The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (88 page)

It was left to Britain to man the thinly-stretched Cold War battleline in the Middle East, backed by a pocketful of promises of aid from the white dominions once the shooting started. Dominion units were not included in the exigency plans drawn up for a
coup de main
in Egypt in 1951, or a similar enterprise against Persia the same year.
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And yet, when Sir Anthony Eden heard the first news of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, he took for granted the services of the New Zealand cruiser
Royalist,
then in the Mediterranean.
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Between 1945 and 1951, the Labour government had engaged in the Cold War with all the resolution and, at times, bravado that might have been expected of a virile world power. Its conduct of foreign affairs contrasted strikingly with the tergiversation and nervelessness of the Conservatives in the years immediately before the war. Attlee’s ministers acted as they did because they believed that it was right to parry Russian expansionism, and they were prepared to overlook the vast costs incurred. These soared after the start of the Korean War and, it could be argued, seriously impeded the economic recovery which had been gathering pace since 1949.

Throughout this period, Britain behaved as if it was an imperial power with global interests, even though the effort was back-breaking without the Indian army. Between 1949 and 1953, the Labour government and its Conservative successor imagined that the African empire might prove a substitute for India as a provider of men and material to sustain British pretensions.

Above all, there was the new, multi-racial Commonwealth, in which both Labour and the Conservatives made a substantial political and emotional investment. The dividends then and after were scanty. Two non-white dominions, India and Ceylon, refused to become Britain’s allies in the Cold War; Burma left the Commonwealth in 1948, having become a republic, and was followed by Ireland, also now a republic, in 1949. India adopted a republican constitution in the same year but, after some legal acrobatics, remained a member of a Commonwealth whose nominal head was King George VI. The reason for permitting this anomaly was the fear that India, once outside the Commonwealth, might easily slide into the Communist block. Pakistan joined the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact in 1955, not as a favour to Britain, but as a result of having been seduced by America, which had come courting with a gift of military aid worth $25 million dollars. The white dominions had been indifferent to calls to defend the old imperial lifeline through the Mediterranean and across the Middle East. It now mattered less than ever; the safety of Australia and New Zealand was in American hands, as it had been effectively since 1942, and Canada was solely concerned with the Atlantic and Western Europe.

In a sense the Commonwealth was becoming a surrogate empire. Indeed, when plans for colonial self-government finally matured, it was assumed in London that the former colonies would automatically join the Commonwealth. Whether this body would endow Britain with the same authority, armed strength and prestige it had enjoyed when it ruled a territorial empire and the dominions did whatever London decreed was open to question. And yet, few in mid-twentieth-century Britain chose to examine the nature and function of the Commonwealth too critically. A BBC talk, delivered after the end of the Commonwealth foreign ministers’ conference at Colombo in January 1950, suggested that the Commonwealth might be dismissed as a ‘sentimental, disintegrating club for Blimps’. Then, having said that the Commonwealth lacked both a unified voice on foreign affairs and material strength, the speaker turned a summersault and announced that it ‘has brought us close to the One World idea’.
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If this was the case, the sceptical listener might have wondered why two members, India and Pakistan, were at daggers drawn over Kashmir, and a third, South Africa, in the midst of constructing apartheid, a social order based upon the supremacy of the white race.

As Britain entered the second half of the twentieth century it began to fall victim to the politics of illusion. In 1950 the Labour and Conservative parties had convinced themselves that the Commonwealth was something that should be cherished and was beyond criticism. It was simultaneously advertised to the world as a shining example of international cooperation and evidence of Britain’s continuing status as a world power. This was make-believe on the part of politicians who had failed to come to terms with Britain’s relative decline, and still hoped that the country might somehow manage to stand apart from its overmighty patron, the United States, and a Europe which, by the early 1950s, was taking its first steps towards economic unity. The illusion of power was better than none at all, and Commonwealth leaders were willing accessories in the charade. It offered them the chance to attend high-level conferences and be treated with a reverence their standing and calibre might otherwise not have commanded.

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The increasing use of the word ‘Commonwealth’ to encompass the colonies as well as the dominions coincided with a sustained Communist propaganda campaign in which ‘colonialism’ was equated with the ‘slavery’ and ‘exploitation’ of coloured races by the capitalist powers. Whatever their political complexion, colonial protest movements were grouped together as part of a world-wide struggle against rapacious imperialism. At the end of 1948,
Pravda
reported how in French and British West Africa, the ‘names of Lenin and Stalin were very well known even in forests and [the] smallest villages,’ where people clubbed together to buy wireless sets so they could listen to Radio Moscow.
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Strikers in the Gold Coast in 1948 were inspired by the example of Communist partisans in Indo-China and Indonesia [the former Dutch East Indies], where the Dutch were the pawns of ‘the monopolists of Wall Street’ who were ready to engorge themselves on the country’s wealth. According to
Trud
of 19 August 1948, these bloodsuckers in harness with the City of London, were encouraging the destruction of the Malayan nationalist movement (i.e. Communist party) so as to get their hands on the country’s raw materials.
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The tentacles of the global capitalist conspiracy reached into Africa. According to the veteran West Indian journalist George Padmore, editor of the London-based
Negro Worker,
Britain and America were about to swallow up its resources. Padmore regularly contributed Marxist articles to the
Gold Coast Observer.
During 1948–9, he accused the ‘Trade Union Boss’ Bevin of carrying out Tory policies in Palestine, and speculated as to whether African troops would be used alongside ‘headhunters and bloodhounds’ in the anti-Communist war in Malaya.
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Colonial campaigns were a godsend for Communist copywriters. In November 1952,
Zy
i
Warzawy
published a photograph of Mau Mau suspects with the caption: ‘Here are two members of the “Mau Mau” organisation, manacled like slaves … They fought to liberate Kenya from the imperialist yoke, and for this they were regarded as bandits.’ Under the headline ‘The Colonisers are on the Rampage’,
Komosol Pravda
of 30 June 1953 gave details of operations against the Mau Mau. ‘The soldiers and police are cruelly persecuting the Negro population of this country. News of the mass murders of Negroes arrives each week from Kenya.’ Among the reports cited was one from the British Communist newspaper, the
Daily Worker,
which proclaimed that, ‘Terror reigns in Kenya which can be compared in brutality with only the occupation régime introduced by Nazi SS units.’
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Two things emerge from this welter of crude polemic. The first is the remarkable degree of press freedom which existed in Britain’s colonies. It was in part the result of the application of domestic liberal principles, and in part an acknowledgement of the fact that outspoken journalism was unlikely to upset the colonial apple cart. The ability of a partisan press to make mischief was limited by the absence of mass political parties, or trade unions. In West Africa, where there were more newspapers and readers than elsewhere in the tropical empire, these conditions changed, slowly before the war and rapidly after. Nonetheless, the Colonial Office and its local officials felt strong enough to let matters stand. Had they wished to do otherwise, there would have been repercussions in Britain where, traditionally, state censorship of newspapers was considered intolerable in peacetime.

External Communist propaganda produced by Russia, its satellites, and later China, presented colonial unrest everywhere as part of a single, global struggle between the haves and have-nots, and pledged Communist support to the latter. The fear of Russian and Chinese-sponsored mass revolution in what today is called the Third World scared Washington and London. Whether or not the alarm was in proportion to the actual threat is irrelevant. What mattered was that from 1948 onwards both the British and American governments were extremely jumpy about subversion, not least because they were aware that in many colonies the social and economic conditions were perfect for Communist agitation. Whatever their actual root cause, strikes and political demonstrations were regularly diagnosed as symptoms of underground Communist activity.

At the end of 1947, the Colonial Office asked all colonial governments to report evidence of Soviet propaganda in their local press.
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None was uncovered in Northern Rhodesia, the Gambia, the Seychelles, Bermuda or the Bahamas. From Nigeria came evidence of some academic interest in Marxism and the presence of Communist literature, but no organised party. Cypriot newspapers had contained Communist articles, including one which predicted a surge in American imperial expansion, and there was an abundance of Communist material in the Gold Coast newspapers. This was disturbing, given the high level of political and trade union activity in the colony, and an unexpected outbreak of rioting in Accra in February 1948. Investigations into this outbreak, and others in Singapore and Kenya, added to official jumpiness for they revealed a chilling lack of popular support for the colonial authorities.
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There was, inevitably, an intelligence trawl for evidence of Soviet intrigue in disaffected areas and among African nationalists. Particular attention was given to African students in Britain and politicians who visited the country. For over fifty years, both groups had gravitated towards left-wing circles, including the British Communist party. MI5 reported in 1953 that two prominent Kenyan dissidents had made contact with British Communists, who were ‘apparently afraid to take them much into their confidence’.
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African visitors were more warmly received and fêted by those left-wing Labour MPs, such as Fenner Brockway, who, in Barbara Castle’s words, had a ‘consuming interest’ in all colonial freedom movements.
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Liaisons of this kind worried the Colonial Office which, in a 1951 memorandum on the welfare of colonial students, suggested that the provision of ‘healthy social interests and good living conditions’ might prove an antidote to Communist influences. It was noted that the Conservatives had begun to court African students, who were by now being regarded as the future leaders of their countries.
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In Africa, evidence of organised Soviet subversion was fragmentary. The 1952 Kenyan emergency produced a shoal of intelligence red herrings, and one suspected Soviet agent, Mrs M.A. Rahman, the wife of an Indian diplomat who had just joined the Indian high commission in Nairobi.
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Both she and her husband were carefully watched, but nothing concrete emerged to link either them or Russian intelligence to unrest in Kenya and central Africa.
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The intelligence offensive against what proved to be some somewhat exaggerated Communist infiltration of anti-colonialist movements was matched by official counter-propaganda. Here the United States was keen to lend a hand, and in 1950 the State Department proposed a joint programme of publicity suitable for colonies, using wireless broadcasts in native languages. The Colonial Office was cool. It foresaw ‘political problems’ if Africans were employed by the ‘Voice of America’ in New York, and was unhappy about scarce dollars being spent on imports of American wireless sets into the colonies. Most significantly, there were fears about American control over the content of the broadcasts.
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The Colonial Office placed its faith in existing colonial broadcasting stations, and the sale of ‘saucepan specials’, receivers made by Pye and destined for African listeners. These sets cost £5 each and were, therefore, affordable. In Northern Rhodesia, where the average weekly wage was about one pound, the ‘saucepan specials’ were an immediate success, with a thousand being sold monthly during 1951.
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It was estimated that each receiver attracted an audience of ten, and there were plenty of appreciative letters to the radio station at Lusaka. One read, ‘These wireless sets are ours. Please try to make use of them if we are to be a civilised nation.’
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