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The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs is published six times a year.
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Contributions on these themes, to the Editor are particularly welcome.Malaysia: The 15th general election and its implications
From the Archive
In this piece written fifty years, the Australian-born civil servant S.C. Leslie focused on the historical background to how Israelis had, in his view inevitably, built up a bunker mentality in the face of a litany of dusty answers, four wars, and constant pressure by the UN, the UK, France, and the US, ‘who induced their 1956 withdrawal from Sinai under promise of future safeguards which proved inoperative’. The author quotes Mrs Meir in a speech in London: ‘it is hard to be small and alone’. ['From the Archives' curated by Alex May and Paul Flather]
Sixty years ago the Conservative MP Enoch Powell (four years later to become infamous for his ‘rivers of blood’ speech on immigration) penned an article in The Times which described the Commonwealth as a ‘farce’: a mere relic of the empire, of no use to the UK, and potentially a drag on it. In this robust response, Timothy Raison (later himself a Conservative MP) set out the case for the Commonwealth.
Labour came to power under Tony Blair in 1997, promising to re-set Britain’s relationship with the rest of the Commonwealth after the difficult years under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. In this article from 2005, Paul D. Williams suggests that the fanfare and solemn declarations failed to translate into concrete actions, and that the official Commonwealth remains ‘an institution relegated to the back burner’.