The Turning Point

Abstract

Through the British High Commissioner, Brown urged that Harold Macmillan see a Liberal Party delegation. There was a polite refusal: Mr Macmillan would meet representatives of Parliamentary parties only, and the fact that the Ballingers were still in Parliament (Rubin had resigned his seat before leaving for an academic post in Ghana and Stanford was already a Progressive) was brushed aside.¹ Fears were real that Macmillan, meeting only tribal chiefs and other ‘yes-men’, would give a non-committal response to Verwoerd’s loudly trumpeted ‘separate development’ policy at the very moment that his government had to be told that a policy based on race discrimination was unacceptable to Britain and the West.