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From Socialist Worker, No. 93, 19 October 1968, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
‘Nibmar,’said a Labour Party delegate, being urged to support demands for a Rhodesia debate at Blackpool this month, ‘is party policy’. He therefore saw no need to petition for a special debate on Rhodesia or to stiffen the party leadership’s commitment to the crucial principle of ‘No Independence Before Majority Rule’. The delegate was right. Nibmar is party policy, and has been since long before the Labour government came to power.
But like much Labour Party policy with regard to Southern Africa, it has swayed and tottered.
Yet significantly. Southern Africa is often used by the government to show how closely they have stuck to pledges made in Opposition days. Barbara Castle, addressing a pre-conference rally in Blackpool, made proud mention that no arms were being sold to South Africa, and that no deals had been done with Ian Smith.
But Harold Wilson must have hoped to do a deal with Ian Smith when he set up last week’s Gibraltar meeting and all those preceding it. The history of his hopes goes right back to the first month of the Labour government.
On November 27 1964, Wilson wrote to Smith:
‘We have an open mind on the timing of independence in relation to progress towards majority rule.’
Only a month before, on October 2, two weeks before the general election, he had written to an African opponent of Smith:
‘The Labour Party is totally opposed to granting independence to Southern Rhodesia so long as the government of the country remains under the control of a white minority.’
In 1965, demonstrating flexibility on the protection of the African majority in the colony, Wilson sensitively chose to tell African nationalist leaders living in restriction in Rhodesia, that no British force would be used against the rebels, in the event of a unilateral declaration of independence.
He passed this word on to Smith, and a few months later, on November 11 1965, Smith seized independence
Numerous declarations that Wilson would not negotiate with the rebels followed, and he instigated a partial programme of voluntary sanctions against Rhodesia at the UN. In January 1966 he told the Commonwealth Prime Ministers in Lagos, that these would bring down the regime ‘in weeks rather than months’.
In April, despite being well-supplied with oil from South Africa, Smith did bleat piteously about the effect sanctions were having, but before the screws could turn, Wilson, forgetting his no-negotiations vow, rushed officials to Salisbury for the famous ‘talks about talks’.
These dragged on and off throughout the summer until the Commonwealth Prime Ministers, assembling in high dudgeon about Britain’s failure to deal with the rebels, came to London in September 1966.
There, Zambia’s Foreign Minister Simon Kapwepwe was so incensed at the British holding operation that he left the Conference calling Wilson a ‘racist’.
Furious, the Prime Minister nonetheless could not even wait till the conference ended before setting fresh talks in train, and by the end of the month the then Commonwealth Secretary, Herbert Bowden, was in Salisbury, showing Smith his new ‘package’.
This had little to do with Nibmar. The British attitude was simply that a re-working of the 1961 Constitution rejected by the Conservative government as unsuitable for independence, would be acceptable, providing some ‘safeguards’ were built in.
Even so, Bowden, after further investigation in Salisbury in November, concluded that there was so little give in Smith’s position that there was no point to further negotiation.
Nonetheless, Wilson insisted on talking to Smith himself, their final meeting before last week.
He flew to Gibraltar and boarded HMS Tiger, promising close, anxious colleagues that he would insist on a British military presence in Rhodesia during a transition from the rebel regime to whatever new form of government might be agreed. This promise did not appear in the proposals later.
Aboard the Tiger, Britain made all the concessions. The police state powers embedded in the 1961 Constitution and the Law and Maintenance Act were not to be annulled.
Nothing in the proposed Tiger Constitution could prevent Smith from banning opposition parties or interning opponents.
There were no demands for improvements in African income and educational qualifications, the prerequisites to an enlarged African A roll vote and thus to majority rule. Nothing made majority rule inevitable. No mention was made of British intervention should the ‘safeguards’ for Africans be eroded in later years.
Smith was canny enough to smell that Wilson was offering a good deal. The Prime Ministers returned home, certain of the best.
Only Smith’s less intelligent and more bigoted colleagues could not see their own advantage and saved the day for their African compatriots, turning down the deal.
At this point Harold Wilson came full circle. ‘The British government will withdraw all previous proposals for a constitutional settlement which have been made: in particular they will not thereafter be prepared to submit to the British parliament any settlement which involves independence before majority rule,’ he told a packed House of Commons early in December 1966.
But the statement stuck in the craw, it was repeated to parliament once or twice with increasing reluctance in the following six months, but already by June 1967, Wilson was indicating to the Rhodesians that he might be able to ‘discuss’ the Nibmar pledge with the African Commonwealth leaders to whom he felt obliged.
In his parliamentary address to the Blackpool Conference this month, the Prime Minister mentioned Rhodesia, and his firm intention to stand by the six principles (which envisage minority rule independence with ‘safeguards’). But he made no mention of Nibmar.
Later in the week, pressed to it on television, he grudgingly said:
‘There will have to be a significant change on the Rhodesia side, before I can ask the African leaders to let me rescind the Nibmar pledge.’
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