The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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responsibilities of the Colonial Empire as a tiresome hinderance to other
things.”14

Conservatives had canvassed the idea of Greater Britain, and subsequently
Imperial Federation. They
had the Liberal ideal of free trade to combine with that
of imperial preference. They had done most to
formulate and harmonise imperial
sentiments with social-imperialism, by which, in effect, the working
classes had
been offered imperialism as a substitute for socialism. The imperialist beliefs
which
many Conservatives were still professing after 1945 had been fixed by the
history of this period (the
Second World War). About half the members of the
parliamentary party had been born before the turn of the
century. It was still
possible for a conference to be addressed by a man who had been
Joseph
Chamberlain’s P.P.S.. It was a Conservative belief that Britain’s imperial
mission
and the Conservative’s imperial mission were one and the same, and, as was
explained in
Chapter One, Britain’s interest in the Empire stems from the direct
interests of the political elite:
for instance, the Colonial Services, drawn from the
public schools and the ancient universities;
moreover, the settlers and planters
who emigrated from Britain to the colonies were largely from the
Imperial class.
Thus this was a further justification for the belief that the Empire was
especially
a Conservative institution.

Having examined the basic attitude of the Conservative Party towards
colonialism, we can now continue
our investigations to see why a party which
considered itself the ‘imperial party’ proceeded with
the decolonisation
programme, which began as far back as 1942, when it was, ironically, the
War
Cabinet headed by Churchill, which sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India in order to
work out a
formula for further constitutional advance in that part of the Empire.
Furthermore, how the Conservative
politicians managed to close the gap between
the imperial sentiments of the party and the pressures of
post-World War Two,
was shaped by considerations of economic interest, as we have seen previously.

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