Abstract
In a speech to the Labour party conference in 1962, Hugh Gaitskell put the case for Britain maintaining ties with the Commonwealth in preference to joining the EEC. ‘The Commonwealth’, he said, ‘means something to us and to the world. Where would our influence be in the world without the Commonwealth? It would be much less. And I believe with all my heart that the existence of this remarkable multiracial association can make a great contribution to the ending of the Cold War’. Gaitskell then added an emotional personal touch:
If I were a little younger today, and if I were looking around for a cause, I do not think I should be quite so certain that I would find it within the movement for greater unity in Europe. I would rather work for the Freedom From Hunger Campaign; I would rather work for War on Want, I would rather do something to solve world problems.1
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Notes
Alan Sked and Chris Cook, Post-War Britain: A Political History, 4th edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) p. 170.
For a discussion of Bevin’s foreign policy, see Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), and
John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944–1949 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993).
Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) pp. 271–2.
Anne Orde, The Collapse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895–1956 (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1996) p. 170.
David Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics, 1945–1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) p. 14.
P. S. Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914–1964 (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1975) p. 281.
John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1988) p. 71.
Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 1941–1945: the United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) pp. 15–16.
John Saville, The Politics of Continuity: British Foreign Policy and the Labour Government, 1945–1946 (London: Verso, 1993) p. 94.
Darwin, op. cit., note 14 above, p. 73. For a discussion of the impact of Whig history on British official thinking, see Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth (London: Sutton Publishing, 1998), chapter 7, pp. 218–47.
John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987) p. 120.
Michael R. Gordon, Conflict and Consensus in Labour’s Foreign Policy, 1914–1965 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1969) p. 54.
R. D. Pearce, The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy, 1938–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1982) p. 96.
Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) p. 144.
Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain, 1945–1951 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992) p. 233.
John Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) p. 145.
David Fieldhouse, ‘The Labour Governments and the Empire-Commonwealth, 1945–1951’, in Ritchie Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments, 1945–1951 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984) p. 91.
Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Little, Brown, 1994) p. 533.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Russell, D. (2001). ‘The Jolly Old Empire’: Labour, the Commonwealth and Europe, 1945–51. In: May, A. (eds) Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523906_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523906_2
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