Dozen Lessons From British History. Reader

all, sea power — held the empire together. White colonies, like Canada or New Zealand and the states of Australia, had been given substantial powers of self-government since 1840. Yet, India, “the brightest jewel in the British crown,” was held not by consent but by conquest.

Britain tried to make sure its trade routes were safe and fought wars to protect its areas of interst. In 1839 it attacked China and forced it to allow the profitable British trade in opium from India to China.

In May of 1857, the Indian Mutiny, a widespread revolt in India against the rule of the British East India Company, was sparked by sepoys (native Indian soldiers) in the Company’s army. The rebellion involved not just sepoys but many sectors of the Indian population as well. The Indian “mutiny” was suppressed, and a year later the East India Company was abolished and India came under the direct rule of the British crown. Imperial control was tightened, too, through the construction of a network of railways, although the nationalist movement that emerged after the first Indian National Congress in 1885 was eventually to gain in strength. Meanwhile, given the strategic importance of India to the military establishment, attempts were made to justify British rule in terms of benefits of law and order said to accrue to Indians.

During 1875, Britain purchased Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal as the African nation was forced to raise money to pay off its debts. In 1882 Egypt was occupied to secure the vital trade route, and the passage to India and Egypt became a protectorate of Great Britain.

It was the Middle Eastern crisis of 1875–78 that produced the liveliest 19th-century debate on foreign policy issues. In May 1876 Disraeli rejected overtures made by Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany to deal jointly with Turkey, which was faced with revolt in Serbia. Disraeli’s calculations concerned strategic and imperial necessities rather than ideals of conduct, and his suspicions were justified when the Russians attacked Turkey in April 1877. In 1878 a British fleet was sent to the Dardanelles and Indian troops were sent to the Mediterranean. The immediate crisis passed, and, at an international conference held in Berlin in June and July 1878, which Disraeli attended, the inroads into Turkish territory were reduced, Russia was kept well away from Constantinople, and Britain acquired Cyprus.

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Between 1896 and 1902, public interest in problems of empire was intensified by crisis. British–Boer relations in South Africa were worsened after the Jameson raid of December 1895, and, in October 1899, war began. The early stages of the struggle were favourable to the Boers, and it was not until spring 1900 that superior British equipment began to count. British troops entered Pretoria in June 1900 and the Boer president fled to Europe, where most governments had given him moral support against the British. Thereafter the Boers followed guerrilla tactics, and the war did not end until May 1902. It was the most expensive of all the 19th-century “little wars,” with the British employing 450,000 troops, of whom 22,000 never returned.

While the war lasted, there had been an even bigger break in January 1901 when the queen died, after a brief illness, in her 82nd year. She had ruled for 64 years and her death seemed to mark not so much the end of a reign as the end of an age.

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Lesson 11

Britain in the first half of the 20th century

A visitor to England in the reign of King Edward VII, between 1901 and 1910 might well have felt that the country was run by an oligarchy — a government by the few: in this case a combination of the aristocracy with the richest manufacturers and bankers. The political power of the oligarchy was based upon the sufferance of the voters. In the first decades of the 20th century, Britain was not a democracy, in that half the adult population had no vote, but almost half did possess the vote, and were beginning to understand the power which it put in their hands. Trade union membership in the early 1900s had already passed three million, nearly all men. In February 1900 a labour representation conference was held in London at which trade unionists and socialists agreed to found a committee to promote the return of Labour members to Parliament. This conference marked the beginning of the 20th-century Labour party, which, with Liberal support, won 29 seats at the general election of 1906. Although until 1914 the party at Westminster for the most part supported the Liberals, it was eventually to take the place of the Liberal Party as the second party in the state.

The Liberals returned to power in December 1905. The new government embarked upon a program of social legislation. In 1906 free school meals were made available to poor children; in 1907 a school medical service was founded; in 1908 a Children’s Act was passed, along with an Old Age Pensions Act granting pensions under prescribed conditions to people over 70; in 1908 the miners were given a statutory working day of eight hours. The vigour of these reforms owed much to a partnership between Winston Churchill at the Board of Trade and David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer.

Lloyd George’s budget of 1909 set out deliberately to raise money to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.” The money was to come in part from a supertax on high incomes and from capital gains on land sales. The budget so en-

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raged Conservative opinion, inside and outside Parliament, that the Lords, already hostile to the trend of Liberal legislation, rejected it, thereby turning a political debate into a constitutional one concerning the powers of the House of Lords. It was not until August 1911 that the peers eventually passed the Parliament Act by 131 votes to 114. The act provided that money bills could become law without the assent of the Lords and that other bills would also become law if they passed in the Commons and failed in the Lords three times within two years.

The most important legislation was once more associated with Lloyd George—the National Insurance Act of 1911, which provided, on a contributory basis, for limited unemployment and health insurance for large sections of the population.

World War I

The seeds of international war, sown long before 1900, were nourished between 1902 and August 1914. Two intricate systems of agreements and alliances—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Britain—faced each other in 1914. Both were backed by a military and naval apparatus (Britain had been building a large fleet and reforming the army), and both could appeal to halfinformed or uninformed public opinion. The result was that a war that was to break the continuities of history started as a popular war.

The 1914 crisis began in the Balkans, where the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in June 1914. Soon Austria, backed by Germany, and Russia, supported by France, were arrayed against each other. The British Cabinet was divided, but after the Germans invaded Belgium on August 4, thereby violating a neutrality that Britain was committed by treaty to support, Britain and Germany went to war.

The government at that period drew criticism for its war policies. For one, Britain was unable to help Romania when it declared war upon the Central Powers in the summer of 1916. More significantly, Britain launched its first major independent military operation, the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 13, 1916), with disastrous results. On the first day of battle the British suffered almost 60,000 casualties. Although little of strategic significance was accomplished, the battle brought the reality of war home to Britain. Dissatisfaction with the government mounted.

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Not only had Britain’s supreme military effort in 1916 failed but the war had lost its meaning. Belgium was forgotten, still more Serbia. Thus, in the next two years, the government set out to reinvest the war with meaning. Its purpose would be to create a better Britain and a safer world.

The war blurred the frontiers between the classes and the sexes. The war changed the position of women, bringing political, and to some extent economic and social, emancipation. With the outbreak of war the woman suffrage movement had turned its attention wholeheartedly to the military effort. Large numbers of women were employed by the ministry of munitions, smaller numbers by private armament makers (against serious opposition by unions), and still fewer in government and private offices.

Economically Britain had been hurt severely. The huge balances of credit in foreign currencies that had provided the capital for the City of London’s financial operations for a century were spent. Britain had moved from the position of a creditor to that of a debtor nation. Depression and unemployment, not prosperity and a better Britain, characterized the interwar years.

Even as peace with Germany was declared, the British nation, as well as members of the government, was beginning to realize that the punitive treaty, which burdened Germany with the responsibility and much of the cost of the war, was a mistake. Accordingly, British foreign policy for much of the decade of the 1920s aimed at rehabilitating Germany and bringing it back into the family of nations. In general, this attempt was opposed by France and resulted in a rupture between Britain and France.

In 1929 the British economy, as well as that of the rest of the world, was devastated by the Great Depression. The postwar world of reconstruction became a prewar world of deep depression, radicalism, racism, and violence. By the end of 1930, unemployment was nearly double the figure of 1928 and would reach 25 percent of the workforce by the spring of 1931. It was accompanied, after the closing of banks in Germany in May, by a devastating run on gold in British banks that threatened the stability of the pound.

Under Neville Chamberlain, who became chancellor of the Exchequer in November 1931, the coalition government pursued a policy of strict economy. Housing subsidies were cut; and interest rates were lowered. Manufacturing revived, stimulated particularly by a revival in the construction of private housing. Similarly, unemployment declined, although it never reached the 10 percent level of the late 1920s until after the outbreak of war.

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World War II

Chamberlain determined to pursue a general policy of European settlement that would include Germany. The prime minister, and many Britons, felt that Germany had been badly treated by the Treaty of Versailles and that the principle of self-determina- tion dictated that German minorities in other countries should not be prevented from joining Germany if they clearly chose to do so. Hence, when Germany overran the Austrian republic in March 1938 and incorporated the small state into the Reich, Britain took no action. Similarly, when almost immediately Hitler began to denounce what he styled the Czech persecutions of the militant German minority in Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain searched for a means not to prevent the Czech borderland from being transferred to Germany but to ensure that it was accomplished peacefully. The attempted settlement of the crisis, culminating in the so-called Munich agreement, was the climax of the appeasement policy.

On September 1, German troops invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3.The Norwegian campaign of Hitler at the beginning of the war destroyed the Chamberlain government. On May 10, 1940 Churchill was announced as prime minister.

When the French government resolved to ask for an armistice on June 18, Churchill announced on the radio that Britain would fight on alone; it would be the nation’s “finest hour.” So began the Battle of Britain. Through August and September 1940 the fate of the nation depended upon 800 fighter airplanes, and upon Churchill’s resolution, in the terrific bombardment. In the last six months of 1940 some 23,000 civilians were killed, and yet the nation held on.

Perhaps the important political lesson of World War II lay in the realization that a democratic nation, with a centuries-old tradition of individual liberty, could with popular consent be mobilized for a gigantic national effort. The compulsory employment of labour became universal for both men and women. In 1943 Britain was devoting 54 percent of its gross national product to the war. Britain was unified in a way it had seldom been. There was some parliamentary criticism of Churchill’s leadership, but public approval, measured by repeated opinion polls, hardly wavered.

German hostilities in the west ended at midnight on May 8, 1945. Six months earlier Churchill had promised in the House of

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Commons that he would ask the king to dissolve the sitting Parliament, elected in 1935, soon after the German surrender unless the Labour and Liberal parties seriously desired to continue the coalition government. As a result, Churchill dissolved the government on May 23, appointed a new, single-party Conservative government, and set election day for July 5. Because it was necessary to count the military vote, the results could not be announced until July 26. On July 26, 1945, as soon as the results were clear, Churchill resigned.

After the war Britain, not entirely by coincidence, was also beginning its withdrawal from the empire. Most insistent in its demand for self-government was India. The Indian independence movement had come of age during World War I. The All-India Congress Party, headed by Mohandas K. Gandhi, the “Mahatma,” evoked sympathy throughout the world with its policy of nonviolent resistance.

The election of a Labour government at the end of World War II coincided with the rise of sectarian strife within India. The new administration determined quickly that Britain would have to leave India. This decision was announced at the height of the postwar financial crisis on June 3, 1947, and British administration in India ended 10 weeks later, on August 15. Burma and Ceylon (which later became Sri Lanka) received independence by early 1948. Britain, in effect, had no choice but to withdraw from colonial territories it no longer had the military and economic power to control.

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Lesson 12

Margaret Thatcher’s policies

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, served as British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990 and leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 until 1990, being the first (and, to date, only) woman to hold either post.

Thatcher led the Conservatives to a decisive electoral victory on 4 May 1979 following a series of major strikes during the previous winter (the so-called “Winter of Discontent”) under the Labour Party government. As a prime minister representing the newly energetic right wing of the Conservative Party (the “Dries,” as they later called themselves, as opposed to the old-style moderate Tories, or “Wets”), Thatcher advocated greater independence of the individual from the state; an end to allegedly excessive government interference in the economy, including privatization of state-owned enterprises and the sale of public housing to tenants; reductions in expenditures on social services such as health care, education, and housing; limitations on the printing of money in accord with the economic doctrine of monetarism; and legal restrictions on trade unions.

1979–1983

The main impact of her first term was economic. Inheriting a weak economy, she reduced or eliminated some governmental regulations and subsidies to businesses, thereby purging the manufacturing industry of many inefficient—but also some blameless— firms. The result was a dramatic increase in unemployment, from 1.3 million in 1979 to more than double that figure two years later. At the same time, inflation doubled in just 14 months, to more than 20 percent, and manufacturing output fell sharply. She had a preference for indirect taxation over taxes on income, and value added tax (VAT) was raised sharply to 15%. Although inflation decreased and output rose before the end of her first term, unemployment continued to increase, reaching more than three million in 1986.

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Thatcher embarked on an ambitious program of privatization of state-owned industries and public services, including aerospace, television and radio, gas and electricity, water, the state airline, and British Steel. By the end of the 1980s, the number of individual stockholders had tripled, and the government had sold 1.5 million publicly owned housing units to their tenants.

Nonetheless, rising unemployment and social tensions during her first term made her deeply unpopular. Her unpopularity would have ensured her defeat in the general election of 1983 were it not for two factors: the Falkland Islands War (1982) between Britain and Argentina, over possession of a remote British dependency in the South Atlantic, and the deep divisions within the Labour Party, which contested the election on a radical manifesto that critics dubbed the “longest suicide note in history.” Thatcher won election to a second term in a landslide—the biggest victory since Labour’s great success in 1945—gaining a parliamentary majority of 144 with just over 42 percent of the vote.

1983–1987

Thatcher entered office promising to curb the power of the unions, which had shown their ability to bring the country to a standstill during six weeks of strikes in the winter of 1978–79. Her government enacted a series of measures designed to undermine the unions’ ability to organize and stage strikes, including laws that banned the closed shop, required unions to poll their members before ordering a strike, forbade sympathy strikes, and rendered unions responsible for damages caused by their members. In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers began a nationwide strike to prevent the closing of 20 coal mines that the government claimed were unproductive. The walkout, which lasted nearly a year, soon became emblematic of the struggle for power between the Conservative government and the trade union movement. Thatcher steadfastly refused to meet the union’s demands, and in the end she won; the miners returned to work without winning a single concession.

A terrorist bombing at a Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984, the work of the Irish Republican Army, nearly killed Thatcher and several senior members of her government. By the end of Thatcher’s second term, few aspects of British life had escaped the most sweeping transformation of Britain since the postwar reforms of the Labour Party.

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In the Cold War, Thatcher supported United States President Ronald Reagan’s policies of deterrence against the Soviets. US forces were permitted by Thatcher to station nuclear cruise missiles at British bases, arousing mass protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She strongly supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, a stance that proved popular with the electorate, given the Labour Party’s repudiation of Britain’s traditional nuclear and defense policies. Thatcher and Reagan, who together made the 1980s the decade of conservatism, shared a vision of the world in which the Soviet Union was an evil enemy deserving of no compromise, and their partnership ensured that the Cold War continued in all its frigidity until the rise to power of the reformminded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. This was a start of a move by the West back to a new d tente with the USSR under Gorbachev’s leadership, which coincided with the final erosion of Soviet power prior to its eventual collapse in 1991. Thatcher outlasted the Cold War, which ended in 1989, and those who share her views on it credit her with a part in the West’s victory, by both the deterrence and d tente postures.

In Africa, Thatcher presided over the orderly establishment of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980 after 15 years of illegal separation from British colonial rule under a white minority. However, she encountered considerable criticism both at home and abroad for her opposition to international sanctions against the apartheid regime of South Africa.

1987–1990

By leading her party to victory in the 1987 general election Margaret Thatcher became the longest continuously serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since Lord Liverpool (1812 to 1827). After her third electoral victory, she adopted a steadily more hostile attitude toward European integration. She resisted “federalist” continental trends toward both a single currency and a deeper political union. Her traditionally pro-European party became divided, and a string of senior ministers left the Cabinet over the issue.

The implementation of a poll tax in 1989 produced outbreaks of street violence and alarmed the Conservative rank-and-file, who feared that Thatcher could not lead the party to a fourth

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