Tomorrow, the Whole World Will Be Yellow!
1958-1963
An apt Telegraph journalist captured the optimistic and expectant mood of British Liberalism in the first years of Jo Grimond’s premiership by comparing the Liberals to the Communist movement of the 1940s. The Liberals were not merely certain of their inevitable and perpetual triumph – they seemed to be winning on every front. The claim ‘’tomorrow, the whole world will be yellow!’’ appeared quite possible.
The Liberals moved busily to attempt to usher in their much vaunted reform programme, within months passing legislation that would create devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland with half of the members of each parliament elected by proportional representation and half through first past the post constituency contests. In the first elections for the new parliaments in 1959 the Liberals achieved a majority in Wales and entered into a Lib-Lab coalition in Scotland having fallen narrowly short of a majority. Elsewhere there were, almost entirely superficial, reforms aimed at empowering local government and homosexuality was legalised (a pet project of Emlyn Hooson who championed a publically unpopular cause).
One of the most burning issues for the Liberal Party was, naturally, electoral reform. Having demanded the adoption of proportional representation for years the Liberals now found themselves in an awkward position in which they were the chief beneficiaries of the system. Not wishing to appear two faced, Grimond angered a number of Liberal ideologues by refusing to radically alter the electoral system without consulting the people through a referendum to be carried out at the next election. The passionate belief of a large number of Liberals in proportional representation, especially amongst Grimond’s allies on the Right of the party, meant that pushing the question of electoral reform forward without dismissing it was a shrewd move even if he risked adopting significantly weakening his own party.
More important to the feel good factor was the success of the Liberal government in overseeing the return of the British economy to steady, if unspectacular, growth. Shortly after coming to office the Liberals passed a budget that provided tax cuts as well as ambitious investments in the expansion and improvement of the country’s road network – with especial focus given to remote and mountainous regions previously badly isolated. With the Liberals buying into the idea of ‘the newly affluent society’ they greatly encouraged car ownership with schemes introduced to provide credit to those looking to buy British made cars in hopes that ever wider sections of the population would purchase them. The Liberals’ budget was given a great deal of the credit as the recession came to a swift end and Britain enjoyed a brief boom going into the 1960s.
Much of the Liberals’ economic programme was made possible by the slashing of the gargantuan military budget of the Eden era. Britain’s entire submarine fleet was scrapped with a fleet of modern vessels around 3/5s the size of the previous fleet put into construction whilst the rest of the Royal Navy saw a 5% reduction in size with the oldest vessels (many of them active since the early stages of the War) being decommissioned. Elsewhere, all plans for the expansion of the Army and RAF were put on hold indefinitely whilst the funding of the modernisation of equipment was reduced by 1/3. As Britain’s nuclear arsenal continued to grow the Liberals theorised that Britain would be able to retain its international military clout without the same levels of spending seen earlier in the decade.
With Anthony Eden’s health becoming a real concern by early 1959 the Conservative Party looked for a new leader. Rather than choose a leader who was drastically opposed to the Liberal government’s policies, the Tories turned to a figure more sympathetic to the government than to some of his own backbenchers. The former Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, would enter battle with Grimond for the hearts of moderate centrist voters – even whilst the voices of the Right within his own party slowly moved towards rebellion.
Internationally, the situation was far more hostile. Shortly after coming to office Grimond had entered into negotiations with the prospective members of the European Economic Community – a proposed Common Market consisting of several Western European States. However, with talks at a very advanced stage in October 1958 the British government had the rug swept from underneath them by events across the Channel. There had been a political crisis brewing in France for some time as the Algerian War fought against Nationalists in France’s most treasured colony continued to rage on and appear ever more unwinnable. With many fearing that the unstable Fourth Republic would be unable to preserve French rule in Algeria a group of army officers made a bungled attempt at a coup d’état that facilitated De Gaulle’s return to power after more than a decade in the wilderness. One of his first major actions on the international stage was to torpedo Britain’s efforts to be included amongst the founding members of the EEC. The Liberal Party had always maintained a strong affinity for European integration, making this defeat especially bitter.
In South Eastern Europe, the return of military dictatorship to Turkey in 1959 was followed rapidly by a more concerning military coup in Greece. The new Greek junta withdrew Greece from NATO and made nationalistic pronouncements over the British occupied Dodecanese Islands as well as Cyprus. The prospect of a war with Greece, however unlikely, was a major cause for concern in London – more pertinently the new junta was believed to be responsible for the increased professionalism of the Greek speaking nationalist insurgents in Cyprus.
In the boom years that followed the Second World War and continued deep into the 1950s Britain eagerly welcomed growing levels of immigration from the Commonwealth with the largest numbers coming from the Indian subcontinent, the West Indies and to a lesser extent British controlled parts of Africa (especially Nigeria) in order to fill a labour shortage. However, following the recession of 1957-58 and brief boom from 58-60 Britain entered into a period of steady but comparatively low growth with West Germany and Italy registering levels of GDP growth nearly twice that of the United Kingdom. In this new economic situation the rate of immigration, upon which there was no limit for Commonwealth citizens, continued to rise. With elements of the Left concerned that continued immigration was acting to supress wages and the Right fearing for social disharmony and cultural degradation for the first time since the great waves of Irish migration in the 19th century immigration was becoming a major political issue in Britain.
Jo Grimond’s Liberal government took a hostile view to the continuation of white minority rule, in whatever form, across Africa. Favouring moves towards granting majority rule and independence to the colonial Empire the British government granted Ghana independence in late 1958 with the following years seeing Tanganyika, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Somalia all gain full independence from British colonial power by the middle of 1962 with Uganda achieving Home Rule and Kuwait in the Persian Gulf also gaining independence. All this, coupled with fierce anti-racist rhetoric emanating from London, did much to alienate the vast white settler populations of Southern Africa. In 1961 the enfranchised white minority of South Africa voted in favour of cutting off ties to the British Commonwealth and founding a Republic out of fear that the British would attempt to interfere in their internal affairs whilst the South African example inspired right-wing groups in Southern Rhodesia to begin to make contingency plans for a rebellion against any British efforts to impose majority rule.
By the end of 41st Parliament only a small number of scattered territories remained under the direct control of British authorities. In areas without substantial settler populations the Grimond government had moved hastily to withdraw – mirroring the actions of the French and Belgians – the majority of the British Empire in Africa was dissolved by 1963 with the informal links of the Commonwealth coming to replace it. Despite the emergence of left wing governments in some former colonies – most notably Ghana – the transition from Empire to Commonwealth was impressively smooth. However, the two key territories with major settler populations, Southern Rhodesia and Kenya, proved a difficult political problem to solve. With both settler populations enjoying close links with military personnel in the region and possessing some degree of political support in metropolitan Britain, decolonisation in these pressure points was put on hold for the future.
The Liberal Party was blighted by factional disputes throughout the period that followed its electoral triumph in 1958. Yet, in truth, only the stridently ‘Yellow’ or ‘Liberal’ faction based around Grimond and the ‘Orange’ Social Democrats wielded the power to direct the future of the party. In 1960 the Social Democrats secured an extremely important victory within the trade union movement as George Woodcock was elected as General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress. Unlike his predecessor Woodcock was willing to unreservedly support the Liberal Party at Labour’s expense yet Grimond fiercely resisted any attempts by Woodcock to negotiate the formal affiliation of various labour unions to the party. In return for substantial political support and bankrolling the Liberals’ 1958 election victory the trade unions had earned little in return. After the recovery from the 1957-58 recession the Liberals had allowed wages to start to stagnate and from 1961 unemployment to rise. The pressure being applied by the labour movement to help reverse this trend greatly strengthened the hand of the Orange block within the Liberal Party with James Callaghan making radical proposals for major reforms to the party structure and a more Left of Centre outlook to its policies.
Although the leaders of the major parties were broadly supportive of the cause of decolonisation – especially when carried out in such an orderly fashion – it would be wrong to claim that British politics were devoid of radical oppositionists. In the aftermath of South Africa’s decision to leave the Commonwealth in 1961 a group of leading traditionalists within the Conservative Party had grouped together to form the ‘Monday Club’ this was just another manifestation of an increasingly vocal and ideologically cohesive right-wing opposition within the party. The most prominent spokesperson of the Tory Right was none other than the one time National Liberal Enoch Powell. Powell and the Tory Right criticised their leader Harold Macmillan as a Whig, a Liberal in a blue tie and little more than a cheerleader for Grimond and his cronies. The Liberals were seen to be ripping the British Empire apart, undermining the unity of the nation by supporting devolution, harming the nation’s economy and society through continued support for unrestricted Commonwealth immigration, further legitimising socialistic state economic planning and allowing Britain to slip into the state of a second rate power. In the years after 1961 these radicals would rapidly grow in influence within the Conservative Party and beyond – appealing to a wide section of British society.
In the Far East, international tensions were slowly rising as the War in Indonesia dragged on and slowly expanded. From early in the conflict Australian forces had been involved following incursions by Indonesian Communists over the border into the Australian administered half of New Guinea but from 1961 Malaysia’s provinces on Borneo started to be affected by an insurgent movement closely linked to the INLF (Indonesian National Liberation Front). As the new hawkish American President, John F Kennedy, poured resources into the war in Indonesia, Communist inspired insurgencies began to break out in the Philippines, Malaya itself, Thailand and the former territories of French Indochina where the guerrillas had only never been totally defeated in the aftermath of the conflicts in the late 1940s. With two Commonwealth Realms directly threatened by the wars in South-East Asia there was heavy pressure for Britain to involve itself militarily – pressure that the British government chose to resist.
In October 1962 the world came terrifyingly close to the outbreak of nuclear war. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959 ousted the country’s American sponsored President the United State adopted a hostile attitude to the country’s new revolutionary government – even sponsoring a failed invasion attempt in 1961. Fearing for Cuba’s safety from further attacks Fidel Castro appealed to the Soviet Union for aid with the Russian eagerly accepting and deploying short range nuclear missiles to the island. In the standoff that ensured after the Americans discovered the missiles the world held its breath before Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to stand down and withdraw the missiles averted a conflict.
Closer to home, by 1963 the IRA campaigns began during 1957 had been all but defeated. As the Ulster Unionist Party resisted Liberal attempts to encourage reform, buoyed but its capture of all 12 Northern Irish constituencies in 1958, the Protestant authorities in Northern Ireland had responded to violence with violence – eventually leading to the IRA choosing to move away from armed resistance. None the less, although no longer in direct confrontation with the authorities in the six counties the IRA remained a potentially powerful force of militant opposition.
When British troops had rolled into Cairo in 1957 to overthrow Nasser’s Egyptian government many in the West had hoped that the ghost of Anti-British Arab Nationalism had been exorcized for good. Instead, just two years after Nasser’s fall, a group of left wing officers overthrew the pro-British Hashemite Monarchy in Iraq with the explicitly Socialist, pro-Soviet and Pan-Arabist Ba’ath Party forming a hostile one party dictatorship from 1960. Hoping to solidify their popular support, the Ba’athists had moved to nationalise foreign owned properties including British oil interests. With Iraq being incomparable in its economic value to Egypt or Iran the dovish Grimond government was unwilling to turn to military means as his predecessor had done and instead merely lodged diplomatic protests.
The situation escalated further from 1961 as Baghdad began to sponsor guerrillas in the British dominated, and fabulously oil rich, Sheikdom of Kuwait. As Britain moved towards new elections in the first months of 1963 the tense situation in the Gulf would mushroom beyond all proportions. From January 20th-24th the Kuwaiti authorities carried out a series of civilian massacres against communities believed to be aligned with the Iraqi sponsored rebels. In response to the massacres the Iraqis denounced the Kuwaiti government and began to amass troops along the border. With elections due to take place in Britain on February 14th, Iraqi artillery began to shell Kuwaiti troops on February 9th with war being declared that same day. Out of nowhere, British interests in the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East as a whole, had suddenly radically altered electoral campaign of Britain’s parties as they were forced to take account of the crisis in the Gulf.