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In this solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore the Macmillan years – that remarkable, contradictory period of post-war British history when the country was forced to confront its diminished place in the world, even as it sought to cling to the vestiges of imperial power.
When Anthony Eden led Britain into the Suez Crisis in 1956, he did so believing that Britain could still act unilaterally on the world stage. The rebuke from Eisenhower told a different story. The crisis exposed the weakness of Britain's post-war economy, triggered a run on the reserves, and revealed that the country could no longer act without American permission.
Harold Macmillan – who became Chancellor in the aftermath and then Prime Minister in January 1957 – understood the lesson. Suez had been a tactical defeat, he told his cabinet, but it could yet prove "the prelude to a strategic victory." What followed was a decade of managed decline: the military budget was cut, national service was abolished, and the white paper on defence argued that spending 10% of gross national income on defence was excessive.
Drawing on Kenneth Morgan's *The People's Peace*, we examine the "one nation Toryism" that characterised Macmillan's government – a form of liberal conservatism that would be denounced by today's Tory party as "creeping Bolshevism." We trace the withdrawal from empire: the end of the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya, the winding up of the Cyprus troubles, the independence of Ghana and Nigeria, and Macmillan's famous "wind of change" speech before the South African parliament in 1960.
But we also confront the darker side of British decolonisation – the concentration camps and torture in Kenya, the police state in Nyasaland, and the selective memory that allows Britain to present its retreat from empire as "relatively tranquil and civilised."
**Topics covered:**
- The aftermath of Suez and the reality of decline
- Macmillan's "strategic victory" and one nation Toryism
- The 1957 Defence White Paper and massive retaliation
- The abolition of national service
- The end of the Mau Mau emergency and the Hola Camp scandal
- The Cyprus settlement and the release of Archbishop Makarios
- Macmillan's "wind of change" speech
- The dissolution of the Central African Federation
- Britain's diminishing role in the Middle East
- The intervention in Jordan, 1958
- Parallels with American decline today
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