Prime Minister
On taking office, Welensky was forced to take sides in the Suez Crisis. The government of the United Kingdom received heavy international criticism for its actions, but Welensky's government, with those of Australia and New Zealand, nonetheless stood behind Britain. It was Welensky's first experience in international politics. In the aftermath of the Suez debacle British colonial policy changed significantly, which would have adverse effects for the federation. It marked the decline of a gradual approach to decolonisation, and a rapid speeding up of the process. Politically, only three years after its founding, the federation began to decline.
International attitudes to the federation were critical, particularly from the Afro-Asian bloc in the United Nations. At a time when most colonial powers were rushing their colonies towards independence, the federation seemed to its opponents to be an unwelcome obstacle. In Britain, Labour grew more critical, and African nationalists in the federation itself became more vocal, unsatisfied with the liberalisation that was taking place, and demanding faster moves towards African advancement. The Governor of Northern Rhodesia, Sir Arthur Benson, wrote a secret letter to his superiors in Britain, highly critical of Welensky and the federation; this letter remained undiscovered until 1958, when Huggins revealed it to Welensky.
Read more about this topic: Roy Welensky
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
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“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)