Jerusalem by Jason Whittaker;

Author:Jason Whittaker; [Whittaker, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192660831
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Popular Culture and Mass Media

The annual ritual of the Last Night of the Proms represented an apotheosis of ‘Jerusalem’ as an imperial hymn, broadcast live each year to establish it more firmly as an institution for British viewers. Yet the century was changing more rapidly than ever. In his survey of post-war Britain, Paul Addison describes the period of the aftermath of the Second World War as the ‘quest for modernity’, that time when Victorian aspirations—particularly imperial aspirations—had to finally be given up in the management of the country.32 This was also the time when A. J. P. Taylor coined the term ‘the Establishment’ to describe the narrow circle of individuals who governed a Conservative Britain. From 1950 until the mid-1960s, the United Kingdom grew economically at a rate that had not been seen since the middle of the nineteenth century—but France and Germany were growing even more quickly, and the collapse of empire that began with the loss of India reduced further the UK’s international status. This can, of course, be overstated: the UK remained a nuclear power and one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, but in the Cold War influence had shifted irrevocably from its former centre in Europe.

Nowhere was the decline of the old colonial powers more evident than in the series of events in 1956 which came to be known as the Suez crisis. In 1951, growing hostility towards British presence in Egypt, particularly at the huge garrison stationed at Suez, had led the Egyptian government to abrogate the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936: when Britain refused to withdraw, tensions mounted, and in July 1952 a military coup, led by Muhammad Neguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Farouk and established an Egyptian republic. Britain strove for a rapprochement following the coup, agreeing to withdraw from Suez at the same time that the United States, increasingly concerned about Soviet involvement in the Middle East, sought to enhance its links to countries such as Egypt. For his part, Nasser maintained neutrality between Soviets and Americans as he sought maximum gains for Egypt and, having been elected second President of Egypt in 1956, he responded to withdrawal of financing for the Aswan Dam by Britain and the US by announcing that he would nationalize the Suez Canal Company to pay for the project. Britain and France, along with Israel, began preparing for war and, in October and November 1956, started a series of operations and invasions intended to overturn Nasser’s nationalization. Eisenhower feared that support for the actions of Britain, France, and Israel would drive the Arab world towards the Soviets, and on 2 November the UN Security Council adopted an American-sponsored resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Facing economic and political pressures (for all that its initial military actions had been a success), the British government agreed to a ceasefire on 6 November, barely a week after the invasion had begun.

For some commentators, the Suez crisis marked ‘the end of Britain as a world power’.

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