Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, 'Race' and the Radical Left in the 1960s

J. Burkett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137008916
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The end of empire shaped the way the British public saw their place in the world, society and the ethnic and racial boundaries of their nation. Focussing on some of the most controversial organisations of the 1960s, this book illuminates their central importance in constructing post-imperial Britain.

Part I

Britain’s Changing International Position

1

British ‘Greatness’ after Empire

As Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said, the ‘winds of change’ were sweeping through the British Empire in 1960.¹ India, Pakistan and Ghana were already independent states and, within a few short years, all of Britain’s African colonies followed. While MacMillan’s pronouncement referred specifically to political changes in Britain’s African colonies, no one, including MacMillan, could yet foresee what sort of impact these changes would have on politics, society and culture within the United Kingdom. It was apparent that politicians, senior civil servants and the upper classes put great stock in the empire, but the extent to which the majority of Britons knew or cared about the empire has been widely disputed.² The extreme right were certainly concerned about the loss of empire as were the more moderate right wing of the Conservative Party. Churchill himself was a strong advocate of empire and particularly bemoaned the loss of India.³ The picture on the left was slightly more complicated. Labour Party policy was that Britain should give up its empire. Opposition to empire was one of the few truly unifying aspects of the postwar British left.⁴ There was general agreement that colonies and colonial peoples should be in control of their own destinies, but what exactly this meant for Britain – what this did to Britain’s international position, its place in the world – was a point of dispute. And, of course, this was complicated by the emergence of two new superpowers. Whether they liked it or not, Britain was no longer at the head of the international table. For the government, this was made abundantly clear in 1956 with the Suez Crisis. Eden’s failed attempt to retake the Suez canal and demonstrate British ongoing military and political superiority forced a reconsideration within government circles about Britain’s place in the world.⁵ However, it took much longer, at least a decade, for this reconsideration to trickle down to the British public and into British society.

Examining the ways in which the end of empire impacted on notions of British identity and society among the left is a study in contradiction. An assumption that Britain continued to be a ‘great’ power was accompanied by the belief that empire was an outdated notion. The tension between these two ideas, when it was recognised, was addressed by the argument that Britain’s greatness was, or should be, founded on a new basis, that of morality rather than military might and control of other territories. Arguments about Britain’s identity as a tolerant and moral nation, used in debates about slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and revived in the twentieth century during both world wars, were once again deployed to differentiate Britain from the new nuclear ‘superpowers’. Throughout the period under investigation here the Cold War defined international politics and squeezed the space for independent powers who were forced to choose allegiance to one superpower-dominated block or the other. Like many other countries Britain was looking for a way to carve themselves some space, power and influence in this situation which allowed them to be both strong allies with the United States and preserve some international autonomy. An awareness of this problem stretched across the political spectrum and from government down to activists at the grassroots level. How exactly Britain should address this problem was the source of long-standing and heated debate both within the halls of power and on the streets.

The first part of Constructing Post-Imperial Britain addresses this question. It explores the many ways in which the radical left attempted to shore-up or redefine Britain’s international position. We will examine the importance of Britain’s relationships to the superpowers, particularly the United States, and international organisations in Chapter 2 and the lasting impact of the empire and commonwealth for Britain’s international position in Chapter 3. But first, this chapter explores how CND, the AAM, the NUS and the NICR movement conceptualised Britain’s changing international position. The discussion of British ‘greatness’ within CND dominates the beginning parts of this chapter while the attitudes of the AAM, NUS and NICR movement enter into the discussion in the second half of the chapter. None of these groups were under any illusion that Britain’s international position remained the same in the late 1950s as it had been in the 1880s or even the 1930s. In fact, they were glad that Britain was no longer the world’s policeman. The radical left is often assumed to be internationalist rather than nationalist or patriotic in orientation. However, each of these organisations were clearly national in focus as James Hinton and Holger Nehring have shown in relation to peace protestors.⁶ On the radical left, arguments for Britain’s ongoing ‘greatness’ were made most clearly within the anti-nuclear movement. CND saw the end of empire and the creation of a modern, post-imperial, Britain as an opportunity for Britain to reclaim its position as moral compass of the world. Britain’s international importance was also assumed by the AAM, the NUS and groups within the NICR movement. Although this assumption is sometimes difficult to detect it was just as important as the overt claims of the anti-nuclear movement. Over the course of the 1960s this expectation or assumption of British ‘greatness’ was increasingly questioned by those on the left. The end of empire allowed for a re-imagining of the kind of world power Britain was and should be. But the recognition of the end of empire and creation of Britain as a post-imperial power did not take place at one particular moment. It was a process and it was not a smooth or easy one.

Postwar British history has often been described as a story of decline in which the loss of empire is a key indicator of this decline.⁷ But this popular story of perpetual, or inevitable, decline is too simplistic. It does not take into account that there were discussions and disagreements within all areas of British society about how to interpret and negotiate Britain’s changing international position. This chapter shows that in the 1960s it was not a foregone conclusion that Britain’s international position was diminishing. Ideas about what kind of international power post-imperial Britain should be were nuanced, contested and non-linear in their development during this decade. This chapter will conclude by examining how these groups came to depend on their own international importance. While the expectation of British central international importance remained, by the end of the decade the location of this power had shifted from the government to Britons themselves.

CND and the Desire to Increase Britain’s Moral ‘Greatness’

‘Britain Must Give the Lead’, proclaimed the first anti-nuclear march to the Atomic Weapons Research establishment at Aldermaston on the Easter weekend 1958.⁸ Initially organised by the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear Weapons (DAC), this march was supported by CND and quickly became the single most important activity within CND’s yearly calendar. But exactly why Britain should lead, what they should lead and why they were not already leading was left unspoken. It was clear to CND and its supporters that Britain was going in the wrong direction with nuclear weapons. CND argued that Britain should be the world leader in disarmament and moral authority, not one of the nuclear powers. Britain tested its first atomic weapon in 1952 and in 1957 tested its first hydrogen bomb.⁹ CND was created, in early 1958, in part to show the British government a new way to maintain their leadership of the world ‘if no longer as a military power, then by setting a moral example’.¹⁰ Formed by a collection of the ‘great and the good’, including J.B. Priestly, Bertrand Russell, Kingsley Martin, Julian Huxley, Michael Foot and Canon John Collins, CND was an umbrella organisation which set out to unify the myriad small groups that existed to oppose the bomb and nuclear testing.¹¹ CND was, therefore, a broad church unified around the simple slogan ‘ban the bomb’ but, increasingly over the course of the decade, divided about how to get there.¹² It is hard to accurately gauge CND support. They did not have official membership until the mid-1960s. However, their perceived impact on activism in Britain in the 1960s, and the left more generally, still looms large. Throughout the extensive literature on CND it is argued that they were a way of expressing ‘reluctance to come to terms with the sudden loss of British international power and prestige’.¹³ The nuclear bomb itself was understood by CND as evil and the fundamental problem, while the solution was seen to be action from the British government.¹⁴

CND acknowledged that in the aftermath of the Second World War Britain was no longer a key military power. The toll that the war had taken on Britain, and the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as military, and particularly nuclear, superpowers arguably put Britain in the role of a second-rate power. Both postwar British governments and CND had plans to reverse this trend. Unfortunately, they were diametrically opposed. Whereas governments planned to keep Britain at the international top table by developing a British bomb, CND argued that it was by eschewing the nuclear game that Britain could reclaim its nineteenth-century ‘greatness’. The moral ‘greatness’ that Britain had shown in ending the slave trade and slavery, CND argued, they could regain by spearheading a non-nuclear solution to international problems. Reports about CND’s first meeting within Peace News highlighted the speech by former Liberal and Labour MP Richard Acland. The article suggested that Acland’s speech was particularly popular because he

stressed the movement’s particular appeal to young people who had felt apathetic and frustrated by the absence of clear-cut issues such as the slave trade, the fight for trade unionism, old-age pensions, women’s suffrage, and other causes which had inspired young people in the past.¹⁵

CND aimed to give the abolition of nuclear weapons the moral fortitude that had been enjoyed by the campaign to abolish the slave trade. Many CND banners, as Meredith Veldman points out, ‘pointed to Britain’s leadership in ridding the world of the slave trade’ which, she says, was part of the ‘British tradition of benevolent reform’.¹⁶ Even Bertrand Russell, in 1961, pointed to this aspect of Britain’s past as a moral leader. He believed that

when we say, ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’, our hearts swell with pride and we feel, though we do not explicitly say, that we should be slaves if we were not free at any moment to commit any crime against any other country.¹⁷

Russell was linking nuclear weapons to slavery and attacking the government position that only by having nuclear weapons, and, therefore, being able to commit mass murder, would they be able to retain British ‘greatness’. Instead, Russell and the other CND supporters, attempted to reclaim the pride they felt in being part of this progressive, moral state by urging Britain to unilaterally disarm and show the world a new moral path.¹⁸

CND was clear in their assessment that Britain’s role as a military leader was spent. They were particularly vocal about this in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.¹⁹ The CND leadership argued that the crisis had shown the emptiness of the government’s claim that having nuclear weapons gave Britain international clout. The fact that the world had come to the brink of nuclear disaster and Britain had not figured in the discussions or negotiations seemed to CND to prove this. In January 1963, the CND newspaper Sanity published an article which explicitly stated that

Britain’s role as an independent nuclear power is played out. Will the British people now recognise this, and demand a change of role? Britain had tried to be a great Power in the military sense and has failed miserably. But CND says that there are other kinds of greatness. We have been pointing them out for a long time. Can we now start exploring them?²⁰

The path that Britain should be on, according to CND and other anti-nuclear campaigners, was that towards unilateral disarmament. CND argued that Britain needed to give up the bomb both because the bomb was inherently amoral, but also because British unilateral disarmament would show other states that it was possible to abandon the nuclear arms race. CND was accused of being ‘utopian’ or symbolic in this demand. To CND supporters, however, it was much more than this. As Laurie Pavitt, MP for Willesden West, said in 1962, ‘the Campaign must continue to press the point that Britain’s unilateral disarmament was not “merely a gesture”, but was a practical first step towards a world without arms’.²¹ The CND leadership firmly believed in the early 1960s that Britain’s international prestige was so high that if it abandoned nuclear weapons, other states including the superpowers would follow.²² Britain merely had to ‘lead’ the world along the correct, moral, anti-nuclear path.

The phrase ‘Let Britain Lead’ was the basis of CND actions from its foundation through to the mid-1960s. After the original London to Aldermaston March which bore this slogan, CND held a week-long national awareness event in September 1959 under the same heading.²³ Four years later, in 1963, this phrase was again resurrected as the title of a CND meeting organised to introduce a new policy initiative.²⁴ Although this policy was a step back from unilateralism, it still required a British initiative to change the world and still, rhetorically at least, saw an important role for Britain as an international moral leader.

This role as a moral leader was intrinsic to the post-imperial British identity that CND supporters were helping to create.²⁵ CND supporters were ashamed of the path that Britain was on, participating in the nuclear game by possessing British weapons. This seemed to be the continuation of the old, amoral British Empire. If Britain gave up its nuclear weapons, CND argued, it would re-instil pride in the British people, showing a new, modern and post-imperial Britain. Ritchie Calder, Scottish peace activist and future president of CND, wrote a public memo to the incoming prime minister in 1964, which pleaded,

Do me a personal favour, Prime Minister, give me back my pride in my own country. Let me push out my chest, and say: ‘I am Br...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Britain’s Changing International Position
• Part II: Post-Imperial Britishness at Home
• Part III: ‘Race’ and Post-Imperial Britishness
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index