Lords Sitting of 23 May 1946

Preamble
The House met at four of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers.

INDIA AND BURMA (BURMA MONETARY ARRANGEMENTS) (AMENDMENT) ORDER, 1946.
THE EARL OF CLARENDON: My Lords, I have a Message from the King, signed with his own hand. His Majesty's Message is as follows:
"I have received your Address praying that the India and Burma (Burma Monetary Arrangements) (Amendment) Order, 1946, be made in the form of the draft laid before Parliament. I will comply with your request."

BORROWING (CONTROL AND GUARANTEES) BILL.
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Pakenham.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly:
(The EARL OF DROGHEDA in the Chair.)
Clause 1:
Treasury control of borrowing, etc.
1.—(1) The Treasury may make orders for regulating, subject to such exemptions as may be specified in the Orders, all or any of the following transactions, that is to say—
4.1 p.m.
THE EARL OF MUNSTER THE EARL OF MUNSTER moved, in subsection (1), after "may," where that word first occurs, to insert "during the period of five years from the passing of this Act." The noble Earl said: The first Amendment which stands in my name on the Order Paper is practically self-explanatory. The object is to secure a limitation of the period during which the Bill shall operate. Thus, instead of the Bill operating for a period of eternity,
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or until some other Government should amend it, I ask your Lordships to insert, "during the period of five years from the passing of this Act." I explained on the Second Reading of the measure—and I do not wish to go into it again at any length—that we do not think it is really necessary or desirable for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to have power to control investment permanently. As I understand it, the Chancellor already has powers under the Supplies and Services Act, which was limited to a period of five years. During the whole course of the discussion on this Bill in your Lordships' House and in another place it has never been suggested by us that all controls should be immediately dropped. I think I made it clear that we consider that there should be two periods—the transitional phase and the post-transitional phase. As the Bill is at present drafted—and of course all the power is contained in Clause 1—it seems to me that it will become possibly a restrictive measure. It is hardly designed for an expansionist economy. No Government, as far as I am aware, have ever had any experience in peace-time of such powers as are contained in this Bill. It is, therefore, appropriate, it seems to us, that we should ask the Government to limit the period of the Bill to five years, instead of eternity. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 1, line 5, after ("may") insert ("during the period of five years from the passing of this Act").—(The Earl of Munster.)
4.4 p.m.
VISCOUNT SAMUEL: The noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, who spoke from this Bench on the Second Reading of this Bill, drew special attention to the fact that the period of the Bill was unlimited, and expressed the view that strong reasons would have to be given before that should be assented to. The noble Viscount is, unfortunately, absolutely prevented from being here to-day, and I should like to support his plea. The powers given under this Bill are exceedingly wide. It is undoubtedly necessary to continue for the time being powers for the direction of our currency, and to continue the system of managed finances which has been necessary during the war. But after a period of years the matter ought to revert to Parliament, for consideration in the light of the working of the system. My

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noble friend who has just moved this Amendment originally suggested that the period should be two years. That period, it seemed to me, would have been unduly short, and I am glad to know that he has now moved his Amendment with the figure "five" instead of "two." All the other controls which have been granted for war-time purposes have been extended by recent regulations or recent Statute, so far as necessary. The term of live years has been generally adopted, and it seems to me that an exception should not be made in this case. I trust that the Government will agree to this limitation.
4.7 p.m.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: May I add a few words in favour of this Amendment. This is a very remarkable Bill. It is an example of delegated powers of legislation going to a very extreme limit, the sort of limit that you would expect to be reached only in the emergency of war. This matter is one of constitutional importance. A number of eminent writers have complained bitterly of the extension of the delegation of the power of making Orders equivalent to law. The late Lord Hewark wrote a very admirable book on the subject. Professor Carr is the author of a book on delegated legislation, which contains the objections which exist to legislation of this kind in cases where it is not necessary. And finally, there is a very able book by my friend Professor C. K. Allen, entitled, Law in the Making, which contains a chapter devoted to the question of legislation such as I am speaking of.
No sensible person thinks that there should be no delegated legislation, but I think anybody who has a strong regard for consistency in the matter of making laws in this country will agree that there are four matters which should be considered before a Bill of this character is passed. The first is that Orders are not subject to legislative approval. These particular Orders in Council, according to the Bill as it stands, are to be laid upon the Table, but they are not subject to approval of either House. Secondly, they may be changed or repealed without notice. As we all know, a law can only be repealed with the consent of both Houses of Parliament and with the approval of the Crown. Thirdly, and this is a very important matter,
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under this Bill there is, in a great number of these cases, no adequate publicity. Nobody will really know when these Orders are made by the Treasury, although it is true, as I have already mentioned, that the Orders have to be laid upon the Table and have to lie there for a period. As we all know, if we are not purblind, vast numbers of these Orders made under such authority as we are proposing to give the Treasury in these cases do not come to the notice of anybody at all. I fear very much that people, at any rate in the early stages of the life of this Bill, will be erring, without knowing that they have done anything in contravention of some Order which they have never seen. Finally, and I think that this is perhaps the most important of all—and it is stressed by Professor Carr in his book—there ought to be a limit placed upon all delegated legislation. In other words, the limits within which the delegated power is to be exercised ought definitely to be laid down. I do not believe that any reasonable person can object to that proposition as a general rule.
The case which no doubt can be supported by the Government is that, just after a terrible war, the economic circumstances are most trying, and it is desired to prevent certain abuses in relation to large sums, of which we had examples after the end of the first world war, and accordingly there is something to be said for the existing Bill. But I wholly deny that any case has been made for this measure as a permanent feature in our legislation. It has been absolutely unsupported by any real argument except that argument of temporary expediency. It cannot be right to give Treasury officials under the Bill, if it becomes law, the right to interfere with all kinds of borrowing however small between private people, and all sorts of proceedings by banks and by the customers of the banks.
This power is conferred by the Bill as it stands, and it is no answer to say, "We do not propose to use the power given to the Treasury except by very reasonable methods and with reference to borrowing of money in excess of £50,000." The Government apparently refuse to put any limit on these egregiously large powers, and, as I have already said, they take up that attitude for the reason that they say, "We are legislating in a case of emergency." Let us be logical and let us make the emergency

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one which we can define by a period of years. In five years, as my noble friend the Earl of Munster says, the matter can be reconsidered, but there really is in my belief no ground whatever for this as a permanent measure in the circumstances in which we now stand.
4.12 p.m.
LORD WOLVERTON: I should also like to support my noble friend, the Earl of Munster. With regard to the Bills we have had so far in this House, in not one case have we been asked to put anything on the Statute Book permanently. In the case of the Emergency Laws (Transitional Provisions) Act, we thought the period proposed in the Bill was too long. We sought to limit it to three years. The Government said it must be five. We have never been asked for permanent authority like this. I for one take great exception to giving these very wide powers. I agree that they are needed for the transitional period, but I think five years is sufficient.
4.15 p.m.
LORD PAKENHAM: With reference to something that the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Maugham, said, I can only assure him that it simply is not so. The Government have never, either in another place or through my humble lips here, suggested that in the case of this measure we were legislating in an emergency. It has been represented throughout as a permanent feature of our arrangements. Noble Lords may not like that, but they have already given this Bill a Second Reading without a Division and, that being so, they have gone some way, if I may say so with respect, to accepting that principle, because that is an essential principle of the Bill. Indeed, on reading through my own remarks in HANSARD after the Second Reading, I was horrified at how long I had taken to develop that point. It has taught me never to read HANSARD again, at any rate when I have contributed to the discussion.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: Will the noble Lord give me one moment to ask a question—whether the wideness of the power to interfere with all borrowing, with the exception of borrowing by a man for the purposes of his trade, is justified by anything but an emergency?
LORD PAKENHAM: The noble Viscount has raised the whole question that we discussed at great length on the Second Reading. Perhaps he will allow me to suggest that he should wait until the end of my remarks this time and then see whether, by summarizing what I said on that occasion, I have made any impression on him. Certainly it was represented to the House—it is in the recollection of everyone who was present—as a permanent feature of our arrangements. I do not think anybody who was present can deny that.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: That is perfectly true, I agree.
LORD PAKENHAM: Well, I am glad to know the noble Viscount accepts that now, because a few minutes ago he was saying this had been represented as an emergency measure. We are advancing. With regard to something that the noble Lord, Lord Wolverton, said, I must protest against the idea that in the ordinary way a measure introduced to your Lordships' House is temporary. The noble Lord, Lord Wolverton, said the House had not yet been asked to pass any permanent measures. No doubt he had in mind measures of control. I do not want to quibble over words, but of course your Lordships passed some permanent measures including the Bank of England Act, the measure repealing the Trades Disputes Act and other measures of that kind. So I am not ashamed to say that this is intended to be what a law usually is—a permanent law, until altered by the Government with the consent of Parliament on a later occasion.
I do not wish to repeat what I said on the Second Reading. I will try to summarize the arguments that I then presented in four propositions, which I will lay before the House, hoping they will at any rate make the position of the Government clear. First of all, the Government in the future must accept in an altogether new sense the responsibility for seeing that full employment is secured. I do not think that such a responsibility was fully accepted by all Parties before the war, but since the publication of the Coalition White Paper on full employment or unemployment policy in 1944, there is general agreement that this new responsibility will adhere to governments in the future.

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The second proposition I think is also common ground—certainly it is common ground between those who were responsible for the Coalition White Paper. That is that full employment over a long period is impossible without a far greater degree of stability in the total amount of private investment than was ever the case here or in any other country before the war. Those two propositions I think are common ground between all of us.
Thirdly, stability of private investment involves new methods of Government regulation, aimed alike against inflation and deflation, and calculated to secure a steady rate of expansion. I do not say that that is completely common ground, but, at any rate, I think it will obtain a wide measure of assent from members of all Parties, although there may still be a few dissentients.
As regards what the noble Earl, Lord Munster said, that this clause was hardly compatible with an expansionist economy, there again I am diffident about repeating what I said the last time, but, of course, our intention is to avoid the restriction in practical result that disgraced this country as all other great countries between the two wars. No one can say our economy was expansionist between the wars. We believe that by suitable regulation we can secure stability and in that way promote orderly expansion. It may not be strength through joy, a term which is perhaps more fittingly applied to Clause 2, but it is joy through strength—we shall get the strength first and then the joy comes a little later.
Finally, I would lay before the House the fourth proposition, that this Government regulation should make use of the well-tried machinery of the Capital Issues Committee and of the principle which that Committee has operated with the goodwill of all Parties, the principle of selecting between rival issues according to the respective social urgency of the various issues. That may or may not be acceptable to most noble Lords present, but that, at any rate, is the fourth proposition which will command a very wide assent in the country. Those are the four propositions. They represent a logical case, whether or not the whole House accepts it, for a permanent measure of regulation of this kind, and while I am entirely in the hands of the House, and am ready to defend and to develop the argument further if required,
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I will say briefly that we are convinced that this measure is essential permanently if we are going to avoid the economic waste and tragedy of the years between the two wars.
4.19 p.m.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: I must at once entirely challenge the proposition put forward by the noble Lord, who has just spoken, that, by giving a Second Reading to a Bill, we deprive ourselves of the power—indeed of the duty—of giving the fullest consideration to the Bill in Committee. I must tell him at once that that is not a proposition which we can accept, or that the country would be willing that we should accept with regard to any measure whether it is of a permanent or a temporary character. That by giving a Second Reading to this Bill we should be precluded from considering whether it should be of a permanent or temporary character, is a most extraordinary proposition. The House gave a Second Reading to the Bill for all those powers to which Lord Wolverton referred. That did not prevent us from discussing most fully whether the right period was a two or a fiveyear period. Really the parallel which should be taken with regard to this Bill is not a parallel drawn from a White Paper on the policy of full employment—from which I do not recede in the least. The parallel should be one with what are quite abnormal and entirely unlimited powers.
Let your Lordships observe what is done here. It is represented as though this were a clear and simple Bill giving power of control to the Government, through a Capital Issues Committee, over great issues of capital. It may be argued that over a matter of that kind the Government of the day, through appropriate channels, should have some authority. I think myself that the wise course in regard to large matters of that kind would be to proceed by trial and error; that we should accept the principle for a transitional period, see how it worked, and then continue it if thought desirable. But this is not at all limited in that way. The noble Lord surely has read his own clauses, but he has expounded them with less than his usual lucidity to the House. Clause 1 of the Bill does not: say the Capital Issues Committee shall have power to consider issues in excess of £50,000. On the contrary,

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what Clause 1 of this Bill says—and I shall be corrected if I am wrong—is:
"The Treasury may make orders for regulating, subject to such exemptions as may be specified in the orders, all or any of the following transactions, that is to say—
(a) the borrowing of money in Great Britain;"
There is no question of limiting this to great capital issues. Nor really does it lie with the noble Lord to say, "Well, this is what we shall do if we get the powers." That is not the right way to legislate.
We have not got finality in the proposed Order, nor does the Bill give any finality. A draft Order was produced with the Bill. Various undertakings and cross-undertakings have been given in another place which are going entirely to alter the form in which that Order was presented to Parliament. But even supposing the noble Lord came and presented us with a new White Paper and a new draft Order, what is there to stop an entirely different Order being made at any time? Indeed, the noble Lord would say, I suppose, "In the light of experience, we may find we want to put this or that restriction upon all or any form of borrowing." At all events, let us be under no misunderstanding. What this Bill does—and I am sure the noble Lord will correct me if I am wrong—is to say that the Chancellor of the Exchequer at any time from now till Doomsday may make any regulation he pleases with regard to the borrowing of any sum of money, great or small, by anybody in this country. Is that not right?
LORD PAKENHAM: No.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: With the exception of borrowing from the banker.
VISCOUNT SIMON: In the ordinary course of business.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: Except that borrowing on overdraft from the bank. I am not going into the details—that was done by Viscount Maugham and others much better qualified than I am, on Second Reading. The whole business of a pawnbroker may be brought to an end by an Order if the Chancellor of the Exchequer so desires. I have no doubt that if we went into it we would find that every kind of hire purchase would come under it too. I would like to know whether
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an Order could be made in that regard. Selling on hire purchase may, if looked at from one point of view, be lending. There are all sorts of transactions which have the element of borrower and lender in them. How would they be affected? In fact, except for the transaction of the borrower going to his bank and borrowing by way of overdraft—
VISCOUNT SIMON: In the ordinary course of business.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: It must be in the ordinary course of business. It is worse, then, than I had thought. Even that part is limited. The Chancellor of the Exchequer can make any Order he pleases. I hope that the Government will give further consideration to this, because I really do not think we can accept it. Surely if these extraordinary powers are to be taken, the right analogy is not long-term policy but an analogy with a special powers Bill which this House gave the Government. The Lord Chancellor speaking with great sympathy then said: "I do not like having these wide, unlimited, uncertain powers for a long term. I do not like having them for five years, but I think we must take them for five years because we cannot tell how long this or that emergency may last. Therefore we propose to exercise them but for no longer than we need." There were special provisions introduced, which are not introduced here, as to how instruments were to be brought before us. The Government had really great hesitation in asking this House to give those special powers for five years. We met the Government over that. We said: "All right, let it be for five years, but it is exceptional and it is certainly on the long side." I believe that is the exact parallel of this entirely unlimited, arbitrary Bill.
If the Government were rightly proposing some long-term policy which they asked us to accept for all time, surely the right course would be to come with a Bill which would lay down with precision what were the proposals; not with a Bill to give the Chancellor of the Exchequer unlimited powers for an absolutely unlimited time to fetter all borrowing and all ordinary relations of this kind. For my part, I cannot think it is right to give these terribly wide powers for an absolutely unlimited period. What do the Government lose if they follow their own precedent of five years under the Emergency

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Laws (Transitional Provisions) Act? If that Act works well, and we all agree—and we have been very reasonable in this House on these matters, as the Lord Chancellor has said—then no doubt the Government would bring forward renewed proposals at the end of the five years, and I am sure that Parliament would pass whatever legislation practical experience had shown to be desirable. But it is trying us too hard to ask us to accept these unlimited powers for all time.
LORD STRABOLGI: There was one matter omitted by the noble Viscount. I am sure inadvertently, and that is that every Order made under the Bill has to lie on the Table. Although the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Maugham, said that very often these things slip through without proper attention, I am certain that with a vigilant Opposition any Order which is oppressive, as has been suggested and described by the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, would be challenged. There is that right. The Order has to lie on the Table for forty Parliamentary days, and if anything is amiss it can be taken up.
The rest of the noble Viscount's speech was really an argument against passing the Second Reading; it was against the whole principle of the Bill. If all he says is true, and all these terrible things can happen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer can make hay of the City of London in the next five years. If all these awful things can be accomplished in the face of an over-awed and frightened Opposition, who dare not challenge the Orders one by one if they are oppressive, what mischief can be done in five years! I fear that the Opposition so hate this Bill that they want to emasculate it in every way possible; yet they had not the courage to vote against it on Second Reading.
4.31 p.m.
LORD SALTOUN: I think I can reinforce the argument of the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, by showing that the case is even worse than he stated. Let us take the case of a man having a landed property on which he has raised a mortgage in order to pay Estate Duty which is above the Treasury limit. I am appealing to what the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, appealed to, namely, the tried and proved experience of the Capital Issues Committee. That man
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cannot change his insurance company, under this Bill, without the permission of His Majesty's Treasury, because it will, in the view of the Treasury, constitute new borrowing. He will have to pay back the first insurance company and raise the money from a second. That is already the view taken by the Capital Issues Committee, and I have no doubt that the regulations made under this Bill will follow that precedent.
4.34 p.m.
LORD PIERCY: I have no idea how much weight may be carried by the noble Viscount's observations about what is imported by the Second Reading of a Bill in your Lordships' House, but I daresay that most noble Lords who were present when the Bill was read a second time, would agree with me that my noble friend is entitled to a certain sensation of surprise at the remarks of the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton. In the Second Reading debate, several noble Lords on the Benches opposite laboured under what appeared to be a misconception, namely, that the Bill was a Bill bringing in provisions of a temporary nature to meet a temporary post-war situation. My noble friend, Lord Pakenham, took the utmost pains to dispell that misconception, which, I must say, still seems to haunt the minds of some noble Lords opposite, and to make it perfectly plain that the Bill was intended to be a permanent measure and was regarded by the Government as a necessary instrument for carrying out a long-term function of Government, namely, to attempt to preserve full employment. That being so, it seems to me that this Amendment not only impugns the basis of the Bill, but was justly objected to by my noble friend as something that he might have considered the House had conceded in granting the Second Reading of the Bill. I will waste no further time upon that, but I would like to put it very seriously to your Lordships that the powers of this Bill are necessary for carrying out an essential element of the employment policy.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: Without any limitation.
LORD PIERCY: I will come to that in a moment. To carry out an employment policy—in the opinion of economists of the present day—control of investment is absolutely essential. That is the broad

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aim of the Bill—to provide powers for controlling the volume of investment. The scope of the Bill has been painted as something excessively wide. It is a large power to take control of the entire volume of investment, but it is not an indefinitely large power. You must have it for an employment policy. If that premise is granted, what, then, is the best way of carrying it out? I suppose it is conceivable that you could design regulations for controlling the volume of investment and embody them in a Bill. However, that would be an excessively difficult job, and it would have several grave disadvantages. Once you have put detailed regulations in an Act, you have petrified the situation for some time. It is rather difficult to alter an Act. You will fare very badly if you have put into your Bill provisions which are excessive, ill-conceived, or insufficient. Indeed, in a thing like employment policy, you cannot proceed successfully with an ossified instrument like that; you must have flexible powers; and you must have flexible powers because the thing with which you have to deal blows up very suddenly, and blows up in unexpected forms from unexpected quarters. I am referring to trade depression. Therefore you must have flexibility. Now we come to the noble Viscount's point.
If there is an instrument of policy in which you must have flexibility, what is the best legislative form in which to frame it? I share his views on the rule of law, and his abhorrence of administrative law. I was brought up on Dicey, like the noble Viscount, but in spite of that, I feel that the form in which this Bill is cast is really a necessary form. You take a general power and you place it at the disposal of some Minister. In this case it is placed at the disposal of the Treasury. You then enable the authority you have designated to fill up the details of that power from time to time as the emergency requires by making Statutory Orders under a well understood procedure. Unless you have got something as flexible as that, you cannot grapple with the phenomena of the trade depression, or of the boom, which is just as dangerous because in the long run it leads to depression. Therefore I think you must be content to waive a little of the old views, very soundly based on Blackstone and Dicey. You must be content to waive some part of those in
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order to get an instrument flexible enough for the emergencies of an enlightened modern economic policy.
I think the Government went a considerable way to meet the natural fears and objections of members of this House and in another place by giving an outline of the kind of thing they proposed for their first Order, and above all, showing the level of exemption, showing that in point of fact in anything like normal times—and these are hardly normal times—they did not propose to prevent people from borrowing ten pounds. They also made it clear that the administration of such Orders as may be made from time to time will be carried out by a body which, if not perfect, is at least a devil we know, namely, the Capital Issues Committee, whose personnel commands some measure of respect. Taking the thing as a whole, I cannot believe that the fears of noble Lords opposite are in any degree justified. To conclude, I think it is abundantly clear that a limit of five years, or any limit of time, in this Bill, will wreck it, because you cannot plan policy ahead under a time limit of that sort. Moreover, five years is a short period. You do not know when these powers will be required to be used. I venture to suggest that it would be very much to the benefit of the country, and of future governments as well as of this Government, if these powers are placed on the Statute Book.
4.39 p.m.
THE EARL OF MUNSTER: Let me say at once, in reply to the noble Lord who has just spoken, that I was not aware that anybody on this side of the House laboured under any delusion at all on the Second Reading that this Bill was only of a temporary nature. The whole of our complaint against the Bill was that it was designed by the Government to be a permanent measure to be strung round the neck of industry and enterprise for ever. As the noble Lord mentioned in the course of his remarks, we have had a draft Order submitted with the Bill, which is going to be considerably amended. But a draft Order is quite valueless; it can be changed to-morrow morning, and there will be no reference at all to that except by a negative resolution.
Perhaps I might address my next remark to the Lord Chancellor. As I understand this Bill, the Treasury or the

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Chancellor of the Exchequer can, tomorrow morning, prohibit me taking out a mortgage if he should think it desirable. I honestly cannot think that that is the intention of His Majesty's Government. They make borrowing a subject of control, but is it really desirable that I should not be allowed to take out a mortgage to-morrow morning if I wanted to? The Treasury have got the power at any
Resolved in the affirmative, and Amendment agreed to accordingly.
Clause 1, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 2 agreed to.
Clause 3:
Provisions as to orders.
3.—(1) Any order made under this Act shall be laid before Parliament as soon as may be after it is made, and if either House of Parliament within the period of forty days beginning with the day on which any such order is laid before it, resolves that the order be annulled, the order shall cease to have effect, but without prejudice to anything previously done thereunder or to the making of a new order.
(2) In reckoning any such period of forty days, no account shall be taken of any time during which Parliament is dissolved or prorogued, or during which both Houses are adjourned for more than four days.
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moment to say that all mortgages are illegal. I was very dissatisfied with the reply which was given to your Lordships by Lord Pakenham, and I think I should leave it to your Lordships whether the Amendment be inserted in the Bill or not.
On Question, Whether the said words shall be there inserted?
Their Lordships divided: Contents, 65; Not Contents, 13.

CONTENTS.

Cholmondeley, M.

Long, V.

Grenfell, L.

Reading, M.

Maugham, V.

Hampton, L.

Salisbury, M.

Samuel, V.

Hazlerigg, L.

Simon, V.

Hutchison of Montrose, L.

Abingdon, E.

Stonehaven, V.

Kenilworth, L.

Albemarle, E.

Swinton, V.

Llewellin, L.

Cavan, E.

Trenchard, V.

Lyle of Westbourne, L.

Drogheda, E.

Mancroft, L.

Fortescue, E. [Teller.]

Amherst of Hackney, L.

Meston, L.

Graham, E. (D. Montrose.)

Ampthill, L.

O'Hagan, L.

Iddesleigh, E.

Annesley, L. (V. Valentia.)

Rankeillour L.

Lucan, E.

Audley, L.

Rennell, L.

Mount Edgcumbe, E.

Balfour of Inchrye, L.

Rotherwick, L.

Munster, E.

Bingley, L.

Rushcliffe, L.

Selborne, E.

Brabazon of Tara, L.

Saltoun, L.

Wilton, E.

Broughshane, L.

Sandhurst, L.

Carrington, L.

Sherwood, L.

Chaplin, V.

Chesham, L.

Shute, L. (V. Barrington.)

Chelmsford, V.

Croft, L.

Sinha, L.

Elibank, V.

Denham, L. [Teller]

Somers, L.

Esher, V.

Fairfax of Cameron, L.

Soulbury, L.

FitzAlan of Derwent, V.

Gage, L. (V. Gage.)

Wolverton, L.

Hailsham, V.

Gisborough, L.

NOT-CONTENTS.

Jowitt, L. (L. Chancellor.)

Holden, L.

Pakenham, L.

Lindsay of Birker, L.

Piercy, L.

Huntingdon, E.

Morrison, L.

Strabolgi, L.

Mountevans, L.

Walkden, L. [Teller.]

Henderson, L. [Teller.]

Nathan, L.

Winster, L.

3.24 p.m.
THE EARL OF MUNSTER THE EARL OF MUNSTER had given Notice that he would move to leave out subsections (1) and (2) and insert:
("(1) Before any order is made under this Act a draft thereof shall be laid before Parliament, and the order shall not be made unless both Houses of Parliament, within the period of forty days beginning with the day on which the draft is laid before them, pass a resolution approving the draft.")
The noble Earl said: I feel that as your Lordships have new decided that the Act should last for a period of five years only, that it will not be really necessary for me to move this Amendment.
Clause 3 agreed to.
Remaining Clauses agreed to.
Schedule:

PROVISIONS AS TO ENFORCEMENT AND PENALTIES.
1. Any person who contravenes any provision of any order made under this Act shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for not more than three months or to a fine not exceeding whichever is the highest of the following amounts—

(a) one hundred pounds; or

(b) the amount of any money borrowed or raised by the transaction in question; or

(c) the nominal or market value, whichever is the greater, of any securities to the issue, sale or other disposal of which (whether actual or projected) the transaction in question relates,

or to both such imprisonment and such fine.
THE EARL OF MUNSTER THE EARL OF MUNSTER moved, in paragraph 1, to leave out "three months" and insert "one month." The noble Earl said: We on this side of the House attach very important considerations to the two Amendments which stand in my name on the Paper. I trust therefore that His Majesty's Government will be able to concede what we are asking. We feel that it is not really desirable that courts of summary jurisdiction should have the vast unlimited powers of punishment set out in Paragraph 1 of the Schedule. It is quite true that very strong powers were taken by the Government in the Defence Regulations, powers which, of course, it was never intended should be made permanent, but I venture to think that there was every justification for the Government, during the war, taking the action which they did take. After all, it was the duty of every man and indeed of every woman to direct all their efforts to one object and one object only, and that was to win the war. I myself agree that if legislation is passed the Government have every reason to ask Parliament to give them heavy powers of punishment. But in cases such as those which might arise under this Bill, as I see it, there are bound to be considerable legal complexities involved, and I suggest that it is unwise that a body of magistrates, who may be and probably are most worthy men and women, but who have had very little training in the law, should by the procedure which is outlined in the Schedule have power in addition to giving the offender imprisonment to impose a fine which may run into thousands of pounds.
I do not know offhand—I am not very skilful in the law—of any other Acts of
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Parliament where penalties of such a nature to be imposed by a court of summary jurisdiction are provided. My Amendment therefore is put forward with the suggestion to His Majesty's Government that they should limit the penalties on summary conviction to not more than one month's imprisonment and a fine not exceeding one hundred pounds. They will, under my second Amendment, have power to prosecute in the more deliberate cases on indictment, and then sub-paragraphs (a), (b) and (c) of paragraph 1 of the Schedule still remain. I think—though I speak subject to correction—that when grave offences are alleged the person accused should have the right of being tried by a judge and jury. Indeed that, so far as I am aware, is the inherent right which is even possessed by a common burglar. I do not think I need say any more than I have already said to your Lordships on this point, but I do hope that His Majesty's Government will agree that as the Schedule is drafted at the moment it requires amendment, and that they will accept the two Amendments which I have placed on the Paper. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 6, line 5, leave out ("three months") and insert ("one month").—(The Earl of Munster.)
LORD SALTOUN: I should like to say a few words in support of my noble friend's Amendment. I have already pointed out that offences under this measure when it becomes law may be inadvertent. The general scope of the Act will be known, but the precise Treasury Regulations will not be known throughout the country. I should like to cut out imprisonment altogether, but I refrained from moving an amendment in the hope that His Majesty's Government would accept that of my noble friend, the Earl of Munster. It would be very unfortunate if a man were sent to prison for an offence against this Act which was committed quite inadvertently and unconsciously. There is another point and a very important one. Most of the evidence in cases under this Bill will be accountancy evidence. Now accountancy evidence is very often very difficult for untrained people to master. I have no doubt that I am suffering under a delusion, but I have sometimes thought that His Majesty's Judges themselves were a little confused by accountancy evidence. I certainly think that a court of summary

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jurisdiction is not the best court before which to try most of the cases which must arise under this I therefore do very warmly beg His Majesty's Government to accept the Amendment of my noble friend.
5.1 p.m.
VISCOUNT SIMON: Might I be allowed to add just one word in support of what has been proposed. The language is necessarily a little technical, but the actual situation can be very simply stated. Your Lordships will have noticed that as the Schedule stands, the provision is that an offender under this Act is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for not more than three months. I have no doubt that that provision of three months was deliberately inserted—for this reason. If the imprisonment to which you may be exposed when you are brought before the magistrates is imprisonment for more than three months, the magistrates are bound to tell you, even before the case starts, that you have the right, if you prefer it, not to be tried by them but to be tried by a judge and jury. That is the general law which operates in courts of summary jurisdiction. I can imagine deliberate cases of the breach of what is proposed, which might very well deserve more than three months, and this proviso has been put in for the express purpose of making sure that magistrates, courts of summary jurisdiction, shall be the only people who can ever have to deal with this class of offence. The size of the fine does not matter.
The test which is provided by the law is this. Is the maximum imprisonment to which the accused might be exposed more than three months? If it is, you must tell him, and he will then have the choice as to how he will be tried. He can be tried by a higher court. If it is not more than a three months' maximum, he has no right to make that claim, and the magistrates are the only body which will try him.
I commend this Amendment, or something in the same spirit, to the House, for this reason. Cases under this Bill will not all be of equal gravity. Those who have the responsibility of prosecuting will have a pretty shrewd idea how grave is the case they have. If it is a case which ought to be prosecuted, but which is a comparatively small matter, it would seem quite right to me that magistrates, the ordinary courts of summary jurisdiction, should deal with it as they deal with many other cases of small crime.
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It is an absolutely unheard of thing that the magistrates of this country, that is, two J.P.'s, men or women—most excellent people, but not especially trained in the law—should have the power, and the sole power, to impose enormous financial penalties. Indeed, as your Lordships know, there is a sort of scale between imprisonment on the one hand, and a fine on the other. In some cases, if a man is fined a certain amount by the magistrates, and he deliberately refuses to pay the fine, he may go to prison instead. If you are told to pay a fine of £20, and you deliberately refuse to pay, you may go to prison for two months. I think that is right. The same parallel occurs between a £30 fine and three months. But here, you have the most extraordinary pair of alternative penalties. Imprisonment cannot be more than three months, and therefore the magistrates will be the only people who can deal with it. But the fine may be as much as "the nominal or market value, whichever is the greater, of any securities to the issue, sale or other disposal of which … the transaction relates."
Nobody imagines that the magistrates would fine anybody £1,000,000, but if the issue, or proposed issue, was £1,000,000 worth of shares, it would be possible. That is manifestly a bad arrangement, and the Amendment proposes, that while smaller cases would still be dealt with in the magistrates' courts—which is right—the really serious cases would have to be dealt with on indictment. I would only add one other thing. I am persuaded that the noble Lord, the Lord Chancellor, will not think that this is an unreasonable contention of ours, whatever may be the precise form in which it is made. Having carefully studied the debates on this subject in another place, I personally am satisfied that there was a certain amount of confusion—it is excusable—as to how these matters stood. I exonerate any lawyer who is not perfectly familiar with our summary jurisdiction code. A great many of us are not, because our practice is laid in other departments.
But it is unfortunate that in the Committee of the Commons, the spokesman for the Government should; have laboured under one or two temporary delusions. For example, he pointed out that most of the cases would arise in the City of London, and would therefore come before

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stipendiary magistrates. I think our City Fathers would be astonished to hear that. There is no stipendiary in the City of London; cases are dealt with by an Alderman. That was just a slip. In the same way it was quite a mistake, as was said in the other House, to say, "Look at Customs offences. They can be dealt with by benches of magistrates, who may impose fines up to three times the value of the goods." So far that is quite correct.
What does not seem to have been observed is that the maximum imprisonment which may be inflicted for a Customs offence is two years. Since two years is more than three months, anybody charged with a Customs offence, has a right to choose to be tried by a Higher Court. Under this Bill, since three months is not more than three months, nobody will have that opportunity. Therefore, my respectful suggestion to the Government is that my noble friend is quite right in endeavouring to differentiate between the smaller offences and the grosser offences, and that cases in which bigger penalties ought to be imposed should be dealt with by a Higher Court. Whether this is done exactly in the words here, or by some similar words, is very largely a matter for the advice of the noble Lord, the Lord Chancellor. I must tell your Lordships, without any prejudice at all, that I think the present provision is quite impossible to defend, and that there must have been some misapprehension when it was thought to be all right when it reached your Lordships' House.
5.8 p.m.
LORD PAKENHAM: I have had an opportunity of consulting with the Lord Chancellor on these matters, and with his usual generosity he has promised to throw me a boathook if and when I disappear under the waters of legal disputation for the third time. In the meantime, I will say that the Government are grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Munster, and the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, for raising this point, and for providing the opportunity for further meditation. I have not a very definite statement to make to-day on the matter, but the Government will certainly look at it again. And there will, of course, be further opportunity for discussion when the Third Reading is reached. It is quite true that, as the Schedule now stands, there is a theoretical possibility that a
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court of summary jurisdiction might inflict an immensely heavy financial penalty. It is a theoretical possibility which, as the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, rightly stressed, ought to be guarded against, if in fact it does involve a departure from the best principle of British law.
VISCOUNT SIMON: One thousand pounds.
LORD PAKENHAM: It might be—
VISCOUNT SIMON: Magistrates, at this moment, are the sole Court for imposing a fine of one thousand pounds.
LORD PAKENHAM: It is a theoretical possibility. I have taken the trouble to look into the cases that have actually come before the courts during the war. I understand that there have been some nine cases altogether. In one case a fine of, I think, £5,000 was inflicted. In the other cases, or in most of the other cases, the fines were very small. Undoubtedly, we are confronted with a class of offence which may be trivial, which may arise mainly from negligence, or, on the other hand, might be a grave and deliberate defiance of the law. Therefore, speaking for the Government, I can say we shall certainly look into the matter to see if we can distinguish between the two classes of case, to see whether we can provide that the less grave kind of offence is taken before a summary court with some maximum penalty that will not seem excessive in the eyes of noble Lords who have spoken. On the other hand I am bound to say (and I think here we have the noble Viscount, Lord Simon with us) that we are determined to mark the gravity of a class of offence that may occur under this Act, and, if in fact, we divide the classes of case and take some on indictment, then we should probably feel bound to raise the penalty in those cases considerably above three months.
VISCOUNT SIMON: The maximum.
LORD PAKENHAM: The maximum penalty considerably above three months. I understand that would have the approval of the noble Viscount, Lord Simon. In view of what I have said, I will ask the noble Earl, Lord Munster, and the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, whether they will not allow time for reconsideration of the matter before discussion at the next stage.
THE EARL OF MUNSTER: I am grateful to the noble Lord for his kindness in telling me that the Government intend to look into this question again. I hope that they will bring forward an amendment at the next stage of the Bill. There will now of course be a Report Stage of the Bill. May 1, at the same time, ask the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, and the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack to look at paragraph 5 of this Schedule, lines 3 and 4, which may require amendment? I need say no more. I thank the noble Lord again for his reply, and I ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.
LORD SALTOUN: I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, for his reply.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Schedule agreed to.

DIPLOMATIC PRIVILEGES (EXTENSION) BILL. [H.L.]
Read 3a (according to Order); Amendment (Privilege) made. Bill passed, and sent to the Commons.
5.15 p.m.

LONDON AIRPORT PASSENGER DEPOT.
VISCOUNT SWINTONhad given Notice to ask His Majesty's Government what arrangements will be made to establish a central depôt in London for the reception and despatch of passengers using the London Airport; and in particular whether having regard to its convenient situation and immediate availability the Government will use the Earls Court Exhibition Building for this purpose; and to move for Papers. The noble Viscount said: My Lords, in moving the Motion which stands in my name on the Paper, I hope that on this occasion I have an issue on which the whole House may agree. I make no apology for bringing it to the House again at the earliest possible date because the Minister for Civil Aviation has himself affirmed that it is a matter both of importance and of urgency. I would like to put what I may call the whole case before your Lordships of the absolute necessity of a centre in London in connexion with civil aviation, because I am not sure that the essential elements are fully appreciated. I think that a certain number of people
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believe you have only to establish an airport and then the business is finished. It is nothing of the sort.
The attraction of air travel is speed, and the handicap in this element of speed is the time taken between the airport at which a passenger arrives and his home or the hotel to which he wishes to go. It really is essential to reduce that time and to make access as quick, as convenient and as comfortable as possible. This is not merely a temporary but a permanent feature in air transport. Indeed, the larger the city the greater is the problem. The larger the city inevitably the longer the distance from the airport, and the greater the traffic congestion between the airport and the city centre. I am quite satisfied that Heath Row is the right site for the London Airport. But, by itself, Heath Row is hopelessly inadequate. It is inadequate not only during the long intermediate phase before final completion, but it is inadequate even when the lay-out and the permanent buildings will be complete. Therefore the London Airport must have a reception centre in London.
What are the requirements of a centre of that kind? The first is that there must be quick and easy access to the residential area of the town—the hotel area. The next is that it should be connected with the whole of the underground railway system, tubes and the district railway, and you must have a rapid and constant direct railway service between the airfield and the traffic centre. I am sure that more and more people, with the increased traffic congestion (and that is one of the most insoluble problems in London and the surrounding country) will want to come by train immediately and quickly from the airport at which they land into the centre of the town.
This centre must be large, because you do not want either congestion or delay. It has got to be big enough to receive and despatch or disperse in comfort the travellers by all or, at any rate, by the great majority of the aircraft using the airport. I suppose no one can say with any certainty what the volume of traffic is going to be, but I know on the last occasion when he spoke the Minister envisaged that when Heath Row was fully developed it might work up to something like 160 landings and take-offs, 160 air motions or movements—I think that is the description—in an hour. That

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means an enormous volume of incoming and outgoing traffic. At the air centre you must have reception rooms for the passengers and proper restaurant facilities. You must have facilities for the Customs. Nothing is more irritating at the end of a very rapid journey than to be interminably delayed by the Customs. That cuts both ways. It means you must have enough Customs officials, and it means you must have plenty of room in which they can work so that people can pass through quickly.
There is another facility which will be required. A large number of air lines will be operating into this country. They will want to deal with their own passengers. Therefore one must have room at the centre for offices for all the airline companies, and plenty of accommodation for all the taxis and motor cars serving the centre, taking people to and fro.
I feel sure that anybody who has studied the needs of air transport in general and of London in particular would not dissent from a single proposition I have advanced, whether in regard to the need for this centre, its character or its size. If it were necessary to find a site and to build, it would be a long and costly business. Indeed, I really do not know where you would find the right site if you had to look for some new building site, and certainly there would be many conflicting claims in building priority. Yet the need is absolutely urgent now. As I have said, Heath Row by itself is quite inadequate, whether now or in the future. I go further than that. I do not think it is putting it too high to say that unless we get the right kind of air centre, unless we start right, we may lose a very great volume of air traffic to this country—air traffic which is essential to our trade and essential to our tourist traffic.
It so happens that there is an ideal centre ready to hand in the Exhibition Building at Earls Court. It is in the ideal position in London. There is quite easy access, down the Cromwell Road and along the big road leading up to it, from all the most important residential parts of London—all the hotel centres. There is tube and district railway communication actually at the door. Moreover, I understand that it would be a comparatively easy matter to connect this Earls Court centre by special underground railway with the London Airport. I believe that would
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be found essential. I went into all these matters of railway connexions carefully. You have to deal with your railway traffic rapidly. It is no good having people sitting about waiting to be brought in. But London traffic is already so congested on the main line railways that it is quite impossible for them to run these new regular services without a duplication of track, which would mean pulling down houses and would be difficult, socially and economically. It is not possible to use the existing tube railways because not only are they cluttered up with traffic in the rush hours but they are pretty heavily engaged in the ordinary way. If the volume of traffic is anything like the Minister has indicated to us there would be congestion.
Incidentally a great many people go to visit airports. If you go out to La Guardia and other great airports you will find an extraordinary number of people who like to see aeroplanes going up and coming down and circling round. And if you are not too austere and have a decent restaurant—I do not know whether the Minister would run to a Casino—with something to eat and drink in decent surroundings, you would find an enormous number of people who would like to go there. Then there are all the people employed at the aerodrome who would have to be carried out. This railway, which would be running fast special trains to and fro every few minutes, might be in itself a money-maker. It certainly is the only way of serving the airport, and you could perfectly well make such a railway from Heath Row to Earls Court. As to the building there, it is a very big one which could, I am advised, be easily adapted to this purpose. What you have there is a great shell, and it would be perfectly easy to make the necessary adaptations in it, so to speak, to taste.
It seems to me that this is a pretty self-evident proposition. I am bound to deal with what I understand has been raised as an objection to it. I have been told that there are those who say that this building ought to be taken for exhibitions. Well, I have great sympathy with exhibitions. I was one of the promoters of the British Industries Fair a great many years ago, and largely responsible for collecting a very good committee to conduct it for a great many years. But really there is plenty of room elsewhere for exhibitions. There is

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Olympia, a very large place; there is the White City, where we used to have the exhibitions; and the Crystal Palace is going to be rebuilt. Why should not the Crystal Palace house the exhibitions of the future, reviving the glory and the tradition of the Great Exhibition in the first Crystal Palace? All these exhibitions need not necessarily be in London. I think it was a very wise practice in the past to arrange that the heavy section of British industry had its site in the British industries Fair at Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, near the great Midland centres of heavy engineering and manufacturing. That was a very good plan. I believe it would be a great mistake to bring it to London. There are quite a number of places where these exhibitions could take place, but there is only one centre which is really suited and immediately available for this air service.
Do not let us treat aviation, in regard to this air centre, and trade exhibitions and trade, as if they were disjointed things. Do not let us put them into competition. I believe an efficient and attractive air-service can be one of the best trade-bringers to this country. I have dealt with the whole situation perhaps at some length, because I feel this case ought to be made and justified. I do not like bringing to the House a half-baked proposition. I think it will be agreed that I have not done that, and I hope I may carry your Lordships with me in saying that what I have propounded is something essential, practical and desirable. I very much hope the. Government will seize the opportunity and develop this air centre at Earls Court, because I believe it is indispensable to air traffic. If they do so, I do not believe they could perform a better service for trade. I beg to move for Papers.
5.30 p.m.
LORD HAMPTON: My Lords, before the Minister replies, I wonder if I might put one question to the noble Viscount, the mover of this Motion? Is it in his mind that every traveller who proposes to travel from Heath Row should have to come into London before he can go to the aerodrome and take his seat in the plane? It occurs to me that there will be a large number of people—and as time goes on, a larger number—who will wish to drive straight to the aerodrome from various parts of England without coming
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into London. There will have to be some alternative arrangement with regard to Customs whatever you have at the main centre.
5.31 p.m.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: My Lords, I felt most passengers would want to come in to London and would probably -find that that was the quickest and most convenient way. Of course, there would be, I take it, alternatives as there are at all aerodromes—and I have taken off from a great many. You could either go out there by train, or in your own motorcar, or by taxi, and then pass through the Customs and board the plane, just as you can drive into Southampton by motor-car, if you are in the New Forest, and board the boat there without going to Waterloo.
LORD FAIRFAX OF CAMERONhad given Notice that he would ask His Majesty's Government "what action is intended to improve the amenities of the London Airport at Heath Row, which at present are totally inadequate," and move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords. I have a similar Motion to that of the noble Viscount on the Order. Paper and it has been suggested to me that it will probably be convenient to your Lordships and to the Minister if I make my speech now.
Heath Row is either now, or very shortly to be, thrown open to the United States Air Lines. I believe there are to be, at any rate to begin with, something like sixteen air liners touching down and taking off each week. That is quite a lot for a beginning, but one hopes that that number will rapidly increase. Heath Row, the London Airport, is becoming, and will become increasingly so, an international airport. But what sort of reception are the passengers going to receive when they arrive there in the immediate future? I went to Heath Row about six weeks or two months ago, and the impression made on my mind by what I saw there has recently been confirmed by a number of representatives of the Press. In this case I think the Press reports coming from trained observers have been of some value.
I shall not detain your Lordships long in relating what I saw, and I shall make no comment on it. The only huts for the accommodation of passengers were

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those left by the R.A.F.; there were no proper restaurants, bars or waiting rooms; there was no telephone service; there was no car or taxi service, although there was a char-a-banc service, and by that means it takes between forty and fifty minutes to get to the West End of London. There were no extensive paved or covered walks. In some cases on a rainy day it would be necessary for travellers to get their feet muddy. There were no road signs outside, and it was very hard to find one's way to the right place. There were several gates, and one could easily get lost. The buildings—I can hardly call them buildings because they were mere huts—were unsightly, and would not create a good impression. To sum up, there was very little comfort, and this bad state of affairs will undoubtedly get worse when the volume of traffic increases.
This is the main airport of England, the London Airport. Everyone wants to use it, but I believe this state of affairs can only create a bad impression upon those coming to Heath Row, and must inevitably be detrimental to our chances. I know there are plans for building in the future. The noble Lord, Lord Winster, on April 10 of this year in your Lordships' House used these words:
"When the Airport is complete"—
that is the London Airport—
"it will be worthy in every respect of the heart of the Commonwealth, one which will give a fitting welcome to passengers from abroad, and one which will give wings to the commerce on which our prosperity depends."
That will be so in the course of time, but I humbly submit to your Lordships that it is the present that matters. All the countries of the world are building up their reputation in the air, and are trying to get hold of new traffic; they are trying to take as large a share as they can of the passengers travelling by air throughout the world.
Then there is the question of refueling. There are many aircraft on long voyages which have to land somewhere to refuel. The passengers naturally want to have a walk and to have some comfort. I will only say that this island is not necessarily indispensable to the Transatlantic air-route. There is Eire, not so far away, and there is Holland. In Holland there is the K.L.M. which has a reputation of which
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it is worthy. I submit that amenities five years hence are not going to be of any use, because we shall have lost passengers in the meantime, and it will take a long time to make good our reputation, which may be damaged so badly that the task will be a very heavy one indeed.
I have tried to paint a fair picture of the situation. There are many difficulties, but this matter is vital and important to the country as a whole. Even if it is not possible to put the whole matter right, surely one can put some part of it right. Even a small part would help. I do not intend to cast any aspersions on the Victory celebrations, but surely the cost of putting up a few temporary buildings and putting this matter right, even for a time, would amount to only a small fraction of what is being spent on the Victory celebrations, with due deference to our great victory. I am not using this as an opportunity for a dig at the Government, because it is a national matter, but I am very glad of this opportunity of drawing the Minister's attention to a matter which concerns us all and our country.
5.38 p.m.
LORD STRABOLGI: My Lords, I am sure that I am speaking for all your Lordships in congratulating Lord Fairfax on the very moderate and well-phrased speech we have just heard. If he will allow me to say so, I wish he would intervene more often in our debates; I am sure it would be of great advantage to this House if he did. I gave notice to my noble friend that I wanted to raise a cognate matter, to which a number of us attach great importance. It was touched on very briefly by the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, in introducing his Motion, and I also referred to it the last time we discussed landing grounds and aerodromes in this country. It is the question of how to get to Heath Row and how to get away from it.
I do not know whether my noble friend has yet got his helicopter, but I can assure him that if he has not got his helicopter, or perhaps some means of alighting on or taking off from the Thames, he will have great difficulty in getting to Heath Row in anything like the forty minutes which Lord Fairfax mentioned, if he is coming from his offices in the district of the Strand. The truth of the matter is that there are two appalling bottle-necks in the western

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exits from London. One is at Hammersmith, and the other is at Shepherds Bush. You have to go through one or the other—at least I have never discovered any other way—if you want to get out west to Heath Row. Unless something is done to improve traffic facilities, we are going to have an unholy scandal.
I believe my noble friend understands this, and I have every sympathy with him. It is not exactly his bailliewick, it is also a matter for the Ministry of Transport; I think I would say it is a matter for the whole Government. But he will get the blame because that is the sad part of politics. People who come to Heath Row, and then take twice as long to get from Heath Row to the Strand as they have taken to get from Paris to Heath Row, will ask, "Who is the Minister for Civil Aviation in this country?" and they will talk to the Press and there will be trouble.
Of course, this scandal of the western exits from London has been with us for years. It has been shirked by Government after Government and sooner or later will have to be dealt with, but that is too long a process for the present situation. Viscount Swinton mentioned the railways, and I mentioned the railways last time. From further inquiries I understand that there is no real alternative to a special electric line to Heath Row, and there would probably have to be about four lines. I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, when he talks about Earls Court, but I understand it is earmarked for exhibitions, though our Air Lines are in the nature of a continuous exhibition. He talks about the need for Customs facilities, and Lord Hampton also referred to Customs facilities. The best plan, I think, is for them to be provided in the train itself. We always used to have our baggage examined in the trains before the last war on the way from the coast to London, and that is the obvious way. That can be done on the electric trains, and it is I understand, the most economical way of using Customs officials. I do hope that this matter is going to be pressed and that your. Lordships will support me in this particular point about the need for improving the transport facilities out to Heath Row and back again. I have only seen the photographs of London Airport; up till now I have only heard about it. I funk the journey as things are now. What it
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will be like when petrol rationing comes off I do not know.
The only other matter I would venture to mention in passing is that also referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. I get the feeling—and I get it every time I hear the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, speak on air matters even more strongly—that we are going to suffer from over-centralization at Heath Row, I do not see why everyone is supposed to want to come to London who travels by air. My noble friend from Oxford, Lord Lindsay, apparently agrees too. I submit it will be found necessary in the future to have several great aerodromes like Heath Row in the Midlands, the north and the northeast.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: Prestwick, for instance.
LORD STRABOLGI: Yes, but I am not domiciled in Scotland, and there are plenty who will fight for that facility. I am frightened of opening that Scottish question myself. The point is, I do hope it will be realized in the future, when we engage in our long-term plan that we will need other great aerodromes not necessarily near London at all but to serve the Midlands and the north, especially when we are going to use aircraft much more for the carriage of freight: and goods. With regard to the mails, that is of the utmost importance. We already have the Post Office tube through London and I should have thought that could have been extended to Heath Row. When hundreds of aircraft, with half of them carrying mail are landing daily, something of that sort will, I submit, have to be provided.
When the noble Viscount; Lord Swinton, talks about swishing passengers from Heath Row to wherever they want to go, I would like to remark that the mails are also important. An increasing tonnage of goods will also have to be taken care of and at present they will not be able to be handled satisfactorily. This is a most serious matter and I make no apologies for bringing the matter to my noble friend's attention. With regard to the great ideals of the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, I must say I do not know that he was able to do much planning in this way himself when he was Minister for Civil Aviation. I suppose he could have pleaded the war and my noble friend can

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plead lack of labour and material, but some of the difficulties from which we are now suffering were owing to lack of foresight or lack of influence to carry them through when my noble friend's predecessor was in office.
5.45 p.m.
LORD SHERWOOD: My Lords, there is only one word I would like to say on this. I do not think we ought to be so despondent at the suggestion that Heath Row is a failure, as many noble Lords seem to think it is. After all, Heath Row was born because the Air Ministry had the idea of using it as an aerodrome for the Air Force. That was the only thing which enabled us to get it through, and make no mistake about it. It is now going to become a very important place.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: I was not crabbing Heath Row at all.
LORD SHERWOOD: Many people are crabbing the Minister of Civil Aviation because of what is happening at Heath Row. What happened at Heath Row was that it was never a civil aviation port. It was an Air Ministry airport, one which the Royal Air Force built and developed, and one for which I was responsible as the Minister at that time. Of course it has had difficulties. It is not easy for the Minister now to turn from the military side to the civil side, but I do hope that people will realize that Heath Row was thought out by the Air Ministry not only as a Royal Air Force place, but also as a civil airport in the future and that is why they went forward with it. I admit the Minister has many difficulties to contend with, but I am quite certain that the view we took when we developed it was right, and that the difficulties with which we have to deal now are difficulties we landed on him because it was built as a Royal Air Force place for Transport Command. It has now become, as the noble Lord has said, a civil aviation airport. Civil aviation needs other amenities. I have no doubt that under the Minister these will come. But it is not easy when you develop one thing to change it to another, and I still think that the decision to develop Heath Row was a wise decision.
5.48 p.m.
LORD SEMPILL: My Lords, I would like to support the suggestion which has
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been put forward by my noble friend on this issue of the terminal point for passengers. At lunch to-day I was talking with my noble friend Viscount Knollys and he was pointing out that in New York the area now available is too small. As the present terminus cannot be enlarged, another one has to be built. I therefore hope the Minister may give some indication of what may be done with Earls Court. I very strongly support the suggestions put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax. The Minister certainly has a great opportunity of providing what has never existed in this country before, that is, facilities for those who travel by air in parallel with the excellent facilities provided in other countries. Heretofore we have never had facilities parallel with those provided in other countries. The points raised by the noble Lord are very good points and the Minister has a great opportunity, of which I am sure he will take full advantage, of seeing that those facilities are provided in a manner which leaves no ground for anything but complete praise.
When the Minister replies I wonder if he could indicate whether something can be done to improve the travel facilities which exist at the moment at Croydon for those passengers coming from Eire. They are put into very unsuitable accommodation, where they are detained for a goodly period of time, and harried by a large number of official regulations. That is immensely different from the excellent facilities which are provided at the other end in Eire where they are put into very good accommodation, and where officialdom is extremely kind in helping passengers rather than, as at Croydon, in harrying them and making their journey a considerable burden.
5.50 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF CIVIL AVIATION (LORD WINSTER): My Lords, the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, has certainly brought forward a matter of great importance and very considerable interest, and I say at once that I completely agree with the general tenor of his remarks. I do not think I could find anything in his speech with which I was in disagreement, because I agree that you have not done all when you have constructed your airport. Of course I agree that it is essential to reduce the time of transport from the airport to the passengers' destination, and that rapid handling

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of passengers through the Customs and other authorities is most important. With the noble Viscount's description of what is required at a reception centre, I am also in full agreement, and I concur in much that he says about the advantages of Earls Court. I agree that the airport will certainly attract a great number of sight-seers. My plans cater for those sight-seers, and I look forward to them as a considerable source of revenue. As regards the noble Viscount's Motion, on the question of the necessity for establishing a central depôt in London I may say that it is the intention of the Corporations to establish such a central depôt which they, and most of the foreign air-lines for whom they act as traffic handling agents, will use. It is, of course, a matter for the Corporations and no: for the Government to provide such a depôt. I say at once that the actual arrangements to be made are still inevitably indeterminate.
The merits of Earls Court as a central depôt are recognised, including its spacious accommodation and its convenient location, in relation not only to the London Airport but to Northolt. The Government would have been very willing to have seen Earls Court used for this purpose, but for the overriding need to have adequate space in the immediate future for the British Industries Fair and other trade exhibitions. Such exhibitions, I am sure it will be agreed, are of vital importance in connexion with the Government's plans for the expansion of our export trade. Earls Court together with Olympia represents the only accommodation capable of providing sufficient space for the British Industries Fair.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: The White City.
LORD WINSTER: That has been taken into consideration and my statement stands. The holding of this Fair in 1947 was announced as long ago as June, 1945, and since then firms have been planning to ensure that the Fair plays a full part in raising the volume of our export trade. Other equally important trade exhibitions must also be provided for. It would clearly be impossible to construct any large new exhibition building in the time available. Unless Earls Court is available, the British Industries Fair cannot take place in 1947, and a number of other important trade exhibitions cannot be
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held. Negotiations for the use of Earls Court for the Fair are well advanced. A difficult decision as between two very desirable objectives has had to be taken in this matter having regard, on the one hand, to the importance of trade fairs in relation to the export trade, and, on the other, to the importance of an adequate central depôt for civil air transport. The advantages on either side have been carefully weighed, and it is clear that, whatever arrangements may be made for the future, Earls Court must be reserved for exhibitions planned for 1947.
The Corporations are actively engaged in considering short-term plans for supplementing, the inadequate accommodation provided in London by the Airways Terminal at Victoria, to meet the situation until such time as permanent arrangements for a central depôt can be decided upon and carried out. The Airways Terminal at Victoria can handle only 800 passengers a day, and we are thinking in terms of 3,000 passengers a day next year. That illustrates the extreme urgency of the problem upon which the noble Viscount has rightly laid stress. In the remarks made by my noble friend sitting behind me, I recall that he asked me how I am getting on with my helicopter. I have not got one yet. I flew in one the other day, and I can assure your Lordships that I will stimulate and encourage the development of the helicopter by any means which are open to me as Minister of Civil Aviation.
My noble friend was very kind and solicitous on my behalf. He foresaw troubles ahead and said that I would get the blame whether I deserved blame or not. Well, my back is broad, and that like the noble Viscount I long ago discovered that a Minister of Civil Aviation is "born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." As regards what my noble friend said about centralization, our plans envisage the provision of airports at provincial centres. As to mails, that is certainly a most important matter, and I have it under discussion with my noble friend the Postmaster-General. With respect to what my noble friend said about Customs, certainly it is an ideal arrangement if Customs can be cleared on the train. But a fast train from London Airport to the centre of London would take only fifteen or twenty minutes in transit. That is too

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short a time to clear the Customs and the other controls. Careful consideration has been given to that problem, and in general I entirely agree with my noble friend, but where the London Airport is concerned it is impracticable, as I am sure he will agree.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: The noble Lord has spoken about airports in provincial centres. Does he include Scotland as a provincial centre of England?
LORD WINSTER: I fear that my life would not be worth a moment's purchase if I were to do anything of that sort. Will the noble Viscount allow me to correct my remark and say that we have a scheduled plan of internal air services in this country which will call for the provision of suitable airports in the requisite parts of the United Kingdom. May I now turn to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax of Cameron. At the outset I would like to say that I am very much obliged to the noble Lord for consenting to roll up his Motion with another and so facilitate your Lordships' convenience and also my task.
I agree with the noble Lord that it is the present time that matters. But when he said that I think perhaps he did not take full account of the difficulties that arise from the labour situation and the situation in regard to building. I could not agree with him more in what he says, but I am only the Minister of Civil Aviation; I am not Aladdin. I cannot rub a lamp and cause terminal buildings to arise out of the ground overnight. The difficulties are very formidable indeed.
The existing amenities at London Airport, I fully agree, are not such as I would wish to have at this important terminal. I have, however, agreed to open the Airport to international traffic on May 31, and to designate it from that date. My original intention was to keep the Airport closed to international traffic until the first three runways were ready for use, and until sufficient adaptations and additions to the hutted traffic-handling buildings erected by the R.A.F. had been completed. That was my original intention, but the American operators strongly pressed me to get the use of the Airport at an earlier date. They were made fully aware of the exiguous facilities available, but they said
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that they were prepared to accept the existing conditions at London Airport as they find them. I understand their reasons perfectly.
There is a natural dissatisfaction amongst operators with Hurn, because of its inconvenient location. Their desire to bring passengers as close to London as possible makes existing conditions at London Airport acceptable for the time being. Only one runway will be available for use until July, but otherwise the operational facilities, as distinct from the accommodation, will be adequate. British South American Airways have been using London Airport since January 1, 1946. On the day that we took it over from the Royal Air Force the first service took off for South America and since then, in face of great difficulties, the service has been built up into one which, I assure the noble Lord, is a source of great admiration in South America at this moment, and is adding very greatly to our prestige in that country.
British Overseas Airways Corporation intend to transfer their service from Hurn to London Airport at the end of this month. By the middle of June, I am advised, the transfer should be complete. Hurn will still be used for maintenance and other purposes. I can say that everything possible in the circumstances is being done at London Airport for the comfort of the passengers. I am sure that they will accept any inconvenience which they may encounter at the Airport, for the sake of a far shorter journey to town than from Hurn. I take this opportunity of thanking the Customs and immigration and medical control services for their whole-hearted co-operation with us in our efforts, by agreeing to improvise on a large scale. The difficulties now being experienced at London Airport are only a passing phase. Work on the adaptations is being pressed on as fast as the difficult labour situation permits. More comfortable accommodation will be available in wooden buildings in the course of the summer.
In the general effort to make the Airport available for use in advance of the target date, sight has not been lost of certain small but important matters which mean so much to passengers' convenience. I refer to such things as snack bars, telephones, cable facilities, cars for hire, and so forth. These facilities will not be

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found on a grandiose scale, but they will at least meet immediate needs. Once these immediate needs have been met, attention can be given to further adaptations and extensions to meet the growth of traffic as it occurs. I must, however, utter a word of warning about long-term permanent buildings. It is very easy for ill-informed critics to say that the permanent terminal buildings ought to be ready now, or at any rate fairly soon. I do not think such critics realize the magnitude and complexity of such a building. Nor, perhaps, do they always count the cost of hasty design of something which, if wrongly designed, may be inadequate or out of date in a few years. The Government wish the permanent building to be worthy of London Airport. I have been told that the east-west runway already constructed is the finest in the world. The Government want the building equally to be the finest in the world.
The needs of all users have to be studied in detail, and that study is going on. Much study of a general character has already been completed. I have arranged that one of my technical officers should visit America in order to learn from experience there and to gather ideas. The functional relationship between the various technical services must be carefully provided for in the design, and the whole edifice must be functionally efficient and of the highest artistic merit. It is an immense problem. We have to cater for a passenger- flow which may reach 8,000 persons a day as early as 1951, and will thereafter go on expanding. When one reflects how much time was occupied before the war—under normal conditions and without the shortage of labour and the competing demands of housing—in the design and extension of major architectural and engineering works, such as the great new railway termini, I think your Lordships will realize that the permanent terminal building at the London Airport cannot possibly be completed for some years.
May I for a moment refer to what my noble friend said about access. My right honourable friend the Minister of Transport and myself are quite alive—as I am sure my noble friend knows—to the need for improving access to the Airport. We fully realize that the advantage of air travel, especially in regard to speed, will be seriously prejudiced by failure to pro
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vide quick means of travel to and from London. The Bath Road will have to be diverted to the west before the Airport is fully developed, and the Minister of Transport has plans for improving road access all the way from the Airport to London. The details will be announced by the Minister of Transport at the appropriate time. As regards rail access, the merits of express passenger services are fully recognized, but no detailed consideration can be given to these until the site of the central London depôt has been determined.
I entirely agree with the noble Viscount. The two things are linked up. Delay in one must inevitably mean delay in the other. I think I have made it clear that the delays are inevitable. Obviously the railway station ought to be in close proximity to the site of the central London depôt. The extension of the underground railway beyond Hounslow West to the airport is now under active consideration. Such an extension would be valuable for employees and perhaps also for the sightseers whom we look forward to welcoming at London Airport in very large numbers.
In saying one word about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sherwood, I am sure that I echo the feelings of all your Lordships when I say how glad we are to see him back in his place after a short period of indisposition. I must tell the noble Lord that either it has happened since he went away, or he has forgotten during his absence, that Heath Row is no more. It is now London Airport. Of course, the noble Lord hit the nail on the head. The difficulties with which we are confronted and the handicaps with which we are confronted at London Airport are all inherent in the origin of the airport. These obstacles and handicaps exist. We cannot whittle them away, but I am quite sure that the noble Lord, who, as he told us to-day, originated London Airport will be very proud indeed as time goes on of what his baby has developed into.
The noble Lord, Lord Sempill, complained about the facilities at Croydon. The noble Lord has experience of these matters, and he must know that owing to the war exigencies, Croydon is being used under a pressure for which of course it never was designed. Personally, I think that it reflects great credit on all who are concerned in handling traffic at

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Croydon, that Croydon does handle the volume of traffic that it is doing at the present moment. When the noble Lord talks about officials harrying people, I think we really ought to deprecate language of that sort. I have no doubt that under the pressure and the circumstances in which we are working, passengers most unfortunately do have to suffer many inconveniences, which we would like to see removed, and which we are working very hard indeed to remove. But I am quite sure that no officials, in the words of the noble Lord, harry passengers. On the contrary, my experience has been that they do all they can, under very difficult circumstances, to minimize the inconveniences which they regret they have to inflict upon passengers under existing circumstances.
I think this short debate has been of value. I will not detain your Lordships any longer at this hour, but may I say to the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax, that I welcome very much the interest which he and so many noble Lords are kind enough to show in this matter. It is a great help to me, and what is more important, it is a great help to civil aviation. I am always available to the noble Lord or to any other noble Lords, and so are the officials of my Ministry, to give any information on this matter which it is in my power to give. I have not shirked the matter. I am fully facing up to all the difficulties which are involved. I can only say that, so far as those who are connected with civil aviation at the present moment are concerned, it is really not a question of what they would do; they know only too well what requires to be done, and how willingly they would do it. It is at the present moment a question of what we can do with the limited resources at our disposal owing to the existing situation with regard to labour and building materials. But we will certainly do everything in our power to press on with our plan to get rid of these inconveniences and difficulties at the earliest possible moment.
6.12 p.m.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: My Lords, I sincerely thank the Minister for his full and frank answer. I am sure he will not be surprised if I tell him that I cannot call it
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an altogether satisfactory one. It has not satisfied me. I do not suppose it has satisfied many of your Lordships and I am quite sure it has not satisfied the Minister himself. Indeed, the Minister was good enough to say that he accepted every argument I advanced, with regard to the necessity for the centre, what it ought to contain, all its features and of Earls Court being an ideal place. He said with commendable frankness that he had not the least idea where he or the company (I believe he is the company now, or is going to to be very soon—two of them are going to exist, and he is the other) are going to find a place to lay the weary heads of their passengers. I really do hope he will return to the charge, and that he will not take this lying down.
With regard to buildings for exhibitions, at a time when we did a very great export trade, and when there was great competition, we managed to hold a very satisfactory British Industries Fair in Olympia and at the White City, and there was the big exhibition at Castle Bromwich in the Midlands. There is the Crystal Palace site. I do not know how much there is of the Crystal Palace standing, but it is quite possible to put up exhibition buildings, not of bricks, which are wanted, but of quick construction. Of course you have to weigh these things, but, when there is absolute need for civil aviation to have a centre of this kind—there being no other possibility except this site either available or in sight or in the dim distance while there are other places where exhibitions can be held—quite frankly I think it is a wrong decision not to give this place to civil aviation. I hope that the Minister will not take it lying down, but will go back and fight for it.
Now that we know what it is all about, it would seem that his chief opponent is in India and is not too well at the moment. We are sorry about that and most sincerely hope that he will soon be restored to health. Nevertheless, in view of that fact, the Minister has got a very good chance. I hope that he will fight for this, because it is a good case. I hope that he will return to the charge. I beg to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

DESTRUCTION OF WAR MEMORIALS.
6.15 p.m.
LORD SALTOUN LORD SALTOUN rose to call attention to the statement made by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for War in the House of Lords on 15th May in reply to a private notice question as to a directive issued by the Allied Control Commission in Germany that certain War Memorials including those of the 1914–1918 War shall be destroyed or mutilated, and to move to resolve:—
"That this House disapproves of and dissociates itself from the action of His Majesty's Government in permitting the destruction or mutilation of certain war memorials in the zone of Germany occupied by British Troops and begs them to reconsider the matter." The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg leave to move the Motion that stands in my name. I would first of all like to say that I quite realize that His Majesty's Government may not be willing to accept that Motion as it stands. I do not actually know that they have—in fact I sincerely hope that they have not—permitted the destruction of any war memorial. But I do hope that in some form it will commend itself to them, and I would especially direct their attention to the last line. I am perfectly certain that the feelings which actuate me, and the opinions which I hold, or many of them, are not held by me alone but by every noble Lord in your Lordships' House. I do not except from that my noble friends on the Government Bench, because in the too short weeks in which I have known them, and I hope have become friends with them, I have learned quite definitely, and am quite certain, that none of them would themselves approve of what we are told is to be done.
I not only speak the opinion of everyone in your Lordships' House but I speak the opinion of every thinking man in the country and I am perfectly certain that I am voicing the unanimous opinion of the British Army in occupied territory and in this country. There is only one small body of men about whom I was not certain in regard to this order. I hope your Lordships will not mind my using the word order; I am so English I do prefer the English language where it can possibly be used. There is a small body of Englishmen forming the British
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Cabinet, and it was very difficult for me to think that this order had actually been published without their knowledge, cannot think so. They are Englishmen like I am, and I am perfectly certain their feelings were exactly the same as mine. If the noble Lord who is going to answer me has any information, I would like him to say what the position is so far as the Cabinet is concerned, and whether it is a Cabinet decision or not, because I would not like it to be thought in the country that it was a Cabinet decision if in fact it was not.
In the first place I must touch briefly on the question of destroying memorials and statuary in general, because it is always possible for the noble Lord in reply to say, "We do not mean the things you mean, but things which are most objectionable." Take a statue of Hitler, or any other statue. I can describe one to you which was described to me to-day. There is a plinth, with an eagle on the top, and a swastika. You may destroy that. I do not mind very much. But I think it is worth your Lordships' while to consider what you actually effect if you do so. If such a thing is done, it becomes perfectly certain that as soon as pressure is removed the statue will be re-erected or, if it is not re-erected, the memory of it will be cherished and not forgotten. If it is left alone nobody notices it. Who can tell me all the statues he passes between Piccadilly Circus and this House? Who ever looks at them?
These statues in Germany make no difference, and if they are noticed, what are they noticed for? It is brought forcibly to the minds of Germans that Hitler was the origin of the evils which at present surround them. It is the best propaganda you could have, and I would remind your Lordships that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. It is always a mistake to destroy these things, quite apart from it being a very ancient custom not to touch them. I am not primarily concerned with that, however. I only say that in case I am ridden off my subject.
I am dealing with war memorials, and whatever subsidiary ideas may be attached to war memorials, however grossly they may offend what happens to be our own taste, war memorials have as their principal object the commemoration

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of the dead. The order is directed against memorials which
"tend to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism, or to commemorate the Nazi party, or which are of such a nature as to glorify the incidents of war."
In the first place, a statue or any work of art may elevate the mind or debase the mind, but there is one thing which I think is the greatest characteristic and most valuable part of a work of art, and that is that by itself it cannot express that vast category of abstract ideas which have to be formulated in words. It is the one refuge of the human spirit from the prison of words.
I can give your Lordships a very good example. The most passionate dirge in the Scottish Song Book is Flowers of the Forest, itself a war memorial. Before that tune was wedded to those words I understand it was the lilt of an old ranting beggar song, maybe the Gaberlunzie Man itself. That is where it originated. That shows it is the ideas you bring to a work of art that give it its meaning, and not the work itself. If you eradicate the ideas, it does not matter if you touch the work of art or leave it; if you do not eradicate the ideas it is no use attacking the bronze or the stone. I think that probably the most effective commemoration of the Nazi Party, and what will promote its disappearance more than anything else, will be the disaster to which it has brought the people who followed it.
But we are told that many of these war memorials tend to preserve the German military tradition, to revive militarism and glorify the incidents of war. A war memorial is a cenotaph of the dead. What should it do? What do our own war memorials do but to glorify the British military tradition? What else does the Shrine at Edinburgh do, what else the Guards' Chapel, endeared to us more than ever by its having been wrecked at the hands of the enemy? I hope our war memorials will long cherish the British military tradition. And as for militarism, your Lordships know that our war memorials did not preserve militarism. It would have been a very good thing for us if they had tended to preserve militarism. That emphasizes my point that the memorials do not do these things; it is the idea which you bring to them. I wish they had preserved militarism.
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The incidents of war which come naturally to the mind when looking at a war memorial are the patience and cheerfulness in suffering, the constancy and determination in danger. Those are the things that come naturally to the mind in contemplating any war memorial. Nobody worries about the inscription or anything else. And sometimes also it reminds us of what the soldier very seldom mentions—his feeling for his country. It is not the military virtues which everybody associates with war memorials that have disgraced the Germans. It is the brutality, the arrogance and the subservience of their civilian nature, which the military virtues have failed to eradicate.
Now the order appears to me to be a little insincere, if I may say so, and a little inconsistent. That is shown by the exception,
"Monuments of artistic merit will not be destroyed, but only offensive features glorifying Nazi or militaristic creeds."
That means we do not mind being vandals against every primitive instinct of human decency, but Heaven forbid that we should be thought vandals about art. As soon as you chip a single war memorial you are in danger. If the Germans had been in occupation of my own county of Aberdeenshire and desecrated our own local war memorial—which as you know they would not have done—I can imagine the huge feeling of contempt that would have filled me. It would not have hurt us at all, but I can imagine my enormous feeling of contempt, and how carefully and how cunningly I would have planned an inscription on the carefully preserved mutilation to record their baseness. It would have hurt them for ever; it would not have hurt us very much.
We are in a very great danger in this matter. If a single tablet is chipped you will never be able to persuade the world as to what you have done and what you have not done. Everything that is damaged will be ascribed to you. I know the Germans pretty well—they taught me themselves—and I know that they are always the prey of some secret society or other. They are quite capable, as soon as we lay a finger on a single memorial, of themselves secretly desecrating the most holy commemorations and attributing the damage to us. How will we ever be able to deny it? We cannot go forward with a list and say, "No, we did

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not do that." From generation to generation that will be written up against us, and who will disbelieve it? There is the order, and there is the result.
At least I would plead that if this work is to be done, it ought not to be done by soldiers. It is not right for people here who are sitting at ease to order soldiers to do work for which they feel a moral loathing and reprehension, and which they feel instinctively to be base. Sometimes in your Lordships' House, when I have listened to those noble Lords who are most violent in expression against the enemy, I have wondered if any one of them has ever been present at or taken part in the sack of one quite insignificant village. When people give orders, they should realize how they are to be carried out, and who are to carry them out. If His Majesty's Government are determined—I do not believe they are, and I certainly hope they are not—then this order should be carried out by volunteers. It comes from the Control Council and one suspects that some of our Allies may be at the bottom of it, such as the Russians or the French. Let us take the French.
There are no troops for whom I have more respect than the gallant troops of the French Republic. If they can produce from their fighting forces one man who, of his own accord, will carry out this work, well, use him as your agent. I can give you a precedent for that, or something very like it. After the Battle of Waterloo, when we were in occupation of Paris, Blucher was quite determined to blow up the Pont d'Jena. Its name and everything about it was, he felt, an insult to Prussia. The old Duke was not an easy man to get to windward of. He did not want it done, hat he could not prevent what his Allies wanted to do; so he posted a Guards sentry in the middle of the bridge. Blucher could not blow up the bridge without blowing up the guardsman, and that did the trick. If this has got to be done, then let it be done by the men who are willing to do it.
I hope the Government's recent intimacy with foreigners has not made them insensible to something which I feel to be one of our greatest assets, namely, our national reputation I was a prisoner of war during the last war, and mingled with all the races of Europe. It is not saying too much to say that one was
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associated with some of the choicest scoundrels in Europe, and very often one found oneself amongst them only. The thing that carried one through the whole time was the high opinion that the very worst of them had of the character of an Englishman. I remember one officer who got into trouble. He had forged a very important person's name on a document, and, unfortunately for him, the document was found in his possession. So the Germans put him in prison, and kept him very short of food. One afternoon, three German officers, having nothing better to do, came into his cell to amuse themselves. They told hint that the whole garrison was horrified that a British officer should have sunk to the crime of forgery.
After a little of this sort of thing the officer decided to end it, and he said, "I will tell you something. There were some Germans at the College where I was at Oxford, and very nice lads some of them were. There was one whom everybody liked, but I will not tell you his name. He was very badly wounded at Le Cateau and brought in. We did our best for him, and as he was dying he said that he wished his mother could know how well he had been treated, and bitterly wished that it was possible for him to hope that British officers in German hands would be treated like he had been. Now," my friend said, "at our college we have a list of the fallen for our memorial, and that lad's name is down with the others. We are all there, all together. Can you tell me what is the practice in the German Universities?" One of the officers said, "I am very sorry to say that I do not think there is any German University where that would be done. It is fine, Dass ist echt englisch—that is English through and through." Do you think it is worth while to sacrifice a national asset like this to gratify a momentary whim and to please a pack of wily foreigners? If that is the meaning of what the noble Lord said about frontiers being as obsolete as bows and arrows, then I think we had better close them again very quickly.
One final word. This war and the last differed from other wars in, I think, principally one thing, and one thing only, and that is in the very large number of men who disappeared entirely, men who were drowned in the mud, men who were captured

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and never reported. I know of one case with the Fifth Grenadiers, where men disappeared, but I know why they were never seen again; the shell-fire was too hot. War brings different sufferings to different classes of people, but for each class there is, as a rule, healing. Sons may grow up, deriving something of the inspiration from their fathers' reputation that they might have got from his counsel. Widows may, and very often do, remarry. But for one class there is no consolation. Mothers who have given you their sons have given you everything. Even Pericles, in that most famous and best of all funeral speeches, falters and grows lame when he comes to the mothers; he has really nothing to offer them. They have given you everything, and for them you can do nothing—nothing except one thing, and that is not to turn to evil the gift that they have given you. If their children have disappeared, the only one spot in the whole world upon which they can fix their thoughts is the memorial where their gift is registered. In defiling these, or any portion of them, in Germany, you defile and sully our own, and stain our reputation. And that stain will not be washed out by all the seas of the world, nor will it fade in all the ages of time.
Moved to resolve,
"That this House disapproves of and dissociates itself from the action of His Majesty's Government in permitting the destruction or mutilation of certain war memorials in the zone of Germany occupied by British Troops and begs them to reconsider the matter."—(Lord Saltoun.)
6.39 p.m.
VISCOUNT ESHER: My Lords, I should like to add a few words in support of the Motion put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun. I hope the Government will find some means of extricating themselves from the very discreditable position which they are called upon to defend this afternoon. It is true that in his speech last week the noble Lord, the Under-Secretary of State for War, endeavoured to console himself and us by pledging that war memorials of artistic merit were not going to be destroyed. Who is going to be the judge of artistic merit? It is always a very difficult task to know the good from the bad. It is to be hoped that it will not be left to some subaltern in the Royal Army Service Corps or the commander of
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a bomb disposal squad to decide these delicate, artistic questions.
Perhaps I may be allowed to give your Lordships an example of the difficulty which arises on these occasions. From his window in the War Office the noble Lord looks down on the memorial statues of Lord Haig and the Duke of Cambridge. The one, Lord Haig's memorial, is compact in power and imagination. The horse's head is compressed and strong, the cloak more rigid than any cloak should be in real life, and the whole conception alive with the grave integrity of the man himself and the indomitable tenacity of the people who held the Western Front. Here is an undoubted work of art, an undoubted work of artistic merit, impossible to pass by without receiving an aesthetic emotion—at any rate for those who know what an aesthetic emotion is and are capable of experiencing it. Close to that memorial, on the right hand, is the memorial to the Duke of Cambridge which means, and is, nothing at all. It neither has any artistic merit, nor does it convey anything of the man or of what he did. If the noble Lord turned away from his window and took a plebiscite of the hundreds of people he has in his department, I have no doubt that they would be in a majority for removing Lord Haig and retaining the Duke of Cambridge. I should not be at all surprised if the same lack of artistic appreciation was present in your Lordships' House.
To judge these things rightly, qualities such as those possessed by the exponents of fine art are required. I hope the noble Lord will tell us what machinery will be set up to deal with the questions of artistic merit, and later on the names of competent people who will be appointed to administer that machinery. But this lip-service to artistic merit, so unusual and unexpected from the Department over which the noble Lord presides, must not divert our judgment from the general principle involved. The Government have no easy task in dealing with foreign countries, and Mr. Bevin has deserved and received the congratulations of all parties in this country, not because he is supporting a Party or a Conservative or Labour Policy, but because he stands everywhere for decent behaviour. It is all the greater shock to find that our military administrators in Germany have allowed themselves to be dragged at the heels of a nation less civilized than our-

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selves. There is nothing English about this policy, which offends every moral and religious sense. Suppose the Germans had won the war. What should we have said if they had, as they would have done, dynamited the Cenotaph and obliterated the grave of the unknown soldier? We should have said, of course—and I can imagine the speech the noble Lord, Lord Vansittart, would have made on the occasion—that it was typical Nazi behaviour. So it would have been, but so it is when we do it ourselves. I put it before the noble Lord, who looked so uncomfortable when he was defending this case last week, that when we desecrate the memorials of the dead we dishonour and humiliate not the Nazis but ourselves.
6.45 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF CHICHESTER: My Lords, I should like to support the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun's protest and also to draw a distinction, first of all thanking him very warmly for what he has said. I am asked by the most reverend Primate to say that the Bishops did, in Convocation this week, pass the following Resolution on the subject of war memorials for the fallen:
"That this House deeply regrets the reported decision of the Allied Control authority in Berlin to destroy or deface German War Memorials arising out of the 1914–1918 war as well as of the war just ended, and expresses the hope that no such defacement or destruction of memorials for the fallen may in fact be carried out in the British zone in Germany."
It is not possible to justify the destruction or defacing of memorials of those Who have fallen in war, wherever they are, in a church or the churchyard, on the village green, in the public park, in the town square, or anywhere. The memorials of the fallen may be accompanied by marks of mourning or gratitude or honour, and different nations express these sentiments in different ways. It would be an act of sacrilege to mutilate the war graves of those of any country who have fallen for their country. We are all with the Government in desiring to eliminate Nazism and militarism, but as the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, has said, to mutilate and destroy memorials of the fallen would in fact have the opposite effect, and I hope with confidence that there is no intention on the part of the British authorities to interfere in any way with memorials of the fallen.
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I wish to draw a distinction which I think is important, and is implicit, if I understood him aright, in Lord Nathan's reply the other day—the distinction between memorials of the fallen wherever they may be and gravestones. The words used in the directive are, "Germany military and Nazi memorials and museums which tend to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party, or which are of such a nature as to glorify incidents of war." I notice that the noble Lord, Lord Nathan, was very careful to avoid the use of the words "war memorials." Those words, and all that they imply, may be absent from the directive. The reference may well be to monuments which are not memorials of the fallen, but glorifications of war, museums of militarism, shrines of Nazi ideology and memorials of military passion. If that be so, that is a very different matter from what is ordinarily described as a war memorial.
I would like to give you an illustration of what I understand to be the policy of the Control Commission in the British Zone. In the current number of the British Zone Review there is a description of the great cathedral of St. Blaise in Brunswick which was built between 1173 and 1195 by Henry the Lion, It contains the relics of Henry the Lion, who was the great rival of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and an English Queen Matilda. That is the most important of all the churches in Brunswick and it still survives. In 1935 Hitler decided to turn that cathedral into a Nazi shrine.
He made it the glorification of Nazism. He removed the former furnishings, he wiped out all the mural paintings. It ceased to be a Lutheran church and became a building for State worship. There was a long frieze etched into the plaster which has always been regarded as one of the principal factors in Nazification so far as Brunswick is concerned. It not only described people on the march, people at war and people at work, but paid particular attention to Henry the Lion's March to the East and placed among a group of Slays the figure of Marshal Stalin. Now, after the war, the military government in the British zone has completely de-Nazified that shrine. The crypt and the cathedral have been re-consecrated. It has been given back to the Lutheran Church. The frieze has

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been cleared away but all the old features, so far as possible, have been restored. That is the right kind of doing away with emblems of militarism, the right kind of elimination of Nazi memorials and museums. If the Government goes along in that good way, restoring what is good and eliminating what has been put in in this militarist and Nazi fashion, then I do not think we shall have much to complain of, and I hope very much that the Directive, so far as interpretation in action in the British zone is concerned, will be followed out exactly in that spirit.
6.53 p.m.
THE DUKE OF MONTROSE: My Lords, until I came into this House I never really realized that it was seriously contemplated to destroy memorials in Germany or in other enemy countries. I can hardly believe now that it is seriously contemplated. The idea seems too puerile, too small really for the minds of the great British people. And it seems hardly worthy of a Government that has talked so much about freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of ideas and freedom of action. To destroy memorials in Germany and other enemy countries is the antithesis of freedom. Does anybody really believe that memorials in marble and other kinds of stone have contributed anything vital to the actual fighting. I do not believe that they have done so, unless they are the works of Epstein or Picasso or someone of that sort. I do not believe that to destroy ordinary memorials in marble and other kinds of stone is going to have any good result. And, as I say, I do not believe that they contribute anything to the warlike spirit. You might as well say: "Look at Trafalgar Square. See that great column with the statue of Nelson on the top," or you might say: "Look at the Wellington statue," and suggest that those memorials contribute to the military spirit. The factors that cause the great gatherings that are to be seen in Trafalgar Square are the open spaces, the pigeons and the fountains—not the statue of Nelson on the top of his column. I do feel that the destruction of these memorials is too paltry an action to meet with any approval from the British people.
Speaking as a Scot, I assure your Lordships that if our great national shrine at the top of the Castle Rock in Edinburgh were to be swept away that would
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not contribute to a peaceful outlook. Anyone who said that it would would be talking rubbish. Certainly it would only make me more warlike and more inclined to fight more fiercely than ever. Is it proposed by the Government to dig up the grave of the Unknown Soldier in any enemy country? Surely not! Surely the Government are not going to stoop so low as to dig up the remains of an Unknown Soldier in Germany or in any other enemy country; and I suggest that if you are going to leave one kind of memorial then you should leave them all. You will not get peace by destroying anything beautiful, by pulling down anything which is revered by a nation. You will only get peace by building up a democratic and enlightened nation. So I would beg, let us leave the memorials.
6.56 p.m.
THE EARL OF SELBORNE: My Lords, there is just one thing I wish to say in this debate. I happen to have returned recently from the Island of Jersey, which, as your Lordships know, was occupied by German troops for five years. I am glad to be able to tell your Lordships that those German troops committed no desecration of our war memorials in the island, nor any other act of vandalism so far as I could hear.
THE EARL OF CAVAN: My Lords, at this late hour may I just say a very few words upon this subject. As a soldier I fully support the noble Lord who moved this Motion. For six years His Majesty's Forces have been not unsuccessfully employed in reducing Naziism, and even Hitler himself, to ashes, and I cannot imagine anything more likely to fan those ashes into flame, than the directive that is now before us. If they are fanned into flame then our work will be all to do again. So much has been said already that I had contemplated saying, and it has been said with such eloquence, that there is little need for me to add much more. I would, however, like, if I may, to support what has been said by my noble friend the Earl of Selborne. I, myself, took some trouble to inquire what has happened in Northern Italy, where I have a certain interest in memorials which have been put up there. I am able to make a similar report to that of my noble friend the Earl of Selborne. Not one of those memorials of which I speak has been touched or interfered with in any way. The picture I particularly

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dislike is the picture of a British platoon being armed with crowbars and picks, and possibly dynamite, and ordered to deface monuments of any sort, I am quite sure it does not matter on which side of the House your Lordships may sit, you all took some part, and many of you played great parts in this war, and I am quite sure there is nothing any of you would resent so much as being put in command of such a platoon. Finally, I do sincerely express the wish that I am not too late in endorsing the hope expressed by Lord Saltoun that nothing has so far been done, because I cannot help saying that in my opinion this directive can only perpetuate bitterness, that it is ignoble, un-English and un-Christian.
6.59 p.m.
LORD LINDSAY OF BIRKER: My Lords, I will not keep the House for more than a few moments, but there are just two or three words I wish to say. I hope that this directive may be so interpreted—and I think it can be so interpreted—that no memorial of the 1914–1918 War shall be destroyed in the British zone at all. It is because I believe that to be possible that I hope that His Majesty's Government will take that line. I do not entirely accept the form—the form only—of Lord Saltoun's Motion but I entirely accept its spirit. Now I just want to add this. What shocked us, I think, when we heard about this proposal with regard to the memorials was the idea that memorials should be destroyed which were put up to brave men who fell in a war in which their country was defeated. All our Allies are not so fortunate. There was a memorial set up in East Prussia of a great German victory over Russia. That memorial was used as a glorification of all the most boasting and arrogant parts of Nazism. If the Russians came and said, "You do not understand; you have not got a monument like that; may we not take away that exhibition of Nazi arrogance, even though it is a memorial of the 1914–1918 War?" I, for one, do not feel that I could take a very high line and be so righteous as all that. It is only fair to remember that, but I still hope that the directive can be so interpreted that no memorials to the fallen whatsoever shall be destroyed in the British zone. For historical reasons, which we need not discuss, some of our Allies on the Continent think that intolerance is a virtue, and that tolerance is a
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crime. I hope that we shall always insist on just the opposite—that we believe intolerance is a crime, and tolerance is a virtue.
7.2 p.m.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: My Lords, I feel I must apologize for intervening once again. I only hope that with the noble Viscount, Lord Cranborne's return I shall have my day of silence. I think it would be wrong if the debate on this very important subject were to close without a word or two from this Bench, because I am sure that the anxiety which has been expressed, and so well expressed, in This House to-day—and in both Houses of Parliament—represents a very real anxiety in the country. The answers we have had have been very brief. Both the reply which we had from the noble Lord last time, and the rather fuller reply which was given in another place, were obscure and far from satisfactory. I hope that to-day we shall have an answer which is both a clear and a satisfactory assurance. I say quite frankly, if a mistake has been made—and in these international matters we should not be the only people to retrace our steps on second thoughts—it will be much more satisfactory to admit it, and to state our intentions in a way which would command general approval in the country. As this debate has shown, people are anxious about this matter. People who are most strongly anti-Nazi in all their sentiments—and after hearing the noble and gallant Earl I say this with confidence—probably those who feel most strongly in this matter are those who have fought for six years to destroy the Nazi system. Everybody agrees that that system must be destroyed, and that the whole spirit of Nazism must be eradicated.
If you had a directive confined to Nazi memorials, memorials intended to commemorate and glorify the Nazi system or its leaders, no one would have the least hesitation—at least I personally would not—in saying that they might very well be obliterated. But we have not seen the whole of this directive. I am sure that the noble Lord will agree that we ought to see it. As far as I can understand it, and from the rather fuller account given in another place, it goes a great deal further than the destruction of Nazi memorials. If it were carried out it would have exactly the opposite effect to what

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I am sure the Government intend. If we take it literally, and I would much rather not try to get away with some interpretation, let us say quite frankly what do we intend to do. Would this directive compel us to destroy war memorials of 1914–1918 unless they have artistic or utility value? If so who is to be the arbiter of taste? There are a number of war memorials in this country which are sacred to people in their own localities, but which would hardly pass sustained aesthetic examination.
The Minister who answered in another place said that we were not to destroy tombstones. I should hope not. One of the few decent things the Germans did in the last war was to see that the cemeteries in all the countries which they overran, and certainly in the territories in which we fought, were respected and safeguarded. What have ordinary memorials of the last war in the towns and villages of Germany got to do with the Nazi system? Hitler was an obscure corporal somewhere behind the lines. These memorials do not celebrate victory; they do not really celebrate war, as war, at all. They are the spontaneous tribute of ordinary people to their dead—fathers, husbands and children. These local memorials certainly do not commemorate any Nazi system. They commemorate the dead. I doubt if in any real sense they revive militarism. I do not believe that anybody as he passes the Cenotaph, or walks through the cloisters at Winchester, or bares his head at a little village shrine, is reviving militarism. So far as the Germans are concerned, I can think of nothing better calculated to inspire hatred, to revive militarism and drive disillusioned Germans back to Nazism than the destruction or defacement of their memorials of the first world war.
So far as the British people are concerned, such action would be wholly repugnant to their unexpressed but deepest sentiments. I do share the feeling of the noble and gallant Earl, that it would be an utterly distasteful task to impose upon British soldiers. I beg the Government to give the assurances which the country wants, and which I feel sure the Government themselves want to give. If we have made a wrong commitment, let us reconsider it. We have the responsibility of what we do in our own zone. It is not as if we were dealing with a
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situation where there was unity and agreement all along the line. We shall certainly not lessen our prospect of agreement with our Allies on much larger and more difficult matters if in this matter, in our own area where we are responsible, we insist on pursuing a line of conduct in keeping with British sentiment and tradition.
7.9 p.m.
VISCOUNT SAMUEL: My Lords, at this hour perhaps I may be allowed in a very few words to endorse the sentiments of the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, and the noble Viscount, Lord Esher. Of all war memorials in Europe, perhaps the most conspicuous and best known is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, at the foot of which the four Foreign Ministers recently saw a victory parade. It is undoubtedly a monument to wars of flagrant aggression. On its sides are inscribed names of battles, such as Jena, Wagram, and other victories of the flagrantly aggressive Napoleonic wars. The Germans were in occupation of Paris. They could have blown it up. They did not do so. If they had done so, everyone would have said, "How very childish." Let us take example by that. If we pull down such memorials in Germany, undoubtedly they will be rebuilt. If they are to be pulled down, let them be pulled down by the peoples themselves, in an age of greater enlightenment, rather than by foreign conquerors.
7.11 p.m.
THE UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR (LORD NATHAN): My Lords, importance has been given to the debate upon this subject by the contributions made by the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Liberal Party. Yet the subject of itself is intrinsically important. When the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, asked me a private notice question last week, the sentiment generally of your Lordships upon the subject was clear to me, and that sentiment has been made clearer to-day, if additional clarity were necessary, by speakers in various parts of your Lordships' House. Let me say at once that the kind of consideration that has impelled this Motion, and has informed the speeches that have been made, is a consideration which is also prominent in the mind of His Majesty's Government. But I think it will be useful, before I come to a more specific statement, in answer to some of the in

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quiries made of me, if I make an effort to put this matter into a different and perhaps more accurate perspective.
It was inevitable, having regard to the statements that appeared in the Press, which reported from Berlin this directive as applying, as it seemed from the reports, only to war memorials, that the minds of members of your Lordships' House, as of the people of the country in general, should have inclined to the view that that was the limited objective of this directive. That is not the case. It has a far wider extension than that. The noble Viscount, the Leader of the Opposition, indicated that it would be useful if the context were given in which this matter has arisen and, before I sit down, I hope I may be allowed to give that. It must be remembered that the general background out of which this directive has emerged is provided by the decisions taken by the great Allied Powers at Potsdam regarding the elimination of all forms of German militarism, the destruction of the National Socialist Party and of Nazi institutions, and the prevention of all Nazi and militarist activity and propaganda, leading finally to the eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis.
To attain these objectives, various measures have been taken, and are in the course of being taken. Let me mention a few of them. There is, for instance, the destruction of German war potential by the disbandment of armed forces, the destruction of war-like stores and the prohibition, or at least the severe curtailment, of industrial production that might furnish materials of war. There is the annulment of Nazi laws which provided the basis of the Hitler regime or established discrimination on the ground of race, creed, or political opinion, and the complete cleansing of the judicial system. There is in the course of being carried out the exclusion from public office, or permanent or official positions in public life, of all Nazis and militarists as well as industrialists who encouraged and supported the Nazi regime, some of the most prominent of whom are in gaol. There has been the breaking up of the great industrial trusts and the expropriation of the leaders of industry, who were so largely responsible for the rise of Hitler and for the war. And then, perhaps as important as any, there is the purging of all schools and universities,
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and the checking of all material supplied to the pupils in order that Nazi and militaristic teaching might be eliminated.
It is really in the context of the elimination of Naziism and of militarism that this matter has to be considered. It is as a part of that programme that this directive was issued. The directive is not aimed primarily at war memorials. I had contemplated giving to your Lordships a compressed statement, but, lest inaccuracies should arise, I will, for the sake of greater accuracy, as the phrase goes, and in the light of the suggestion made by the noble Viscount opposite read a few lines from the directive. It provides that
"the planning, designing, erection, installation, posting or other display of any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends…"
and these I think are the important words
"which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi party, or which is of such a nature as to glorify incidents of war, and the functioning of military museums and exhibitions, and the erection, installation, or posting or other display on a or other structure of any of the same, will be prohibited and declared illegal."
Then it goes on to provide for such objectionable elements to be destroyed.
LORD STRABOLGI: Is that a new instruction?
LORD NATHAN: They are prohibited. They are to be destroyed. Your Lordships will have observed that the provisions of the directive are far wider than might have been judged, either from the question put to me last week or from the form of the Motion now before your Lordships. I ought to add that the terms "military" and "militarism" and the phrase which I quoted—"incidents of war" —refer to warlike activities after the 1st August, 1914, that is, including the 1914–1918 war. It is clear that it is not every monument, every statue, every street name or memorial that is to be removed, but only those which would serve to perpetuate Nazi and militarist principles.
Under the directive there is to be selection, and, in the first plate, responsibility for selection is to be placed in the hands of German officials. It is the Germans who will be charged with compiling lists of memorials and the like which are recommended

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for demolition within the terms of the directive. It will be open to them to recommend to the zone commander in each zone that certain elements which appear to be covered by this directive shall be spared because of exceptional artistic value or public utility. It must be borne in mind—
VISCOUNT SWINTON: I want to get this right. What I would like to determine is whether the Germans will be able to say what they think ought to be destroyed, or merely have to interpret literally a directive and only be able to say, "We want to preserve this because it is of some artistic merit." Could they say, for instance, "No memorial of the 1914–18 war is to be destroyed?"
LORD NATHAN: No, I think it is quite clear they would have to come within the general purview of this directive. They would have to look at particular memorials and the like, and draw those memorials to the attention of the zone commander. The ultimate responsibility would clearly rest on the zone commander for accepting or refusing the advice that was given to him. But I will revert in a sense to that matter in a moment, because it is important in considering a directive of this kind, which clearly arouses much feeling in every part of your Lordships' House, that the British position should be understood. In that connexion it is most important to realise that the directive is quadripartite; it is the result of consideration by all the four occupying Powers. Now it is inevitable that when a document of that kind is prepared, the points of view of the four Powers may differ, and the result may be to some extent a compromise.
When answering the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, last week on his private notice question, I informed your Lordships' House of one respect in which we should have preferred the directive to be different, namely, in the fixing of the time-limit of August 1, 1914. We felt obliged to defer to the views of our Allies on this date in order not to obstruct agreement to the document as a whole, and we had to bear in mind that there was, in fact, some feeling that no early time-limit should be fixed at all. August 1, 1914, was therefore a compromise as between a later date put forward by the British representative, and an earlier date, or rather no anterior date
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at all, as suggested by other parties to the discussion. Noble Lords will of course bear in mind that criticism has been directed against us for the way in which we are alleged to have fulfilled our obligations on de-militarization in the British zone. We rebut such accusations as being wholly unfounded, but your Lordships will know that we have recently agreed to an American proposal that a quadripartite mission shall investigate the progress of demilitarization in all four zones. We are naturally sensitive on this question and we are unwilling to fall behind our Allies in agreeing to proposals designed to remove all traces of Nazism and militarism in Germany.
Noble Lords have asked me how the matter will work in practice. I had not heard before, but I was much impressed by the description given regarding Brunswick Cathedral by the right reverend Prelate a few moments ago. That, as I apprehend, is the spirit in which in the British zone this directive will be carried into effect. Indeed, I doubt whether much new action will be needed in the British zone to carry it out. Already Nazi emblems have been removed from most monuments and buildings in Germany, and I am told it is rare to see a Nazi emblem there to-day. Let me give examples of objects to be removed, if they have not been removed already. My noble friend Lord Lindsay has referred to the memorial at Tannenberg. There are in the British zone statues of William II, Ludendorf, Hitler and other Nazi leaders; there are swastikas and eagles on barracks, works and harbour installations; there are street names such as Adolf Hitlerplatz, and there are offensive objects in museums. All those will in our view come within the directive.
War memorials are not condemned as such by the directive, and there is certainly no intention, so far as the British zone is concerned, of regarding the memorials to those who died in war as ipso facto glorifying militarism and therefore liable to destruction. Indeed, as I said last week, the ordinary village green memorial will remain wholly unaffected, and I think I may add that harmless memorials to the fallen and those of a religious character will be respected. Let me say frankly that His Majesty's Government are in entire agreement with the sentiments which actuate the mover of this

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Motion, and that to remove or destroy what are simply memorials to the dead would do harm to our reputation and would, as the noble and gallant Earl, Lord Cavan, has said, be shabby. It would also do violence to the strongly held instinct, peculiar to no single people, of respect for the dead.
All that is intended is to erase from war memorials Nazi emblems or offensive wording which glorifies the ideals of the Nazi leaders or war as such. Apart from those there is no question of removing or destroying monuments to the memory of formations or individuals who fell in a battle. The same refers to tombstones or plaques in churches that serve a similar intention. There is no intention to interpret the directive in a way which would be repugnant to decent feeling, and our officers in charge in Germany have been so instructed.
I have pointed out to your Lordships already, and I now repeat, that this is not a matter for His Majesty's Government alone. It is a quadripartite decision which the British authorities are bound to carry out in their zone until such time as the other three occupying Powers agree to modify the existing ruling. If the directive is to be changed, it cannot be changed by unilateral action on the part of His Majesty's Government alone; it must be changed by a fresh quadripartite decision. Let me say to the noble Lord who opened this discussion, to the Leaders of the Opposition and of the Liberal Party and to all others who have spoken that I have taken note of the opinions expressed in the course of the debate and that I shall bring to notice the strong views which are held in this House on this subject. The Government will then, I do not doubt, consider whether it is their duty to instruct their representatives on the Allied Control Council in Berlin to take this matter up again on the Council with a view to securing a clearer definition of the scope of the memorials covered.
VISCOUNT SWINTON: Or making our reservations.
LORD NATHAN: Or making our reservations. Let me say in conclusion that where it touches on the difficult and delicate problem of memorials to the fallen, this directive will be applied in the British zone in a reasonable way, confined to eliminating Nazi and militarist emblems
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where those survive, designed to avoid unnecessarily hurting German feelings, and, above all, designed to avoid prejudicing the good name of the British authorities or the British people whom those authorities represent.
7.32 p.m.
LORD SALTOUN: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord for the very conciliatory nature of his reply. In particular, I should like to thank him for the emphasis he placed on the fact that the British representative—he said it both today and on the previous occasion—struggled hard to get spared at least the 1914–18 memorials and only gave way on pressure from the others. That shows that the British representative knew perfectly well that this policy was absolutely wrong and that he only agreed to do as little evil as he possibly could. That His Majesty's Government should have had to say that reinforces what I have said.
There is one point on which I am still deeply anxious, and that is that the Army should not be called upon, under orders, to do a thing which it morally reprehends. I will not mention the particular person, but I know of a statue of a German general who fought against us with signal ability and, for a time, with considerable success. One of the memorials which is eyed for removal is that statue. Every officer, non-commissioned officer and man, down to the lowest drummer boy, if we still have drummer boys, in that area is resolved that the last thing in the world he wants to do is to disturb that statue. It is natural to us, and why we should be asked to act out of our nature I cannot conceive. I do not know if the noble Lord can give me an assurance on that now. I am satisfied by his attitude to what I have said that he himself has that point at heart.
The second point on which I am anxious is that it is very important not to give the subversive Boche element the chance of putting on to us sins we have not committed. I think that is a frightful danger, unless we mean to be eternally in occupation of Germany. Having regard to the unanimous expression of your Lordships' opinion—an opinion which is, I know, shared by as Majesty's Government—I do not propose to press my Motion and, therefore, with your Lordships' permission, I will be satisfied for

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the moment with the assurances I have received from His Majesty's Government.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn

EX-SERVICE AGRICULTURAL TRAINEES.
LORD CARRINGTON: I beg to ask the question standing in my name.
[The question was as follows:
To ask His Majesty's Government, what was their target figure for the agricultural section of the Government Vocational Training Scheme for demobilized members of the Forces, how many applications have been received, and how many trainees have been placed.]
7.37 p.m.
LORD WALKDEN: My Lords, I have been asked to reply on behalf of my noble friend, the Earl of Huntingdon. While it has been stated that the agricultural industry could absorb a maximum of 100,000 recruits over the next few years, no actual target figure has yet been set under the Agricultural Training Scheme. The aim is simply to secure for the industry as many suitable men and women from war service as possible. The number of persons who had made application for farm or institutional training to the Ministry of Labour up to May 6 of this year was 4,048. In addition, 169 members of the Women's Land Army had applied direct to the Ministry of Agriculture for institutional training. Something like twenty-five per cent of this total number of 4,217 applicants withdrew their applications in favour of employment in other occupations, while some 200 men and women were found unsuitable, and a smaller number were ineligible for participation in the training scheme.
By the end of April of this year, 2,026 men and women had been placed in training, and an estimated 800 who had been
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accepted as eligible were awaiting interview for suitability or actual placing on farms or at institutional centres. Finally, 327 out of this total of 2,026 men and women placed had terminated their training, almost all of their own accord, before completion of the course.
LORD CARRINGTON: I thank the noble Lord for his answer.

WEST YORKSHIRE GAS DISTRIBU TION (PETITION FOR BILL).
The Lord Chancellor acquainted the House that the Clerk of the Parliaments had laid on the Table the Certificate from the Examiners that the Standing Orders have not been complied with in respect of the Petition for the Bill; the same was ordered to lie on the Table.
Examiners' Certificate of non-compliance with the Standing Orders referred to the Standing Orders Committee.