After the 2nd World War and with having to rebuild Britain while at the same time deal with the Soviet Union which had its European ambitions, Britain needed dollars - US dollars to buy whatever it was that was needed.

The empire was on the decline and India had had its independence. Its only goose that was laying golden eggs was Malaya!

"From 1948 until 1957, when the back of the communist insurgency was broken, it sank immense resources into the campaign.

By October 1950, it had committed twenty-one infantry regiments, two armoured car regiments and one commando brigade, totalling nearly 50,000 troops.

An official estimate put the overall cost at a staggering £700 million, of which the UK government spent £520 million.

At the end of 1948, it was estimated that the Emergency was costing between M$250,000 - M$300,000 per day.

In one year alone, 1951, the Emergency cost the government £69.8 million. This is especially significant when we consider the state of the British Treasury in the late 1940s. World War II drained the British economy to such an extent that it could scarcely meet existing commitments let alone accept new ones.

Its very economic viability seemed in doubt, especially during the ‘dollar gap' crisis of 1947. As one of Attlee's chief advisors wrote in December 1947: "We are a bankrupt nation. It will tax our strength and determination to the utmost during the next years to provide for our necessary imports by exports. Until we succeed we shall only keep alive through the charity of our friends."

The question that therefore arises - and it is a core concern of this paper - is why, at this time of acute financial difficulty and without, in this instance, crucial American support, did the Attlee Labour government commit itself to a costly campaign in a colony whose march to Merdeka seemed imminently realisable?"

With all the chatter focused on communist conspiracies perpetuated by Moscow and instructions being issued out of the Cominform conferences held earlier in 1948 in Calcutta for the CPM to take violent action, the narrative carried through to this day which Umno of course upholds, was an armed conflict orchestrated, somehow, by China rather than Moscow, would have instilled in this country communist rule that would cast God aside, and that of course includes Islam.

That narrative of course sat well with the rulers of the day to provide the moral high-ground to garner the support of the people.

Violence was met with violence and then more violence and even more violence. The CPM were cast as the bad guys. And they were bad.

Indeed I am glad that they lost. But one cannot ignore the fact that they too saw the British as the enemy that needed to be cast out of Malaya so that Malaya would be independent. Of course they saw an independent communist Malaya!

Well, remove the spectre of the violence that they participated in, you cannot really fault their aspirations as one cannot also fault PAS' aspirations for an Islamic state, or for that matter UMNO's take on its Islamic state.

All of that is political posturing and really it is the citizens who should have had the right to determine their own destiny. I suppose the communists assumed too much and so does Umno to this day of course.

But post war Britain had a different reason for issuing the emergency order and taking the battle against the CPM to the level that they did despite their own financial circumstances.

"Besides the desire to crush communism, a desire aggravated by the onset of the Cold War, there was another, less publicly acknowledged reason for massive military commitment at a time of limited resources and fiscal parsimony. It concerned economic exigencies. Once the Japanese were defeated in 1945, Great Britain was determined to return to Malaya even if not to Burma or India.

"This second colonial occupation, this new imperialism, occurred because of Malaya's dollar-earning capacity. As Creech Jones told Cabinet (but not Parliament): During 1947 the total value of the exports of Singapore and the [Malayan] Federation together was £151 million of which dollar exports accounted for £56 million. [Malaya] is by far the most important source of dollars in the colonial empire and it would gravely worsen the whole dollar balance of the Sterling Area if there were serious interference with Malayan exports.

"In 1948 the US imported 727,000 tons of rubber, of which Malaya supplied 371,000. The US imported 158,000 tons of tin of which all but 3000 came from Malaya. In terms of dollars, rubber production exceeded in total value all domestic exports from Great Britain to the United States.

"During 1946-1950, it derived US$700 million income from rubber exports to America. Any interruption of that supply, such as that presented by the insurgency, would seriously impair the British economy. In that year, 1948, Britain was still struggling to maintain the value of its sterling and the ‘dollar gap' seemed to be getting wider.

"This financial crisis made earnings from the ‘Sterling Area', in which Malaya was the linchpin, all the more crucial. The maintenance and security of British business in Malaya was therefore of central economic importance to the imperial government."

I have always wondered why on earth Australian and New Zealand servicemen would come to Malaya to fight our Communists and die in the process. Now I don't have to wonder why!

Maybe the communists knew something that Umno did not know then.

After all in gaining independence did not the British retain much of the income generating assets of the colonial period post independence? Keeping Singapore, did not they ensure much of Malaya's resources continued to find their markets via Singapore hence giving them a pinch of the pie?

What is the point of independence if we could not also determine the fate of our resources? How come Umno was so generous?

Note: Those paragraphs within inverted commas taken from Malaya, 1948: Britain's ‘Asian Cold War'? by Phillip Deery, Fellow, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University.

I will recommend a good read of this article.