ABSTRACT
The future of the Commonwealth as a whole might be dubious but there still remained specific lingering issues from the imperial past which still had to engage a British government in the 1980s and beyond. In the decades after 1945, as the Empire dissolved, there was much anguished discussion, at least in some quarters, of the extent to which Britain remained a 'world power'. The importance of British policy was again demonstrated in the autumn of 1986. For the time being, however, Sino-British relations seemed good and the settlement was generally held to be a satisfactory one, even though substantially conducted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office without too much Prime Ministerial assistance. Some commentators contrasted the 'civilian society' which they detected in continental Europe with British society which was apparently willing to contemplate the war with certain equanimity.
