Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [169]
ODATE: Hello! Is that you Killearn?
VOICE: No.
ODATE: Has he been recalled?
VOICE: Eh? well… er… who are you?
ODATE: Insignificant self is Odate – Siego Odate.
VOICE: What do you want?
ODATE: I wish to congratulate Killearn. You see, when I was Mayor of Syonan, I could never reduce the rice ration to under six kati for men. I was warned of trouble and black market.
But Killearn was, his driver recalled, very careful with money. He smoked long Burmese cheroots, and at parties at Bukit Serene he would serve cheap Thai whisky from bottles of Red and Black Label.109 Through Killearn’s role, the idea of ‘South East Asia’ as a distinct regional entity began to acquire an enduring substance.
In the Indian summer of empire, more Britons were involved in it than at any time previously, and often in entirely new roles. The large establishment was in part a reflection of the Labour government’s commitment to an imperialism of the welfare state. To the district officers, planters and policemen of the pre-war era were added new levies of doctors and midwives, social researchers and ethnographers, welfare professionals and educationalists. British Southeast Asia became a unique laboratory of empire. Under the aegis of Lord Killearn, a ‘Social Welfare Conference’ in 1947 voiced the premise that ‘the findings of Sir William Beveridge for Great Britain are also applicable to Southeast Asia, namely that the total resources of the community by the redistribution of income are sufficient to make want needless’. Social and economic research was commissioned. The British trained a new generation of Asian technocrats. For many women it was their first experience of administration. A social survey of Singapore in 1947 brought to prominence a young economist, Goh Keng Swee, who would later design Singapore’s grand strategy for economic development.110 But it was made clear that there were no resources for anything resembling a ‘welfare state’; communities were to be taught to help themselves. A pressing target of reform was youth. The British believed that the region’s social crisis was in large part created by the general ‘disintegration of morals’ of the young during the war, particularly in the towns. Singapore made a special claim on the Colonial Development and Welfare Council for youth centres, citizen’s advice bureaux and community care as the British desperately tried ‘to divert energies in socially desirable channels.’111 In the paternalistic writings of the time, radical nationalists appear as disturbed adolescents, and young communists, criminal delinquents.
The agenda of liberal imperialism was kept alive by the Labour government’s particular commitment to trade unionism. Edward Gent acknowledged that the BMA’s attempts to keep down inflation had been the overriding cause of strikes, and he took the unusual step of approving a back issue of strike pay for government labourers. On the basis that 90 per cent of BMA labour had struck for an average of ten days, the bill for their half pay on those days came to $270,000 .112 John ‘Battling Jack’ Brazier, as trade union adviser, enjoyed Gent’s strong backing and Malcolm MacDonald argued that, once the constitution squabble had been resolved, labour was the dominant issue facing British Southeast Asia. But although they went to great lengths to protect Brazier’s independence, his role was ambiguous and invidious. He was to be a ‘guide’ and ‘friend’ to trade unions, but in their eyes he was clearly a government official. He provided model rules for unions, and undertook to explain to employers that ‘Ramasamy’, a stock name for an Indian labourer, ‘is waking up but so few seem to realise it’. But Brazier was unpopular with both