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The British Labor Party and the Economics of Decolonization: the debate over Kenya

2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cch.2008.0011

1532-5768

Paul Kelemen,

Australian History and Society

The British Labor Party and the Economics of Decolonization: the debate over Kenya Paul Kelemen In the 1950s, the generally bi-partisan approach of Conservative and Labor Party leaders to imperial affairs began to break down. “Colonial issues,” Goldsworthy notes, “became not merely politically important, they became politically contentious.”1 The military repression of the Mau Mau rebellion caused the most serious rift between the two main political parties over colonial policy in Africa. Kenya always had the potential to pull them in opposing directions and had been a source of conflict in the past. The Conservative party was supportive of the European settlers and shared their view of a community defending the frontiers of civilization. By contrast, for many in the Labor Party, the settler economy epitomized the worst aspects of colonialism. They pointed to its color bar and saw the colony as a particularly acute case of British rule’s failure to protect Africans from the destructive effects of capitalism. The Conservative politician Ormsby-Gore remarked in 1930 that, “left wing opinion in Britain had always been more worried about the treatment of natives in Kenya than anywhere else.”2 Kenya proved to be contentious, however, not merely between the two main parties, but within the Labor Party itself. The internal tensions which the colony’s “trusteeship” generated, shed light on the party’s approach to the economics of colonialism which has tended to remain in the background in more general surveys of Labor’s colonial policy.3 Three aspects in Labor’s colonial policy making come into view by this narrower focus: the post-war Labor government retreated by relation to the inter-war radical liberal critique of Kenya’s settler colonialism; the party adopted, in the late 1950s, the Movement for Colonial Freedom’s call for a rapid hand over of political power to African nationalists but rejected its economic policy; the Labor leadership endorsed and, when it came to power, extended the land settlement that had underpinned decolonization and the continued dominance of the foreign owned companies in the Kenyan economy.4 It was only towards the end of the second short-lived Attlee government in the early 1950s, that the Labor Party’s left wing began to develop a distinct position on colonial affairs. During the war years and for the first few years after, party thinking on such matters had been heavily influenced by the Fabian Colonial Bureau, which was set up in 1940 by Arthur Creech Jones and Rita Hinden to conduct research and formulate policy for the party.5 The Bureau’s advocacy of state induced development found a receptive audience not only in the Labor Party, but among senior officials at the Colonial Office who wanted to placate widespread international hostility to colonialism, yet find a way where possible, to preserve Britain’s imperial possessions. The emphasis on economic and social reforms dovetailed with the growing belief of leading figures in the Colonial Office and the Labor government, that the colonial economies could play an important role in overcoming Britain’s domestic, food and raw material shortages. In 1947, the government set up the Colonial Development Corporation, and the Overseas Food Corporation to boost Africa’s food exports. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, argued that there was, “no conflict between the social and economic development of those overseas territories to the advantage of their people, and their development as a source of supplies for Western Europe as a contributor… so essential to the balance of payments.”6 Tribune, the weekly newspaper that later became closely identified with left-wing criticism of the party leadership, did not disagree. An editorial asked, “do we want to stay in Africa?” The subsequent reply indicated that, “Africa offers huge material resources which can be exploited for the benefit of Britain and the world. Equally and not one whit less, if Africa is not exploited with the aid of capital goods and technical assistance which can only come from the West, whole stretches of the continent will be submerged by disease, poverty, and appalling disaster.”7 The Treasury’s investment in the colonial economies and bulk purchase agreements to secure stable prices for colonial producers...