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The Continuity of British Foreign Policy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
InTheSummer of 1958 the Gallup poll revealed that for the first time since 1955 a small majority of the British electorate favored the Conservative party. The narrowness of the margin made it dangerous for the Conservatives to call for a new election. But an election will take place within a year. The Conservatives are hopeful of another victory — a third successive victory over the Labour party, to cap their feat, unprecedented with the modern electorate, of increasing the parliamentary membership of the Government party in 1955. The Labour party, however, has been duly warned and has already rallied to cover its divisions, banishing them temporarily to the unconscious perhaps only to produce political neuroses in the future.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1959
References
1 The Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebery (London, 1931), I, 261–262Google Scholar.
2 United Kingdom Policy(London, 1950), p. 11Google Scholar.
3 Several of MacDonald's writings on this subject are cited in Benjamin Sacks, J.Ramsay MacDonald in Thought and Action (Albuquerque, 1952), pp. 544–545Google Scholar.
4 Woolf, , “The International Postwar Settlement” Fabian Publications, Research Series, No. 85 (London, 1944), p. 3.Google Scholar
5 This was precisely the point of much leftist criticism. For example, the frequent speeches of Konni Zilliacus, a Labour M.P. who was deprived of Labour endorsement only to receive it again when in 1955 he successfully ran for parliament. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian, May 3, 1951, Zilliacus wrote: “It [British foreign policy] is for all practical purposes a Coalition foreign policy and was first proclaimed at Fulton in March, 1946.” He branded it as the traditional foreign policy of the balance of power and the arms race. As Britain was the weaker partner in the alliance, Britain had become subservient to the United States.
6 When the Labour party forms a government, the Government's policy is formed by the cabinet and the parliamentary Labour group must support it or bring down the Government. During the election of 1955 I attended a number of meetings addressed by such Bevanites or left-wing spokesmen as Michael Stewart, Wilfred Fienburgh, Bevan, and Harold Wilson. Attlee showed up at several. The meetings followed this order invariably: leftist speeches with severe criticism of the United States (notably by Harold Wilson), then Attlee arrived for a moderate talk, and after his departure the meeting resumed its original tenor.
7 New York Herald Tribune, January 21, 1952.
8 This debate took place on February 5, was interrupted on the following day, and concluded on February 27, 1952.
9 This initially plausible suggestion was most unlikely of adoption by the United Nations. The United Nations was able to act in the Suez crisis because war had broken out but primarily because the United States and the Soviet Union were momentarily in accord. In the field of domestic and foreign policy the debates of democracies concerning past crises provide a treasury of ex-post facto criticism, mournfully affecting in its unacted-upon wisdom and shattering in its unrealism. For example, Anthony Eden in making a Conservative election broadcast noted: ”An important part of the art of diplomacy lies in anticipation. Must we always be taken by surprise? It didn't need any feat of imagination to understand the need for a new pattern of Middle East defense immediately after the war.” New York Herald Tribune, October 20, 1951. The observation was certainly sound, but it is difficult to envisage the Conservative party coming to terms with the forces at play in the Middle East.
10 The Times (London), 12 7, 1951. Stewart Alsop, indiscriminately listing Churchill's disagreement with American policies on the Schuman Plan, the European Army, the defense effort, and his expressed concern over American air bases in Britain asked: “Is Churchill a Bevanite?” New York Herald Tribune, December 19, 1951Google Scholar.
11 This part of the speech apparently was not approved by the Cabinet or the Foreign Office. In later speeches by Government representatives abroad and Conservatives including Cabinet Ministers the emphasis was concentrated on other parts of Churchill's speech; for example, his observation that “this would be the most fatal moment for the free nations to relax their comradeship and preparations.” See speeches by R. A. Butler (July 23), Anthony Nutting (June 27), and Sir Roger Makins (July 6).
12 The New Statesman and Nation, June 5, 1954, with characteristic exaggeration, noted that great bipartisanship then prevailed in British foreign policy, for Churchill in resisting United States pressure for war was deliberately risking a rupture of the Anglo-American alliance.
13 I have dealt with the Suez crisis in “The Suez Crisis and the Containment Policy,” The Review of Politics, XIX (1957), 421–445Google Scholar.
14 York Times, November 25, 1958.