Harold Macmillan's 'Wind of Change' скачать в хорошем качестве

Harold Macmillan's 'Wind of Change'

→ The end of the British Empire MACMILLAN’S ‘WIND OF CHANGE’ SPEECH - 9½-minute video It was on this day in 1960 – 3 February – that British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, gave his famous ‘Wind of Change’ speech in the Parliament at Cape Town, South Africa. It was a hugely significant and brave speech, because Mr Macmillan spoke out against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Although he received a polite applause at the end, his words were met with a frosty reception. The British government's aim, he said, was to "create a society which respects the rights of individuals - a society in which individual merit, and individual merit alone, is the criterion for a man's advancement, whether political or economic." He proudly referred to the of speech of his Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, at the United Nations: "We – that is the British – reject the idea of any inherent superiority of one race over another.” Nationalist Party politicians listened to him in silence, and a number refused to applaud when he had finished. Dr Verwoerd, the South African Prime Minister and the architect of the apartheid system, thanked Mr Macmillan for his speech, but said he could not agree. In the same speech, Mr Macmillan acknowledged the end of the British Empire, and asserted that nations could not exist in isolation. "No country, not even the greatest, can live for itself alone," he said. The following year, in 1961, Mr Macmillan applied for the UK to join the fledgling European Community, urging that Britain could not isolate itself from Europe. He told the British people at the time, “The leading European countries are joining together to build a future of peace and progress.” At the same time, Winston Churchill, in a private letter to his constituency Chairman wrote, ‘I think that the Government are right to apply to join the European Economic Community..’ Hard as it is to believe now, without Conservatives such as Macmillan and Churchill, Britain might never have joined the European Community in the first place. They don’t make Conservatives like that anymore.