PREVENTION OF CORRUPTION (FOREIGN PAYMENTS). (Hansard, 2 December 1925)

§ Commander OLIVER LOCKER-LAMPSON
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend and extend the law relating to the prevention of corruption. I had intended to introduce this Bill last Wednesday, but certain Communists were then in Court upon a criminal charge, and I felt that no words of mine in this House, however privileged, should be allowed to interfere with a fair trial for them. Therefore, I have postponed introducing this Bill until to-day. I do so now under the protection of the Ten Minute Rule, but I shall speak only for 4½ minutes. This Bill is in no way directed to stopping free speech; it is in no way directed to interfering with the great trade unions of this country, the disposal of their funds, and the management of their own affairs. It is directed solely against those persons who receive foreign money for purposes hostile to the security of the State and subversive of the constitution of the realm.
It seems extraordinary that anybody should not support a Measure as benevolent as that which I introduce to-day, but I am told that people will object to it, and there are some who object to it on the ground that it is unnecessary. People tell us that as long as an enemy does not march into our territory with armed strength to lay waste and devastate it we can sleep and snore serenely in 2240 our beds. But now that people can read and write there is a weapon in the arsenal of anarchy far deadlier than any bomb or bayonet. I served three years with the Russian Army at the front, and I remember seeing those armies of the Czar, who had for long stood unconquered against frightful odds, yield in a few weeks to the sugared falsehoods of the paid agents-provocateurs. I saw whole armies evaporate without a single blow under the high explosion of that mixture of a distortion of the truth and an exaggeration of it which goes by the name of propaganda to-day: and that propaganda was possible simply because there was foreign money behind it.
I chanced to be in Russia during the revolution. Not many Members of Parliament were. I was in Petrograd shortly afterwards, and one day I happened to be in the streets, and I saw a short, bearded man enter a house, go and open a window, and speak to the multitude outside. [HON. MEMBERS: "Shame!"] I went and listened. Perhaps there was shame in that. I heard this man preach anarchy, murder, and treachery. I asked who he was, and was told that he was named Lenin. I went straight off to the officials of the Republic, which was then in power under Kenensky, and I said to them: "Why do you not lock up this crazy incendiary?" The only answer I got was that he was a negligible nonentity, and that nobody need pay the slightest attention to him. That negligible, nonentity, in six months' time, became Tsar of all the Russias and his triumphant régime has lasted till to-day, nearly 10 years later. How was he able to do it? Do you imagine that any man, whatever his genius, could have achieved that by will power alone? He did it solely because he was given money by a foreign enemy. He was sent, as we know, with £2,000,000 by Ludendorff to influence the Russian proletariat and to steal soldiers and sailors from their allegiance to a common cause, and there are to-day thousands, nay millions, of people, who might be alive among the allied countries but who are dead, simply and 2241 solely because Lenin prolonged the War by ruining Russia. If Lenin was a negligible nonentity, then, however negligible some of our nonentities may seem to us to-day, I do not think that they can be negligible if they can get foreign money to work their will, and I would like to prevent that foreign money coming into this country in order to ruin it. We may be told that they are unimportant people. You might as well say that the typhoid bacillus is a jolly little fellow, because he lives in your blood and remains with you to no harm to yourself while you are well. But you have only to weaken your resistance in a moment of ill-health to see the ravages he may work in your system. So it is with any negligible nonentity if he is given money and supplies.
This money flows from Russia to-day. We know it, and it has been proved. It is not generally denied. I remember, when I learned political economy, we used to hear about what were called invisible exports, outgoings which were unseen from one country to another, and which balanced the trade of the country which was behind hand. But there are no unseen outgoings from any country to-day that are as invisible or secret as the Russian rouble which travels over from Moscow to do its purposes here in England. It comes over at any moment. There is no sea that can stem it; there is no frontier that can arrest it; there is no cordon of police that can stop it. I think it is legitimate to say to-day that there is probably no strike in this country, the fomenters of which could not get support from the Soviet; there is no journal in England which, if it turned red, might not draw some sustenance from suspected quarters; and there is probably no type of civil disorder upon which the subsidised hand of anarchy could not, in a crisis, stamp its odious imprint. This Bill is brought in in order to prevent that sort of thing, if possible, from occurring again. The time has surely come when foreign cash should no longer be free to flow in here to interfere with our purely domestic concerns, and when a murderous régime in Moscow should no longer be at liberty to fan the flames of our own disputes, and for its own chaotic ends to poison the wells 2242 of good will and conciliation in our own labour disputes. This Bill is brought in to prevent this, and to bring to book those English mercenaries who have sold themselves for stolen shekels to the high priests of disorder in an enemy land. Under this Bill these pests will be made to own up, pay up, and shut up.

§ Mr. DENNIS HERBERT
On a point of Order. May I ask for the information of the House whether this Motion is correctly put down on the Order Paper, or whether it ought not to have been put down as a Notice of Motion to ask leave to bring in a Bill? I do not wish to interfere on this occasion, but some of us have been a little misled as to the form of the Notice.

§ Mr. SPEAKER
The Notice is quite in order and according to our usual practice.

§ Mr. SPEAKER
Does the hon. Member rise to oppose the Bill?

§ Miss WILKINSON
I rise to oppose it. I had not intended to do so until I heard the speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Wandsworth (Commander Locker-Lampson), and it does seem to me quite extraordinary the way in which Members of his way of thinking, assume that there is some mysterious power placed in the hands of anybody who is paid to prosecute any particular doctrine by which they can take away the brains or common sense of the people who happen to listen to them. I wish that the hon. and gallant Gentleman, who evidently speaks from some knowledge of Russia at the time of the revolution, had not told us only of the agitators who were at the front, but also something of the economic conditions of the soldiers who were at the front. If those men had been fighting in a cause which they thought was right, and if they had been properly supported from their headquarters, I venture to suggest that there would have been no propaganda and no words, however honeyed, that could have taken them from their allegiance. If that were not the case, surely the agitators who were paid in order to seduce the Red troops from their allegiance would have had greater success. What you had at the time of the revolution, as every- 2243 body knows, was a complete breakdown of transport, not due to any Soviet Government, not due to the Kerensky Government, but due to the complete breakdown of the Tzarist Government before the revolution.
Everyone knows these conditions. Gentlemen who sit on the other side of the House have written books to say these Russian soldiers were fighting in the snow with clubs because there was no ammunition. It is not a question of any words of any orator. However many restrictions we place upon propaganda, however many people we put in prison, that will not stop revolution unless the economic conditions that make for revolution are altered. The reason they had revolution in Russia is that it followed the most appalling tyranny the world has ever known. The only safeguard against revolution in this country is not imprisonment and is not Bills such as this, but a real desire on the part of Members of this House to remove poverty and the causes that lead to destitution and misery and distress. I am sure the hon. and gallant Gentleman's intentions are of the very best, but Bills like this are merely pills to cure an earthquake and plasters put on running sores. They merely widen the conscience of people in this House who refuse to look at the appalling conditions there are in this country and try to believe that it is not their privileges and their oppressions, but merely the honied words of agitators that make revolution. The Bill is completely unnecessary and is on entirely wrong lines