ABSTRACT
THE FIRST OF three letters (22) to The Manchester Guardian in Part III appeared on 11 Aug. 1956, p. 4 (B&R C56.11). It was Russell’s earliest public reaction to the crisis precipitated by Colonel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July (see Introduction, p. xxxiv). This unilateral declaration of intent by the Egyptian leader had come just one week after Britain and the United States had withdrawn financial support from his Aswan High Dam project. Russell’s intervention, however, was triggered more by the growing likelihood of military means being used to thwart Nasser’s objective. He was drawing attention to the call by a small group of mainly left-wing Labour M.P.’s for a peaceful solution to the conflict based on a system of international control for the canal that was acceptable to Egypt and not necessarily incompatible with Egyptian ownership (see also A128:3-4). But this statement carried only twenty-four signatures. Much of the parliamentary opposition hesitated at first to rule out force quite so unequivocally. Indeed, in the Commons debate of Suez on 2 August, Herbert Morrison, a former Labour Foreign Secretary, was as truculent as anyone from the right-wing Suez Group of Conservative M.P.’s. Hugh Gaitskell would become an impassioned and effective scourge of Prime Minister Eden after Egypt was attacked. At this early stage of the crisis, however, the leader of the Opposition endeavoured to maintain a bipartisan approach. In Parliament he had echoed Eden’s comparison of Colonel Nasser with the fascist dictators of the 1930s and had also pointedly referred to the bankruptcy of earlier appeasement policies. Whereas Eden’s Cabinet had already resolved to act alone if necessary, Gaitskell, by contrast, stressed that the resort to arms must be “consistent with our belief in, and our pledges to, the Charter of the United Nations…” (United Kingdom 1956a, 1,617). By mid-September, with the FrancoBritish military build-up accelerating, and with Eden refusing a pledge not to act in contravention of the UN Charter, Labour support for the Prime Minister’s position-which had been extremely soft all along-had all but melted away.
