236. Greyness at home, decline abroad

Of the five ‘giant evils’ William Beveridge identified, the Attlee government set out to deal with want through social security, squalor through better housing, ignorance through more schooling and disease through the National Health Service. When it came to the fifth giant, idleness, the government’s tackeld unemployment by setting out to rebuild the British economy and, overall, that didn’t go too badly. Unemployment was kept to 2% of the workforce despite the return of two and a half million men to the employment market from the army, and a massive trade deficit was wiped out. But the price was a tough economy with rationing still in place and little in the way of luxury to make life more pleasurable. Survival had been made easier, but living was short of joy in a rather dour postwar Britain.

Greyness at home was reflected in continuing decline abroad. This episode traces the loss of status and, indeed, of value of the pound, once the world’s reserve currency, now forced aside by the dollar.

It also looks at the sad story of how Britain handled, or rather mishandled, its territory of Bechuanaland in Southern Africa, behaving shamefully towards its hereditary ruler Seretse Khama and his white wife Ruth Williams, to accommodate the growing racism of South Africa, source of the uranium Britain needed for its A-bomb.

Things went no more smoothly in Palestine, where Britain simply abandoned its mandate, leaving Jews and Arabs to sort out their differences themselves, kicking off the long series of repeating wars that have poisoned the existence of Israel ever since.

To cap the episode off, we talk about the start of the Malaya emergency, a counter-insurgency war as ugly and as strewn with atrocities as any other. It underlines the lesson that it isn’t government intentions that matter in such conflicts, it’s the nature of colonial war itself that makes it vile.

Illustration: Seretse Khama, first President of Botswana, and the first First Lady, Ruth Williams

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License