From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

3. Britain Pulls Out
Denis Healey laughed when Keng Swee and I asked him in October 1966 to sell
us a squadron of Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft. He wagged his finger at us and
asked what we were up to; British forces would look after us. We left London
reassured that the RAF would stay in Singapore.
We badly needed the confidence British forces generated. If they were to
leave suddenly before we had any capacity to defend ourselves, I did not think
we could survive. Their presence gave people a sense of security, without which
we would not get investments and be able to export our goods and services. That
was the only way we could create enough jobs to absorb our school leavers and
prevent massive unemployment. In January that year I had met Harold Wilson,
the British prime minister, at an emergency Commonwealth prime ministers’
conference in Lagos on Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence. In
between meetings, we discussed the future of British forces in Singapore. He
told me that he might have to take away 25,000 of the 50,000 troops guarding
Malaysia. Although he said no decision had yet been taken, my impression was
that he was moving towards troop reduction.
To get a better understanding of British intentions, I visited London in April
1966 to discuss their defence planning. It was disturbing to discover a growing
lobby for withdrawal from east of Suez, both in the Labour and Conservative
parties and among their top leader writers and commentators. Healey
(corroborated by British pressmen) said that there were strong advocates in the
cabinet for a quick phased withdrawal, with George Brown, No. 2 to Wilson,
leading the group. Paul Johnson, the 
New Statesman
editor, went so far as to
name the year, 1968. This point of view would easily win support from the
Labour Party and Labour MPs. Iain MacLeod, a former Conservative minister
and now the shadow minister for finance and economic affairs, told me that there
were many “Europeans” (those favouring integration with Europe) in his party
who were keen on withdrawal.
Wilson, I felt, was committed, at least over this term of office, to carry on

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with Singapore and Malaysia, and there must have been a quid pro quo from the
Americans for Britain to stay. Friendly ambassadors told me that the Americans
were helping the British to support the value of the pound sterling, on condition
that the British continued to maintain their presence east of Suez. The Americans
had good reason to want the British to stay. By January 1966, their forces in
South Vietnam had reached 150,000, and the US Air Force was bombing
selected targets in North Vietnam. Later George Brown confirmed to me that the
“quid” was US support for the British pound sterling, then overvalued and under
pressure.
Denis Healey, the defence secretary, was the most important leader I had to
meet after Wilson. I liked him personally. He had a powerful intellect, like a
computer which kept on putting out new solutions as more data was fed in, ready
to abandon fundamental positions taken earlier. His supple mind and facility
with words made him a congenial dinner companion, full of interesting and
useful gossip about people I wanted to know more about. But he could be biting
in his assessments. He once said of a Commonwealth prime minister, pointing to
both sides of his forehead, “He is wood from here to here.”
From him I had a good run-down of the position of the Labour ministers. He
believed it was possible but difficult for the British government to maintain their
military presence in the Far East into the 1970s. In the cabinet, most ministers
favoured a phased withdrawal within the next five years; only Harold Wilson,
Michael Stewart and Healey himself – “a formidable combination” – were keen
on keeping British forces east of Suez in the next decade. I was reassured for I
had met Michael Stewart, the foreign secretary, and found him a steady,
dependable man.
Healey said there was a strong body of opinion in the Labour Party that
wanted complete withdrawal of British forces from their overseas commitments,
believing these forces in the Far East to be less an instrument for the
maintenance of peace and security, and more a cat’spaw in the squabbles of
regional governments. He warned that Britain’s military policy on the Far East
might well change in the life of the present government. This uncertainty over
the duration of their military presence was a constant worry. Keng Swee and I
agreed that whatever the British finally decided, we had to build up a visible
defence capability as soon as possible, to make it apparent to our people and our
neighbours that we were not defenceless.
The day before my departure, on Monday, 25 April, I had a final meeting
with Harold Wilson. He asked about the contribution of British bases to the

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economy of Singapore. I assessed it at about 20 per cent of the gross domestic
product (GDP). A run-down of the bases would result in the repatriation of
appreciable numbers of Malaysians and Indians. This would be a dislocation of
the economy, but I feared most the effect on the morale of our people. It had
taken immense effort to get them “off the fence” and to convince them that
communism was not the inexorable wave of the future. The withdrawal of
British troops and the closure of the bases would lead to a serious erosion of
morale. People could be resigned to the inevitability of China’s might.
I concluded that Wilson and his government could not do much to help
Singapore settle its defence and economic treaty with Malaysia. Their influence
had declined, especially with the easing of Confrontation by Indonesia. The visit
was as satisfactory as I could have hoped. All the British leaders, particularly
Wilson and Healey, stressed that they were badly shaken by the separation, that
we should not have taken so drastic a step without consulting them, and at a time
when they were defending us against Indonesia’s Confrontation. There was a
great deal of heart searching then as to whether they should stay on in Southeast
Asia. They underlined it to emphasise the gravity of the situation. For the
immediate future, I was reassured that Singapore had friends in the Labour
government and in the opposition Conservative Party leadership. It would give
us a few years – time, I hoped, to get some defence forces built up, revive our
economy, resume trade with Indonesia and, most important of all, get
investments in industry.
Wilson showed friendliness in every way during the week I spent in London
that April. He had given me lunch at 10 Downing Street with key cabinet
ministers and Opposition House of Lords leader, Peter Carrington, and their
wives present. In an impromptu speech, he spoke in the warmest terms. In reply
I thanked him for his friendship and support.
Soon after I left London, Wilson came under pressure from his Labour Party
to cut back on overseas defence commitments. At a Parliamentary Labour Party
meeting in June 1966 he had to appeal to their socialist sentiments:
“Frankly if we had only ourselves to think of, we would be glad to leave
Singapore as quickly as possible. We cannot, however, say, as we do in
Aden, that we are not wanted by the local government and local
population. Lee Kuan Yew, as good a left-wing and democratic socialist
as any in this room, certainly wants us to stay there. Let us remember in
the political battles of Southeast Asia and in his own electoral struggles

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he has shown tremendous courage in fighting communism in an area the
communists would dearly like to control.
“The government of Singapore, as we understand it, is the only
democratic socialist government, as we understand the phrase, in
Southeast Asia.
“His social record, in his housing programme for example, defies
challenge in anything that has been done in the most advanced social
democratic communities.”
After London, I attended a Socialist International conference in Stockholm to
keep in touch with British and European socialist party leaders. There I met
George Brown over lunch. He spoke in frank and blunt terms; he wanted to pull
out from Southeast Asia, the sooner the better. He admitted that he was in a
minority, but he intended to persist. Brown said Wilson and Healey had a warm
regard for me and the Singapore government, but he was fed up that this was
made an excuse for British policy east of Suez. He had wanted to include a firm
declaration to pull out in a defence review published in October 1965, but had
been outvoted. I argued that if Britain had pulled out, the Americans would not
have backed sterling. Then the pound would have been devalued and Labour
would have lost the second election. He muttered resentfully that the Lyndon
Johnson-Harold Wilson agreement would do Britain no good in the long run.
In July 1966 Healey visited Singapore and told me that troop levels in
Singapore and Malaysia would be cut to the position it would have been if there
were no Confrontation. He had been to Kuala Lumpur. With a straight face, he
said he had told the press that there was no anti-British feeling there and no
reason other than Britain’s economic difficulties had prevented aid to Malaysia.
He winked and said the Malaysians had learnt that what he called their “Hate
Britain Month” had caused a bad impression and was counterproductive. (The
Malaysian leaders had reacted angrily to criticism in the British media of their
race and language policies and they had gone sour over the British.) By the time
he arrived, it was “Love Britain Month”.
He was jovial, full of bonhomie, and reassuring. There were times when I
felt that the British would be able to stay for a decade, into the 1970s. At other
moments, I feared that time was fast running out on Wilson and Healey. The
mood among British Labour MPs was strongly in favour of cutting defence
spending overseas to concentrate resources on Britain itself.
Healey made a second visit to Singapore on 22 April 1967. He made clear

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that Britain would be out of mainland Asia by the late 1970s. I urged that
confidence in the general security of the area be maintained and that there should
be no sudden changes.
Healey explained that the decision to pull out had been taken for economic,
not military, reasons and was therefore unlikely to be changed. There was no
other way of resolving Britain’s financial problem. There was also fear of
Britain becoming involved in a “Vietnam” war. The British were aghast at the
blood-letting in Vietnam.
At another meeting, two days later, he tried to soften the blow by talking of
significant aid to Singapore; after all, he was talking about cuts, not total
withdrawal. He realised the significance of the confidence factor and would try
to persuade his colleagues on this. But he had to make long-term plans for
British defence and it was not possible to do that bit by bit. He asked about our
plans for the naval dockyard. I told him of our intention to have Swan & Hunter
(a British firm of shipbuilders) take over and “civilianise” it and that I had
already persuaded them to take over our civilian Keppel dockyard, to familiarise
themselves with our conditions.
Both Harold Holt, the prime minister of Australia, and Keith Holyoake, the
prime minister of New Zealand, had cabled to warn me that heavy reductions in
British forces were under consideration and that this would lead to
disengagement and dismantlement of the existing framework of Commonwealth
defence arrangements.
Among the British military commanders in Singapore there was no
expectation of a precipitate withdrawal. In May, a month after Healey’s visit,
Keng Swee and I had a working dinner with Sir Michael Carver, British
commander-in-chief Far East. Carver was most reassuring. He said the principal
role of Singapore’s defence forces should be the prevention of a coup from
within or from the outside. In the event of sustained hostilities we would have to
depend on allies. His attitude assured me that he expected British forces to stay
in Singapore for some time.
In case Carver’s political masters were thinking otherwise or were under
pressure to do the unthinkable, I wrote to Harold Wilson on 26 May that any talk
about “significant aid” had ominous implications. The danger of economic
dislocation was secondary compared to the grave danger of damaged confidence
when it became known that the British had decided to move out by the mid-70s.
Wilson sent a comforting reply and then invited me to London for preliminary
talks.

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When Keng Swee and I met Healey in June 1967, he gave a detailed list of
the force reductions up to 31 March 1968 and the run-down from 1968 to 1971.
After 1971, Britain would have an amphibious force in Southeast Asia, a sort of
“policeman on the beat”.
Discussions on the economic implications were handled by Keng Swee. Like
me, he was more worried over the security than the economic implications of a
run-down of British forces. We both felt that we could somehow manage the
economic run-down if we had security, and confidence was not shaken. I asked
an official from the ministry of overseas development who had dealt with
problems related to the run-down of British forces in Malta whether abandoned
airfields could be put to civilian use. In British experience, he said, abandoned
airfields were either reverted to agriculture or in a few instances made available
for light industry. I did not think agriculture or light industry at all promising for
Singapore and asked that our Economic Development Board be given early
access to the three British airfields, Tengah, Seletar and Changi, to decide how
we could use them later.
British military regulations required them to destroy surplus military
equipment, but Healey agreed to revise the regulations so that such equipment
could be handed over to Singapore for training and other uses. He and his team
bent over backwards to help. These two meetings were a great relief. We felt
confident we could sort out our problems by the mid-70s. I could not have asked
for more. Swan & Hunter had confirmed that the prospects for the naval
dockyard at Sembawang were very good, and a committee comprising the Navy
Department, Swan & Hunter and the Singapore government could plan its
conversion to commercial use.
In a private discussion on 26 June 1967, Wilson promised that this would be
the last defence review for the present Parliament. Healey separately also
promised there would be no further defence reviews. My impression was that
Wilson, even more than Healey, wanted to keep open Britain’s options east of
Suez. What he wanted of me in London was not so much to argue the merits of
staying east of Suez but to work on Labour backbenchers and cabinet ministers
who were against staying.
I spoke to Labour backbenchers at the House of Commons later that
afternoon. The Afro-Asian scene had changed rapidly, I said. Nehru was dead,
Sukarno was discredited and Mao was involved in the madness of the cultural
revolution. Half a million American troops were in South Vietnam. The days of
the white man’s control of Asia had passed. Instead some Asians insisted upon

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Asian solutions to Asian problems so that the big Asian countries could settle
their problems with the smaller ones. The smaller ones had the right to ask their
friends from the West to help redress the balance.
I spent hours talking to Wilson’s ministers. A scheduled half-hour meeting
with Jim Callaghan, then chancellor of the exchequer (whom I had met several
times over the previous 15 years), went on to one and a half hours. From time to
time, whenever the division bells rang, he went out to the lobby to vote but
asked me to stay. At the end, he said, “I was for naming a date by which Britain
should be off but I will think over what you have told me. At the moment I have
an open mind.” He asked me to see Roy Jenkins, then home secretary. Roy
Jenkins listened to me quietly and said that he would support naming no dates,
but that Britain must be off the mainland by 1975.
The minister most opposed to our position was Dick Crossman, then Leader
of the House. For one hour, he hectored and berated me for misleading and
beguiling his colleagues into staying east of Suez. He set out to shock me by
being deliberately rude. He wanted Britain to get out quickly, by 1970. He and
his group of MPs wanted savings for more old-age pensions, cheaper interest for
home loans and more votes. In his frustration he said, “You don’t have to worry
about me for I am a minority voice in the cabinet for the time being but I am
winning, and more and more the Party is coming around to my point of view.”
Our high commissioner, A.P. Rajah, who was present, thought Crossman was
letting off steam because my arguments had strengthened the hand of those who
wanted to stay.
I believed we were all right this time, but there was no guarantee of no
further knocks on the pound, which would lead to another fit of depression in the
British cabinet, another defence review and further watering down of their
forces. This danger was beyond the control even of the British government. The
sad fact was the malaise of the British, and the leadership was not inspiring their
people. Both Labour ministers and backbenchers were despondent: they had had
to do all the things they had said they did not want to do, including the stop-go
economic policy for which they had criticised the Conservative government.
President Lyndon Johnson’s papers showed that he had urged Wilson in
Washington in June 1967 “not to take any steps which would be contrary to
British or American interest and to the interest of the free nations of Asia”. But
Johnson did not push as hard as his aides had urged in their submissions to him
before the meeting. Robert McNamara, Johnson’s defence secretary, had written
to Johnson as early as December 1965 that America placed a higher value on

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British presence and commitment in the Far East than in Europe.
The British Defence White Paper published in July 1967 announced their
intention to reduce forces in Southeast Asia by 50 per cent by 1970/71 and to
withdraw completely by the mid-70s. A dismayed Harold Holt wrote to Wilson
and made his views known to me: “We see the UK government as having taken
historic decisions to reduce its world role and contract, to a significant degree,
from any kind of international responsibility that Britain has carried for many,
many years” and that the Australians must now “rethink our whole situation”.
Soon afterwards, Wilson invited me to speak at his Labour Party annual
conference in October 1967. I agreed, knowing he wanted me to talk his party
into not opposing his staying on in Singapore. I was their main guest speaker, a
fraternal delegate at their eve-of-conference rally on Sunday, 1 October, at
Scarborough. I expressed the hope that Singapore’s long association with the
British over a period of 150 years could allow them to make the disengagement
in a way “to give us the best chance of continuing security and stability”, and
that given a little time and no little effort, we would live as well in the mid-70s
without British base expenditure as we were doing then. I knew the delegates
would be preoccupied with Vietnam. Since I could not ignore the subject, I said,
“I do not want to sound like a hawk or a dove. If I have to choose a metaphor
from the aviary, I would like to think of the owl. Anyone looking at what is
happening in Vietnam must have baleful eyes. It need never have been thus. And
perhaps it was not the wisest place, nor the safest ground in Asia to have made a
stand. But enormous sacrifices have already been expended and in blood, both
Vietnamese and American.” For that anti-Vietnam audience this was the furthest
I could go to hint that if the Americans pulled out, there would be severe
repercussions for the rest of Southeast Asia.
Barely six weeks later, without any warning, on Sunday, 18 November 1967,
Keng Swee received a message from Callaghan, as chancellor of the exchequer,
similar to one he must have sent to all Commonwealth finance ministers, that the
British were devaluing the pound sterling from US$2.80 to US$2.40. That meant
we had lost 14.3 per cent of the reserves we kept in London in sterling. Britain’s
currency came under selling pressure soon after the Labour government took
office in 1964 but we had not moved out our reserves. Their forces were
defending us against Indonesian Confrontation, and we did not want to be
blamed for precipitating a devaluation. Wilson, in a television broadcast that

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same Sunday evening, said, “We are now on our own; it means Britain first.”
This was ominous. But Healey was reassuring when he said in the House of
Commons on 27 November, “I believe that the whole government share my
view, that we must, above all, keep faith with our forces and with our allies in
making these cuts. We can have no reversal of the July decisions. … That is why
my Rt Hon Friend the chancellor (Callaghan) said last Monday that the
reductions must be made within the framework of the defence policies
announced last summer. Let me tell the Rt Hon Gentleman that these cuts mean
no acceleration in the run-down or the redeployment of our forces.”
I wrote to thank Healey for his assurance. I was wrong: he could not speak
for the government. Wilson, the prime minister, was out to save his government.
He meant it when he said it was “Britain first”. Wilson also said “no area of
expenditure can be regarded as sacrosanct”. I wrote to Wilson on 18 December
to recount how the Singapore government had faithfully supported sterling and
lost S$157 million as a result of this devaluation (the Currency Board S$69
million, the Singapore government S$65 million, statutory boards S$23 million).
My letter ended: “I would be loath to believe that temporary difficulties could
disrupt the trust and confidence we have in each other’s good intentions,
goodwill and good faith. I shall stand by my statement at Scarborough and on
our part we shall see that the last of the British forces will be given a ceremonial
send-off when they leave their bases in the mid-70s.”
This was a forlorn hope. In the first major crisis of his government Wilson
had no time to save friends and allies, however faithful. Instead of replying, he
sent George Thomson, the Commonwealth relations secretary, to see me on 9
January 1968. Thomson was apologetic and defensive. Devaluation, he said, had
given the British government a chance once and for all to put the economy right.
The defence cuts would mean a fundamental change in the historic role of
Britain and its long-term defence structure. The British would remain in Europe,
though their capability could be used to help allies outside Europe. I asked about
Healey’s statement on an amphibious capability in Singapore. That was to be
scrapped. No naval forces would be stationed in Southeast Asia after 1971.
Asked how firm the decision to pull out by 1971 was, Thomson said it was very
firm but they would take into account the views of their Commonwealth