The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (77 page)

As a result, when the draft statute was debated in November 1931, it made ‘heavy weather’.
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Churchill, the grand rebel, appealed to both strands of the Die Hard tradition, linking Ireland and India in a Cassandra-like warning of impending decay. Ominously for the government, he drew ‘ministerial cheers’ – support from the Conservative benches.
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To ward off the danger of a deeply embarrassing retreat (and an open division among the Conservative followers of the National Government), all the stops were pulled out. Jimmy Thomas, the rough diamond Dominions Secretary, warned that any delay would enrage not just the Irish but the South Africans as well. The Attorney-General, Inskip, insisted (inaccurately) that the legal standing of the Anglo-Irish treaty was unaffected by the Statute (a view overturned by the House of Lords three years later). A letter from Cosgrave, the Free State prime minister, was read out in the Commons, denying any intent to alter the treaty except by agreement. Austen Chamberlain, the party's grandest elder statesman and (like Churchill) a signatory of the treaty, declared his faith in the Free State government. Baldwin, as party leader, warned his supporters that delaying the Statute would deeply offend the dominions ‘even the most British of them’, and shrewdly referred to the prize that most of them (though not Churchill) wanted most: the forthcoming conference on imperial economic unity.
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It was enough to secure an overwhelming majority.

As Churchill had prophesied, Cosgrave soon dropped through the trap-door, to be replaced by De Valera. But, the Free State apart, most opinion in Britain observed little change in the dominion relationship. Jimmy Thomas’ claim that the Statute was the ‘cutting away of dead wood which will render possible new growth’
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was largely accepted. Certainly, among ministers, scepticism about the honesty and even the intelligence of dominion politicians was deeply ingrained. Close encounter at Ottawa reinforced this impression: ‘Bennett a cad and deceitful’ (Baldwin); ‘Bluff!! Mendacity!! Dishonest!! Liar!!’ (Neville Chamberlain); ‘Bennett a liar’ (Thomas).
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The financial instincts of Australian leaders were viewed with suspicion. When New Zealand's first Labour government declared its support for a ‘planned economy’, the reaction was bemused irritation at such doctrinaire folly. But, if most politicians in the overseas dominions were regarded in Britain as parochial in outlook and meagre in talent, they also seemed free of any ‘nationalist’ aspirations to ‘real’ independence. The ‘British’ identity of Canada, Australia and New Zealand was taken for granted. The exception was South Africa, whose ‘native policy’ had already attracted humanitarian disapproval in Britain.
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But doubts over South African ‘loyalty’ were largely assuaged by the entry of Smuts into coalition with Hertzog in 1933. The most ardent British imperialists, including Leo Amery, Edward Grigg and Lionel Curtis who kept the Milnerite faith, were also among Smuts’ warmest admirers. Appeasing Afrikaner demands for the symbols of sovereignty was the surest way, so they argued, of creating a loyal Anglo-Afrikaner dominion. They looked forward to the prospect of a union of two peoples (the blacks were invisible) that would ‘follow the history of the Union of England and Scotland’.
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The powerful Anglo-South African interest entrenched in the City, at
The Times
, and in academe as well, exerted its influence against any criticism that might offend Afrikaners and endanger the prospects of ‘fusion’ as the South African historian, W. M. Macmillan, found when coming to Britain in 1934.
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This complacent British view of their dominion relations did not extend to India. Between 1928 and 1935, three British governments wrestled with Indian ‘reform’: to frame a new constitution that would win Indian consent – or at least acquiescence. Part of their problem was the refusal of the Congress to accept anything short of full independence, with a ‘strong’ central government. But they were also hemmed in by the widespread unease in the Conservative party that extended well beyond the notorious Die Hards. Neither the minority Labour government of 1929–31 nor the National Government that followed it could hope to enact a new constitution unless its Conservative critics were kept to a minimum. The main difficulty lay in persuading Conservative party opinion that elective self-government should be granted not just to the provinces (as the 1930 Simon Report had proposed and to which even most Die Hards agreed), but to the centre as well, and that India should be promised a future as a self-governing dominion. A loud chorus of outrage, orchestrated by Churchill, denounced both these ideas. It drew on a mass of inherited prejudice about Indian incapacity (lovingly cultivated by generations of ‘Old India Hands’), as well as more recent alarm about caste and communal violence. It castigated the betrayal of imperial duty, an ethos still loudly proclaimed in other parts of the Empire. It exploited the embarrassing absence of Indian leaders pledged to work the reforms in a loyal and cooperative spirit, and pointed instead to the Congress campaign of civil disobedience from mid-1930. It took up the cause of Lancashire cotton, whose waning market in India might decline even more if a self-governing India adopted local protection. It evoked an intangible sense that conceding self-rule to ‘
babu
’ politicians (so often the butt of official disparagement) would mark a shameful defeat, a blow to ‘race-pride’, and a public avowal that British ‘decline’ had become irreversible.

The pull of these powerful emotions was sometimes unnerving. To Conservative leaders, the danger of being painted as less than loyal to the Empire posed an obvious risk. A sudden upset in India might set off an earthquake in the mood of their followers. Their endorsement of the 1933 constitutional plan offering India responsible government at the centre, and future dominionhood as an ‘All-India’ federation, was shot through with unease. Yet, at the reform bill's second reading in February 1935, it was supported by more than three-quarters of Conservative MPs.
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It seems very unlikely that (as has sometimes been claimed) this decisive result reflected a falling away in the British commitment to Empire. Its arduous passage suggests quite the reverse. The real explanation for the success of the bill was both the widespread belief that (in its eventual form) it would secure key British interests without a sterile (and costly) repression, and the backing it won from almost all senior politicians. To accuse this great phalanx of age and authority (what Lord Hugh Cecil called ‘Front Benchdom’
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) of being indifferent to the safety of British world power was too much even for Churchill.

But what lay behind this consensus, and how had it been built? Perhaps the critical stage was the conversion of Baldwin, the Conservative leader, to the need to make more than purely provincial concessions, and offer progress towards Indian self-government at the centre. Like Ramsay MacDonald, Baldwin accepted the view of Lord Irwin (whom he had appointed as Viceroy) that a way had to be found to reconcile Indian ‘moderate’ opinion to the British connection, and that to appear to renege on the promise of eventual self-government made in 1917 would be politically fatal. It chimed with his instinct that the art of good government was holding the centre against the extremes – in both Britain and India. On three vital occasions – in November 1929, in March 1931 and in December 1934 – Baldwin threw all his prestige behind the cause of reform. His message was shrewd. Again and again he insisted that the aim of concession was ‘to keep India in the Empire’;
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that to fall back on repression ‘would break up the Empire’ (a silent reminder of Ireland);
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that ‘the Empire was organic and alive and in constant process of evolution’
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and could not be governed by Victorian methods. ‘The present proposals’, he told his Cabinet colleagues in March 1933 when the reform scheme white paper was about to be published, ‘might save India to the Empire, but if they were not introduced we should certainly lose it.’
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Indeed, far from conceding that Britain's position in India had become a lost cause, or that its Empire was redundant, Baldwin argued the opposite, portraying his Die Hard opponents as defeatists and wreckers with obsolescent ideas. ‘The Empire of today’, he declared in a memorable phrase, ‘is not the Empire of the first Jubilee.’
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Baldwin could count on two useful supports. First, some of the most ardent imperialists shared his view of India, including Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of
The Times
. They rejected Die Hard ideas as crude and old-fashioned, and Churchill himself as a political fossil. Secondly, the expert advice from the ‘men on the spot’ echoed the need for an advance at the centre to draw the sting of the Congress and force it back into ‘constitutional’ politics. Two recent ex-Viceroys, Lords Reading (1921–6) and Irwin (1926–31), pressed the same case.
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Retired Indian officials were quietly called up to preach the new gospel. The ‘Union of Britain and India’ society was formed in May 1933 to back the white paper policy: its chairman, steering committee and membership were almost entirely made up from former members of the Indian Civil Service.
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Churchill could play on the fears of Conservative activists and enjoyed the support of two great press barons, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, both old foes of Baldwin. But some of his allies mistrusted his motives; his tactics in Parliament offended even some of his friends; and his knowledge of India was transparently shallow. The Die Hards’ best hope was to stir up enough internal party division to frighten the leadership into dropping the bill. Their most dangerous claim was that under its rules the Congress would capture the vast bulk of the seats in any central assembly, and that an Indian dominion on the Statute of Westminster model could repeal any safeguards that London laid down. It was precisely these points that worried Austen Chamberlain, who exerted his influence over a large middle group otherwise sympathetic to the government scheme. But, once the Cabinet agreed to excise any reference to India's future ‘Dominion Status’ from the bill, and to adopt indirect election to the proposed federal assembly, it won over the last major figure with the power to obstruct it.
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Of the seventy-nine Conservative MPs who rejected the bill in February 1935, only Churchill himself had held cabinet rank. ‘Front benchdom’ had triumphed.

The price of consensus had been a large helping of caution. The bill's supporters assumed that India's advance to self-government would be closely controlled by the Viceroy (armed with an arsenal of ‘safeguards’); that London's grip on India's army and its external relations would remain absolute for a long time to come; that the Congress would be hobbled by the constitutional privileges conferred on the Muslims and Princes; and that India's dominionhood (the content of which was left carefully vague) would only begin at an unspecified time in the future. How far these conditions could be imposed in fact, and in constitutional theory, will be discussed later on. But, as an index of British ideas about their own place in the world, the Act is revealing. The sound and fury of the Die Hard campaign was a noisy distraction. What really stood out was the solid insistence of the most ardent reformers that India must remain part of the British world-system, and that, until its leaders accepted this ‘imperial’ fate, they would languish in the limbo of semi-self-government.

Of course, opinion in Britain on India and the Empire was not monolithic. On the Left, the reform scheme was derided as too little and too late to reconcile the nationalists in India. The turn to protection revived the old radical charge that economic imperialism was bound to bring war. Labour's election manifesto in 1935 urged ‘equitable arrangements for access to markets, the international control of…raw materials and…the extension of the mandate system to colonial territories’.
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It was the Cobdenite formula: more free trade meant more peace. But most of those who condemned the current practice of rule in the Empire imagined a future in which Britain was the centre of a loyal community of self-governing satellite states, bound together by common interests and values. There is little reason to think that this imperial world-view was unrepresentative of British opinion at large. ‘The people of this country’, remarked Neville Chamberlain, ‘have a deep sentiment about the Empire, but it is remote from their ordinary thoughts’.
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Perhaps this was true, although there was much to remind even the least politically minded of Britain's imperial ties – not least the stream of those travelling to the white dominions and back. Indeed, ‘ordinary’ opinion in Britain relied for its knowledge of much of the world on accounts that were shaped by settler, administrative, missionary or commercial interests, each in their way committed to empire. In the inter-war years, as much if not more than in previous eras, three grand propositions still framed British thinking: that they formed a distinct British ‘race’ among the world's peoples;
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that their institutions and culture enjoyed both global pre-eminence and universal appeal; and that Britain was still the emporium of the world's trade and ideas. Set against these, the divisions and boundaries
within
their imperial system seemed of little importance. ‘The British prefer to emphasize the unity of the Empire’, remarked an acute foreign observer. ‘To them England and the Empire are one, and no such thing exists as an England conceived separately.’
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