Page 56 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Retreat from the Gulf 51

contributions from either the West German government towards the cost of
supporting the British Army of the Rhine, or the government of Hong Kong
towards the maintenance of the colony’s British garrison. Healey’s gratuitously
offensive remarks were also an odd way of rewarding the Gulf oil shaikhs for
their loyalty in retaining their sterling deposits in London throughout the
financial crisis in the autumn of 1967- It was a loyalty which cost them dearly
when sterling was devalued without advance warning. Bahrain alone, which
could least afford a loss, suffered a fall in the value of her holdings of £2.5
million.
Afterwards, in his memoirs, Harold Wilson was pleased to describe the
‘package’ of proposals adopted by his Cabinet in January 1968 as having ‘as a
whole ... an impressive integrity and balance’. ‘Integrity’ seems a singularly
inapt word to apply to the planned repudiation of solemn treaty engagements
and defence commitments. It has even less applicability to the series of shabby
manoeuvres that attended the assembly of this ‘package’ and which were later
to become public knowledge through the publication of Richard Crossman’s
diaries. Though the diaries must be approached with circumspection, they are
nevertheless an intimate record of the way in which the Labour Cabinet dealt
with great affairs of state, at home and abroad, in the weeks that elapsed
between the onset of the sterling crisis in October and the fateful decision­
taking of the following January. Here, it is clear, was no searching and
far-reaching analysis of Britain’s foreign, imperial and defence policies, with
all their grave implications and perilous imponderables, but an unseemly
squabble among ministers of the Crown for private advantage, factional ascen­
dancy and ideological or financial priority. Every consideration, it would seem,
was subordinated to the narrow interests of party and doctrine, and the fate and
consequence of Britain in the world was made to revolve around such mighty
issues as whether or not the reimposition of medical prescription charges
would be a blot upon the name of British socialism.

For a time after the announcement that British forces were to be withdrawn
from the Gulf some uncertainty prevailed as to whether the withdrawal auto­
matically meant the termination of Britain’s treaties with the Gulf shaikhdoms.
Shaikh Rashid of Dubai publicly complained in late January that although he,
along with the rulers of Bahrain and Qatar, had asked for clarification on this
score, he had so far received none. Britain’s legal position in the Gulf rested
upon the trucial system and the special treaty relationship with Bahrain, Qatar
and the seven shaikhdoms of the Trucial Coast. The trucial system had its
eginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century when Britain, in an effort
to stamp out piracy and maritime warfare in the Gulf, persuaded the ruling
s aikhs of the principal tribes dwelling along the southern shore of the Gulf
torn Abu Dhabi to Ras al-Khaimah to observe a truce among themselves at sea
unng the months of the annual pearl fishing, the tribes’ principal source of