British Diplomatic Oil Crisis: Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Geopolitical Rivalries in the Persian Gulf: Drawing a Lesson? Or Sir Anthony Eden‘s Delusion of Grandeur.

‘Whose
finger is on the trigger?’
45 responded the Daily Mirror. The Labour
manifesto for the 1951 election said, ‘the Tory still thinks in
terms of Victorian imperialism’.46 The
Labour Leader, Clement Attlee, had already been, even before the
Second World War, speaking of Labour’s commitment to the
‘abandonment of imperialism’.

In 1945 the Labour
Government inherited a huge and complex empire.
It appeared that the British Empire had yet again emerged intact
from a fundamental challenge, but in real terms this was not the
case. The global war’s impact on Britain was a massive debt, mainly
to the United States. Additionally, estimates have shown that 10% of
Britain’s pre-war wealth or no less than one-quarter if
disinvestments were also included, had been lost. Most importantly,
Britain was able to pay for only a fraction of the imports she
needed both for current survival and for the reconstruction of her
economic well being.

Through Lend-Lease and her
ability to run up enormous debts to
members of the sterling area it had been possible during the war to
divert a large proportion of her former export industries to war
production, so that at the of 1944 her exports stood at only about
one-third of their pre-war volume.47

As for
import needs, they remained the same as in 1938, in addition
to the fact that terms of trade had also moved against Britain:

invisible earnings had
fallen through the loss of one-quarter of the
merchant marine, and liquidation of over £1 billion in