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By Root 4598 0

other ‘nations of intent’ being voiced, other parallel struggles for freedom underway. These too were at their defining hour, and their course could no longer be dictated by the British. The main thrust of colonial high policy between 1945 and 1948 had been to weld Malaya more closely to the British Empire. There was vague talk about self-government – it was written into the federal constitution – but it was clear that the British were thinking in terms of twenty-five years. Now the British seemed cut adrift by events. But there was a remarkable underlying continuity to political aims and a quickening of political vision. In early 1949 there was talk that the British were preparing to abandon Malaya to its fate. This reached the ears of the deputy leader of the opposition, Anthony Eden, who was visiting the country at the time. This provoked Attlee to stand in the House of Commons on 13 April and announce that Britain would not leave Malaya until the insurrection was defeated. But this was also a public commitment to self-government, and it was no longer a distant prospect, but a fact of life. This was no sudden political decision to withdraw; but there was a change of mindset; an acknowledgement that Britain had lost the ability to dictate the pace of events. By mid 1950, MacDonald acknowledged, it was clear that Malay politicians were now thinking of fifteen years, ‘and there is now a tendency that the transition to self-government will have to be speeded up’. He also recognized that it would ‘inevitably be accelerated by factors over which we shall have little or no control’.134 In such circumstances it was vital that Britain’s local allies were firmly secured, but this entailed a concession of initiative to them which became a slow but steady haemorrhaging of power.

The clearest sign that the British had recognized the inevitable in Malaya was their obsession with placating Dato Onn bin Jaafar. In 1949 the turbulent and temperamental Malay leader still seemed to command the open political scene. Britain’s reliance on UMNO had grown during the Emergency. The party was strengthened by the arrest of its opponents; the police provided a good living for tens of thousands of young Malays and gave UMNO ‘a larger ready-made well-controlled audience which would not otherwise had been readily available’.135 In the face of reports of Malays taking to the jungle, it was ultimately Britain’s final line of defence in Malaya. But the British could not take the mercurial Onn for granted. In 1948 there were a series of clashes between the British and the Malay State administrations, principally over land for Chinese squatters. In the middle of the year Onn looked set to resign from the Legislative Council. In December 1948 his frustrations spilled over during a visit to London. As a senior mandarin, John Paskin, told Gurney: ‘I don’t think any of us were quite prepared… for the degree of bitterness, under which he still labours, at what was done in 1945/6…’ Stopping just short of an ultimatum, Onn made it clear that the British had yet to prove themselves; he demanded tangible evidence of Britain’s ‘special responsibility towards the Malays’. ‘We have’, the British were told, ‘reached the stage when only deeds and not merely assurances would tell’. He suggested a gift of £10m as restitution to the Malays, for their development. The Emergency had raised Onn’s ire: Britain’s ‘first thought is, “What will the Chinese think about it?”, whereas it ought to be, “What will the Malays think about it?”’136 Yet despite Onn’s ‘disconcerting quirks’, Whitehall was convinced that ‘he has the makings of a statesman’; that he was ‘capable of a broader vision, and was a man with whom (except on the subject of our “misdeeds” of 1945/6) one could reason’.137 Throughout 1949 Onn continued to snipe at the ‘authoritarian’ federal administration and his ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ personality infuriated Gurney. But the British had made it clear that a solution to what they now termed the ‘communal issue’ was a condition of political development, and Onn seemed the