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On 13 December General Harold Briggs, the army commander in Burma, sent a particularly gloomy assessment of the situation to his superiors. For political reasons, Indian troops could not now be used, he said. Burmese troops were of ‘doubtful reliability’. And the British forces were ‘weak’ and could not hold the situation. The evidence suggests that Briggs painted the situation to be as dire as he could because he agreed with Rance and, more distantly, Mountbatten on the need for an immediate statement about the date of independence.70 The only alternative was the kind of warfare that was happening in French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. Commanders who had seen their men survive a brutal world war were extremely reluctant to throw more lives away in minor police actions designed to hold colonial territories of dubious economic value. Finally, the government decided to do what it had really known it was going to do two months or more before. On 20 December, Attlee made a speech in Parliament in which he at last disavowed the maligned White Paper and acknowledged that the government ‘would hasten forward the time when Burma shall realise her independence’.71

Events were now moving very fast. One of the old Burma hands in Whitehall, Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, was sent to Burma to discuss the AFPFL leaders’ visit to London in the new year to approve the final settlement. Laithwaite had intensive discussions with Aung San and Tin Tut and left a vivid account of them. Aung San was ‘about an ordinary Burmese height, largish head, very close shaved, a straight forehead receding with a covering lock. Good small hands; a white silk Burmese coat and longyi; sandals.’72 Though short and frail, he was ‘a personality, clear headed with good controls [sic], and much in charge’. Tin Tut, the old ICSman, was much closer to and more comprehensible to the British. Educated at Dulwich College and Queens’ College Cambridge, he was an ideal negotiator, a quiet rugby-loving nationalist who could still speak to the British as an establishment insider. Mrs Tin Tut and Mrs Aung San were friends of Lady Rance and all the women were afraid of further strikes and disturbances. Tin Tut’s own relationship to Aung San was ‘a little like that of a family solicitor when the son of the house is up before the magistrate, he intervened from time to time to make a point or direct an argument’. Dorman-Smith’s answers, said Aung San pointedly, had always been ‘evasive’. The only terms on which constitutional discussions could go ahead were clear and unequivocal commitments. Laithwaite noticed that the point of reference for these Burmese leaders was always India: ‘At every point there was the check back to what had happened in the case of India.’73 Why, asked Tin Tut, had Burma occasioned fewer recent ministerial statements than India? Why had India already despatched its own diplomats to foreign countries? The Burmese were sorely aware that by October 1946 the British had effectively handed power to India. That in itself raised serious questions about future relations between India and Burma. Aung San returned to the old sore point of the position of Indians in Burma and intimated vaguely that the Burmese could not have Indians and other ‘foreigners’ voting on their constitution. Laithwaite’s reports revealed that all participants in the forthcoming negotiations were extremely jittery. The British were worried that they faced ‘another Indonesia’. Some members of the AFPFL were still quite unclear about what freedom entailed and worried about the good faith of the British. They remained afraid that any delegation to London might be arrested and incarcerated as U Saw and Tin Tut had been five years earlier.

The British saw turmoil all around them. India was convulsed by the INA trials and communal violence. Malaya was fighting off a British constitutional settlement and gripped by communist-inspired labour strife. British troops had barely extricated themselves from the unrolling civil war in the Dutch East Indies and French Indo-China. The army was