Edited by Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman and W. Scott Lucas.
Pinter/Institute of Contemporary British History London, 1991, £35
Goodness only knows what “politics and the limits of policy’ in the subtitle is supposed to mean. This is just a collection of essays on recent British history and was initially of interest because of the essay by Richard Aldrich, “Unquiet in death: the post-war survival of the Special Operations Executive, 1945-51′. Aldrich shows how, despite the organisation’s formal demise, sections of SOE survived to be absorbed into SIS to play a part in the anti-Soviet operations of the early years of Cold War 1 — the small-scale British version of the conversion of the CIA from an intelligence agency into a covert operations adjunct to US foreign policy. (Aldrich is one of the handfuls of British academics who are trying to incorporate the activities of the British secret state into our post-war history and teaches a post-graduate course on the intelligence services et al at Salford University.)
Just how important the secret intelligence dimension to post-war history can be is illustrated by Frank Ferudi’s essay on the war against the Mau Mau in Kenya. Ferudi calls his essay “Kenya: Decolonization through counterinsurgency’, but comes nowhere near making that apparent paradox intelligible. Ferudi dodges both the main issues. First, while this may have been called an “emergency’ by the British state, on the ground it was a bloody war, which the British did not win despite killing huge numbers of Kenyans. Figures vary but maybe more than 30,000 died. (Ferudi is unable to completely conceal this from his reader and notes that in 1956 “the kill rate remained high’.) Secondly, he has nothing at all to say about the British secret state’s attempts to contain and deflect Kenyan nationalism. In other words: he ignores the question of which of the post-colonial leaders had been bought. (This question appears to be the main reason for the extreme sensitivity of the war in current Kenyan politics.) It is possible that Ferudi actually knows all this. In his last paragraph he writes “Radical nationalism could only be contained if Britain showed that it was prepared to hand over power to a new group of African collaborators.’ (My emphases.) Is that not simply a euphemism for “we put in a bunch of our stooges?’
In a trio of essays on British economic history there are faint but distinct signs of a revival of some of the old agenda for what might best be called the Politics of British Economic Policy. It does seem to be dawning — again — that it is not possible to talk simply of “the British economy’ without acknowledging the structural conflict between the makers of things and the movers of money. But, oh dear, this is so slow. Richard Roberts’ “The City of London as a financial centre in the era of the depression, the Second World War and post-war official controls’ huffs and puffs merely to show that while the City was sat on between 1939 and 1951, as soon as the Conservative Party got into office, it got its hands back on economic policy. Notice how Roberts puts this: “Two decades of cheap money came to an end in November 1951 when the New Conservative Chancellor revived the use of interest rates as an instrument of economic policy.’ “An instrument of economic policy’, my foot. All that happened was that the Tory Chancellor put the interest rates up for the money-lenders who ran the party. In writing his essay Roberts cites not one of the writers who have been working in this field since the early 1970s. Do we really have to reinvent the wheel?
A feeble creature though it is, Roberts’ essay makes an appropriate scene-setter for Scott Newton’s sharp little piece on current views of Keynes. (Keynesians appear have the same relationship to Keynes’ writing that Marxists do to Marx’s. Somewhere, surely, Keynes said, “Je ne suis pas Keynesian’.) Noting the central role in the imposition of economic orthodoxy played by the Treasury, Newton bells the cat, suggesting that “the economic historian should study the Treasury as a political sociologist, finding out about the recruitment of staff, social and educational backgrounds, the connections with the Bank of England and the City.’ And then s/he could begin to consider why this has not been done before.
RR