, p. 36; and on Kenyatta and the camps, The Politics of the Independence of Kenya, London 1999, pp. 46–47, 61. From 1974 to 1990, Kyle convened Chatham House’s Middle East Research Group, issuing a book on Israel’s internal politics during Rabin’s premiership, by a group of Anglo-Israeli scholars: Whither Israel? The Domestic Challenges, eds. Keith Kyle and Joel Peters, London 1993.

  153.At no point did the Economist consider abandoning the bases. ‘Half measures in Cyprus’, 21 July 1956; ‘Cyprus After the Storm’, 1957; ‘Tragic Twist in Cyprus’, 1 February 1958; ‘Cyprus Confronts Its Future’, 31 October 1959; ‘An Independent Cyprus?’, 14 February 1959; ‘Cyprus’ 28 February 1959; ‘An Independent Cyprus’, 16 July 1960.

  154.‘What to Say in Africa’, 9 January 1960.

  155.‘White Africans’, 15 October 1960; it eventually accepted dissolution of the federation, given intransigence of white and black leaders, into present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi – ‘Parity of Abuse’, 25 February 1961; ‘Nyasaland’s Choice’, 12 August 1961; ‘Who Will Rule Nigeria?’, 9 July 1960.

  156.Algerie française was now a myth. ‘Without that myth, or some form of it, the French position in Algeria is untenable’: ‘Algeria’s Cry’, 17 December 1960. For the diplomatic and moral victories of the FLN, see Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence, Oxford 2002, p. 134 and passim.

  157.‘Congo Express’, 25 June 1960; ‘Congo Express Derailed’, ‘Ordeal in Leo’, 16 July 1960; ‘Black Man’s Burden’, 21 January 1961; ‘After Lumumba’, 18 February 1961.

  158.20 December 2003.

  159.Cuba, like any other nation, had the right to trade, choose its own form of government and even make alliances with the Soviet Union: ‘Obsessed by Cuba’, 6 October 1962.

  160.‘In his sensibly worded message to Lord Bertrand Russell on Wednesday, [Khrushchev] has shown a keen awareness of the dangers the world is running, and an apparent willingness to negot
iate with Mr. Kennedy’: ‘Cyclone Cuba’, 27 October 1962.

  161.‘After Cuba’, 3 November 1952.

  162.‘It grieves me to say this, as Tyerman – a brave man who had overcome the handicap of legs crippled by polio had been invariably kind to me, despite our political divergences.’ Crozier, Free Agent, p. 47.

  163.Goulart was a reckless populist, guilty of advocating nationalizations and votes for the illiterate, to distract from inflation, and of ‘sterile anti-Americanism’: ‘Brazil Cracks’, 4 April 1964. Most letters, including from the British and Commonwealth Chamber of Commerce, expressed gratitude to the generals for saving Brazil from turning into a ‘second Cuba’: 18 April, 9 May, 6 June 1964. For positive evaluation of the new regime, and its reforms – ‘prepared discreetly, without the demagogic publicity that characterised the unfulfilled promises of the previous regime’ – see ‘Roses for the Generals’, 11 April 1964; ‘Shipshape, Army Style?’, 18 April 1964; ‘Gorillas or Reformers?’ 30 May 1964.

  164.Donald Tyerman to Geoffrey Crowther, 10 July 1963, Layton Papers, TCC, Box 83.137.

  165.Smith, ‘Not so Hard Labour’, 20 December 2003.

  166.There were six Economist staffers on the IRD journalist list up to 1977, or one more than at either the Times or the Telegraph, according to David Leigh in ‘Death of the Department that Never Was’, Guardian, 27 January 1978; ‘Tim Milne, Kim Philby: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal, London 2014; Kim Philby, My Silent War, New York 1968, p. 262. Midgley ‘was in military intelligence during the war, trying to figure out German intentions’. ‘Obituary’, Economist, 4 June 2001. McLachlan, co-foreign editor with Ward from 1947–54, had worked on ‘black propaganda’ during the Second World War for the Foreign Office. Monroe was ex-director of the Middle East division of the Ministry of Information. Honey, who worked in the foreign section, was close to Crozier and the IRD. Lashmar and Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, pp. 118, 115. Elizabeth Monroe, Philby of Arabia, London 1973, p. 288.

  167.Of criticisms levelled against the Conservatives over Suez, or repression in Cyprus, Nyasaland and in Kenya, only the last ‘seem to lack any mitigation at all’: ‘Thursday’s Child’, 3 October 1959.