ABSTRACT
Advocates of the metropolitan explanation of decolonization who believe that the pressure of economic and domestic change at home was a seminal influence on the end of empire might find sustenance for their views from the activities of Robin Young on the night of the British general election of 15 October 1964. Young was an experienced Political Officer and hugely admired by his colleagues but they were not convinced by his suggestion that the results of the poll would be crucial to the future of the Middle East. He stayed awake to listen to the returns on the radio and by the end of the following day was convinced that Harold Wilson’s victory was the beginning of the end for British influence in the region.1 The assumptions underlying this analysis have since acquired a degree of orthodoxy. The general view is that, given a more robust attitude than Wilson and his colleagues managed to summon up, something like Trevaskis’s plan to model southwest Arabia on Cromer’s Egypt might have been feasible. In one sense there is evidence to commend this view, for the new Labour government was unable to devise an effective strategy and, by announcing in February 1966 that previous offers of defence assistance after independence were to be retracted, it made the task of clinging to the remains of British influence more difficult. However, this analysis takes insufficient account of the fact that the watershed had already been traversed by October 1964: nationalist fortunes had been in the ascendant since the late 1950s, international pressures for withdrawal were mounting and the internal security problems in the interior were being magnified by an alliance between the tribes and the Egyptians. Furthermore, there was an element of continuity between Labour and Conservative approaches: although the former were less sympathetic than the latter to the federation and keener to appease the nationalists in Aden, the goals of British policy and even some of the tactics remained unchanged. The Wilson government wanted to play a continuing role in southwest Arabia and the Middle East; in order to do so it employed a variety of means, many of them familiar, to combat Egyptian influence and construct a stable state in which their interests would be guaranteed. Initially, the new tactics in Aden will be explored before the elements of continuity in policy towards tribal insurrections and the Civil War in Yemen are examined.
