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Brexit, The British Empire and The Never Ending Post-Colonial Nightmare…
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It is no hyperbole to state that Britain has never got over losing an empire.
For all of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill’s bluster about not becoming Her Majesty’s Prime Minister to preside over the dismantling of the British empire, there was a tacit realization that events had overtaken them.
His successors with varying degrees of understanding recognized this salient fact: Clement Atlee oversaw the independence of India and Pakistan, while causing all kinds of chaos in Singapore and Malaysia; Anthony Eden tried and failed abysmally to topple Colonel Abdel Nasser, when the latter nationalized the lucrative Suez Canal.
Harold MacMillan, on the other hand, wasted no time in decolonizing vast swathes of Africa and nailed his colours firmly to the American mast; Harold Wilson chose not to support the Vietnam war, while countenancing the genocide of Igbo babies during the Nigerian civil war in the 1970s.
Edward Heath’s difficulties with the unions which culminated in the entire country thrown into darkness, illustrated the extraordinary descent of the once great empire which ruled the world and this was further confirmed when James Callaghan went cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to beg for a loan.