Eighty Years Ago This Week

  The government announced plans to construct a new building to house the Colonial Office, integrating on a single site activities spread around five separate ones. Extra space was needed to meet "new and important responsibilities as a result of the great developments in the colonial Empire."  These presumably referred to the new possessions awarded to Britain by the Versailles Treaty over twenty-five years before, which included Palestine which Britain was frantically trying to slough off. It was to be an immense building across the road from Westminster Abbey covering a comparable area; it would have dominated the area north of the Palace of Westminster. Providing a suitable venue to receive visiting foreigners (presumably colonials) was part of the brief. It was to take some years to clear the site and history rapidly overtook the project which was never begun. The opposition found a way of introducing the question of the closed shop into a debate on fair wages for employ...

At the apparently unilateral decision of Britain the conference on Palestine was suspended until December 16 at the earliest. The ostensible reason was that the upcoming  first meeting of the UN General Assembly made it impractical to continue the discussions. In fact prime minister Attlee was already concerned at the possibility that permitting the immigration of 100,000 Jews, which was under discussion at the conference and was supported by President Truman, would inflame Moslem sentiment worldwide and increase the difficulty of the Indian independence process which was deadlocked by the stand-off between the Moslem and Hindu communities. The conference had, anyway, been floundering with no agreed solution in sight; India was the far larger problem.  Truman responded with a public endorsement of the 100,000 immigration plan and a far more direct statement in favour of an independent Jewish state. Attlee appointed A. V. Alexander as the first minister in charge of a newly cre...