The Labour Party and Foreign Policy by Callaghan John

Author:Callaghan, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Middle East

In the face of an acknowledged nationalist agitation throughout the Middle East, Bevin also imagined that it would be possible to broaden Britain’s influence in the region ‘by developing an economic aid and social policy which would make for prosperity and contentment in the area as a whole’.54 It would raise the purchasing power of ‘the masses’ and undercut the nationalism that was potentially lethal to British interests. In approving this policy in October 1945 the Labour Government was again following ideas which had been taken up in Whitehall during the war. In Egypt, however, the government of Sidki Pasha had been calling for the abrogation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, and the removal of British military bases, even before Labour entered office. The Government continued to resist this demand throughout its term despite recognition of the strength of local feeling and the fact that Britain was asking Egypt to accept a new treaty involving obligations, as Attlee pointed out, that were considered intolerable by members of the Commonwealth – such as accepting Egyptian involvement in war by virtue of decisions taken in London.55 Egypt, as Field-Marshal Smuts informed the Cabinet, was considered ‘a vital link in the British chain of communications through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal’. For that reason it was essential to retain a British military presence in the country and the right to enter Egypt whenever Britain apprehended an international emergency. This was essential according to advice from the Chiefs of Staff, though as Attlee observed there was no more justification for it than claiming the same rights in continental Europe. Oil rights needed to be protected, he conceded, but stirring up nationalism was not the best way to do it.

The Labour Government thus adopted a policy of stalling and of linking the argument about British military bases with the question of the future of the Sudan on which there were disagreements with Egypt. It was calculated that were the UN to be drawn into the dispute, Britain would receive a more sympathetic hearing on the Sudanese question as long as it was emphasised that Britain stood for the eventual self-government of Sudan at the earliest practicable opportunity (whereas the Egyptians claimed sovereignty over it). It was also recognised that insisting on the validity of the 1936 treaty would serve immediate security interests but probably compound Britain’s long-term problems in Egypt when the treaty came up for revision in 1956. By April 1951 the Cabinet was considering how the subject of Middle East defence might involve the USA ‘on the basis that the defence of the Middle East was at present very weak and that the western democracies could not afford to allow the oil resources of the Middle East to fall into Soviet hands’.56 The unilateral nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by the government of Mohammed Mussadiq in that month gave this thought a particular urgency, though Mussadiq was no Communist. In May it was thought opportune to introduce the Sudan

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