Decline & Fall?

Said Winston Churchill: "The words which have come from the Prime Minister's lips today are, in fact, irrevocable and he has shorn Burma from the British Crown."

Clement Attlee had just told the House of Commons that Burma could have a choice between complete independence and dominion status. A representative group of Burmans would come to London next month to speed the freedom process while Burma elected a constitutional convention.

Attlee had acted under pressure. A month ago Burma's youthful (31) nationalist leader, Aung San, had presented the British with a demand to quit Burma by Jan. 31, 1947. If the deadline were not met, Aung San had threatened, it would be time for "extralegal methods." Aung San, whose Anti-Fascist People's Freedom . League is expected to sweep the elections, will undoubtedly head the delegation to London.

Aung San himself had acted under pressure. Although he publicly clamors for complete independence, he privately favors a tie-up with Britain as a means of ensuring military protection. His main rival is Communist Than Tun, who instigated protest strikes against Aung's less extreme attitude toward the British.

Churchill had not become the leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition to witness in silence the liquidation of the British Empire. First there had been India, the brightest jewel; now, with Burma, that hated word "liquidation" had proceeded into the second syllable. An 18th Century statesman who scorns the 20th Century's grey impersonality, Churchill identified himself with his imperial cause. In a peculiarly Churchillian passage he said: "I have always followed [Burma] affairs with attention because it was my father* who was responsible for the annexation of Burma. ... It was said in the [18th Century] days of the great administrator, Lord Chatham, that you had to be up very early in the morning in order not to miss some acquisition of territory. . . . The present Government is distinguished for the opposite set of experiences . . . the decline and fall of the British Empire."

But Attlee stuck to Labor's line that it was the old imperialism that had declined, fallen and been buried beneath the weight of colonial peoples' drive for freedom. Said Attlee: "We do not desire to retain within the Commonwealth and Empire any unwilling peoples."

* Lord Randolph Churchill, as Secretary of State for India in 1885, ordered a British expeditionary force to depose Burma's mad King Theebaw and formally join the country, which had been under British influence for 60 years, to the Empire.

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