Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [21]
So the British faced newly energized nationalist movements, both great and small, which limited their room for manoeuvre in the longer term. But it was not only Asian thinking about empire that had changed. Many young Britons, though not yet the Tory and Labour leadership, had come to see empire as an anachronism during the war. Not only did it divert valuable manpower and resources from where they were needed at home, it also threatened domestic liberties and seemed likely to blow Britain’s new socialist government off course. At an almost unconscious level, the complaints of the ‘forgotten army’ in the East and its even more radical RAF comrade, the ‘forgotten air force’, represented a deep desire for change in the British social order as a whole. Before the election Churchill had been disgusted to hear from Sir William Slim that 90 per cent of the troops in the East were going to vote Labour and the other 10 per cent would not vote at all. Now those Labour supporters, heartily tired of dysentery, malaria, ENSA humour and poor pay, wanted to see the brave new world that their left-leaning tutors in the army education corps had promised them. Morale slumped and would soon lead to small-scale mutinies among British forces from Karachi to Singapore. Months after the surrender of Japan, British troops were incensed to find themselves fighting and suffering casualties in what seemed like completely unnecessary wars against nationalists in Indonesia and French Indo-China.
This mood was picked up and articulated by radical newspapers in Britain and political discussion groups at army and air-force bases. A newspaper such as the old Labour broadsheet, Reynolds News, was typical. It was written for working people, but most of its correspondents and columnists were British middle- or upper-class communists and socialists, free to inveigh against the country’s archaic society and the dominance of ‘monopoly capital’ now that wartime censorship had been lifted. Major Woodrow Wyatt, a socialist with an interest in the ‘Indian problem’, demanded a pro-Congress policy and the abolition of the India Office in London.23 Harold Laski, Labour’s most prominent left-wing intellectual, urged that the viceroy’s executive council be turned into a ‘national government’.24 These radicals made common cause with Asian nationalists. Indonesian nationalists argued in Reynolds against any attempt by the British government to reinstate the Dutch capitalists who were accused of exploiting and impoverishing the Indonesian peasantry.25 All the while, the paper’s editorials demanded the swift demobilization of the eastern army and justice for Britain’s miners, steelworkers and textile workers, many of whom were now on strike. The Labour government and the political establishment at home found itself fighting on three fronts, in Asia and the new United Nations and among its own supporters at home. The news was full of reports of the trial and execution of French collaborators, concentration-camp guards and Japanese militarists. Repression was harder and harder to justify.
One of Reynolds columnists was Tom Driberg MP, a colourful and maverick British politician who came to play a small but representative role in the history of the crescent. His Times obituary thirty years later stated with surprising candour that he was ‘a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist and a homosexual’,26 while many at the time also hinted that he had worked for the KGB. Before the war Driberg gloried in the sort of circles portrayed in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, but at the same time he rejected the British establishment represented by his