Thoughts on Suez

Sean Gabb

[This is promoted from a comment on a post by Alex Rantwell]

Suez was a moment of education from which the wrong lesson was drawn.

Conservative Governments since 1951 had believed that, while we no longer had all the freedom of action we’d had before 1939, the Americans could be relied on to underwrite our continuing pretensions. The Americans, for entirely valid reasons of their own, took the Suez adventure as an opportunity to tell their allies who was boss.

Had I been in charge in 1956, I’d have told the Americans to get stuffed, and gone on to smack the Egyptians hard. I’d have threatened the Americans with floating the pound, thereby breaking up their currency management scheme. With their anti-Communist crusade at risk, they’d probably have backed down.

This done, I’d have dumped the remaining Empire from a position of strength, and then radically sliced at the post-War state. I’d also have made it clear to the Americans that we were a semi-detached ally, willing to cooperate only so far as it was worth our interest in each case. Still being rational players rather than neo-con loons, they’d have scowled but gone along with this. And I’d have had a go at an economic accommodation with the French and Germans.

The result would have been a country with ambitions in keeping with its actual resources. We could have kept the pound stable, and a continuing great power status within a contracted area that might have included the Middle East, so long as we could use the Israelis as a proxy. We still had, at least in potential, a first rate industrial base. As in the reign of Charles II, we could have trimmed between the two stronger powers, keeping both from dominating us while something turned up.

I’d have done something like this even after the event of Suez as it actually proceeded. De Gaul did something similar after worse humiliations. His mistake was to be too corporatist in his economic policies.

In the event, the lesson we learned was that we should grovel in all things to the Americans, who would, in return, prop us up in the semblance of great power status. We still lost the Empire, but we also did nothing about an over-extended domestic state; and the loss of national pride meant that the social liberation of the 1960s went in often malign directions.

Suez could have been one of those moments when a drunk wakes up with a splitting head and resolves to turn himself round. All we did was reach for the bottle again.