On 19 March 1952, some six weeks after his arrival in Malaya, General Templer, as President of the Federal Legislative Council, addressed the opening session of the Council to outline the manner in which he intended to implement the political Directive he had been given by the British Government. It dealt with an impressively wide range of social, economic, and political matters which brought out clearly his views on the immense number of complex problems with which he had to grapple.

Templer sent a draft of his speech to Lyttelton in London, which he said was “entirely in accord with Her Majesty's Government's policy”, and in his telegram of 12 March to Lyttelton, which he copied to Malcolm MacDonald, British Commissioner General for South East Asia in Singapore, he said that it had been “gone through yesterday by the Executive Council”.

In his telegram to Lyttelton, Templer said that during the past few weeks he had held a number of discussions with Dato' Onn, Dato E.E.C. Thuraisingham, a Ceylonese Tamil, who was the Member for Education, and other local politicians about responsible local government at grass roots level, which Templer referred to as the “parish pump level”. On 7 March, the Singapore Standard in a critical article written by S. Rajaratnam [then a newspaper journalist who later joined the People's Action Party (PAP) and became Singapore's first Minister for Culture and subsequently Singapore's longest serving Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister], said it was Templer's intention to limit Malaya's advance to self-government, to use Templer's own phrase, to “parish pump” level. This mention of the term “parish pump” which was to incur Templer's wrath, attracted a lot of attention, and Templer informed Lyttelton that he intended to issue a statement about it in his forthcoming address to be delivered on 19 March to the Legislative Council along the following lines: