Lords Sitting of 21 December 1955

Preamble
The House met at eleven of the clock, The LORD TEYNHAM on the Woolsack.
Prayers

MANUFACTURE AND STOCKS OF HEROIN
11.5 a.m.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: My Lords, I beg to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, with reference to a statement made on their behalf on 15th December, 1955, confirming that in their opinion they have powers to restrict the amount of heroin in the coming year to that needed here by the profession, taking account of stocks which already exist, whether they will state (1) if those alleged powers do not in fact represent powers to prohibit the manufacture of heroin; and (2) in what manner it is proposed to ascertain the precise amount of stocks which already exist.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT (LORD MANCROFT): My Lords, Section 9 of the Dangerous Drugs Act, 1951, gives the Secretary of State power, for the purpose of preventing the improper use of certain drugs, including heroin, to make regulations for controlling the manufacture of those drugs by prohibiting their manufacture except by persons licensed or otherwise authorised and upon premises licensed by a Secretary of State and subject to any conditions specified in the licence or authority, and regulations have been made accordingly. The Secretary of State is advised that it is proper for him by way of such conditions to limit the manufacture of the drugs to such quantities as are required for legitimate use. As regards the second part of the noble Viscount's Question, licensed manufacturers and wholesalers have been required, as a condition of their licences, to make quarterly returns of stocks since the ratification of the Limitation Convention of 1931.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: My Lords, I beg to thank the noble Lord for his Answer. May I ask whether the stockpiling in hospitals is in any way affected; and, if so, to what extent the Home Office are taking that into their calculations of the amount of existing stocks?
LORD MANCROFT: My Lords, there is available at the moment with the wholesalers about nine months' supply, at the normal rate of demand. That takes no account whatever of the stocks already in the hands of the hospitals, doctors, chemists' shops and veterinary surgeons. Obviously, it would require a complicated stocktaking process to discover how much that is.

FOREIGN LABOUR ON BRITISH RAILWAYS
11.7 a.m.
LORD TEVIOT: My Lords, I beg to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether it is true that there is a serious shortage of labour to keep the permanent way on the railways in proper shape and order; and that the trade unions refuse their consent to the proposal of the Ministry of Transport to import Italian labour, in order to ensure that the maintenance work which is vitally necessary to the safety of the trains may be carried out.]
THE PAYMASTER GENERAL (THE EARL OF SELKIRK): My Lords, the British Transport Commission assure me that although there is a shortage of permanent-way staff, the essential standards of the safe working of trains at permitted speeds are being maintained. The question of the importation of foreign labour necessarily involves wide issues, and I think it is right that the British Transport Commission should, in the circumstances, decide whether that is desirable or not.
LORD TEVIOT: My Lords, I beg to thank the noble Earl for his reply to my Question. I should like to ask him whether or not it is the fact that the Transport Commission asked for 2,000 Italian railwaymen for permanent-way maintenance?
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, I am afraid I cannot confirm whether or not that is so, but I think the noble Lord will appreciate that the difficulty about permanent-way staff is essentially local—there are some places where there are too many and some places where there are too few. I think the Transport Commission are anxious not to create greater difficulties than already exist by making proposals of that character.

THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION
11.10 a.m.
LORD HENDERSON LORD HENDERSON rose to call attention to the International Situation; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, in rising to move the Motion standing in my name, may I first take the opportunity, on behalf of those who sit on these Benches, of congratulating the noble Earl who has just answered a Question on his elevation to the Cabinet? We have been greatly impressed by the efficiency and the courtesy with which he has conducted his duties in the past, and, leaving his Government on one side, we hope for him personally success in the future.
To come to the Motion that stands in my name on the Order Paper, may I say that it may appear to many of us that the day for the adjournment of Parliament is not the best time for a general debate on international affairs; but we are about to go into Recess for a month, and it is several months since we had the last debate on the general foreign situation. In the period that has elapsed since then, important developments have occurred in Europe, in the Middle East and in Asia. I am not going to attempt to deal with many of the present problems that would have a proper place in a foreign affairs discussion; I intend to confine myself to certain aspects of major related problems, and I hope not to occupy too much of the time of the House.
We are almost at the end of the year, and if we look back we must, I think, realise that little substantial progress has been made as regards East-West relations. The main issues that divided the East and the West remain deep and unsettled. In the light of the year's experience, we are once again forced to realise that patience and persistent effort
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are called for, and that whatever the setbacks we must not relax our efforts to bring about agreement, if only limited agreement, and that slowly, in the different fields where disagreement still seems fixed and obstinate. We must not accept that the position can safely be left as it is. Six months ago the Geneva Conference at the Summit ended. It was the first at the highest level—between Heads of Government—since the Potsdam Conference of 1945. A full decade lay between the two conferences; and, as noble Lords will recall, it was a decade of conflict, tension, threat and anxiety, highlighted by the rape of Czechoslovakia, the blockade of Berlin, the breakaway of Yugoslavia from Moscow domination, the bitter war in the Far East and the establishment of N.A.T.O. as the defence shield of the free world.
Towards the end of that period there was another event which overshadowed all that had gone before, because of its terrifying and decisive power over the future of human affairs. That was the invention of the hydrogen bomb. In the light of the ten years of continuous struggle and frustration, the fact that a highest-level conference could be brought into being was a notable event which was generally welcomed. There was little disposition to write down its significance. World-wide expectations were centred in its discussions. A successful outcome was regarded as capable of bringing a turning point in post-war relations between East and West.
The Summit Conference seemed to justify, up to a point, some of our hopes. True, it did not solve a single problem, but that was not its purpose. Out of it came what has been called the "Geneva spirit," one of those imponderables that can have far-reaching influence in foreign affairs. Out of it, too, came a directive to the Foreign Ministers, a guide on agreed objectives for them to aim at in the conference at Geneva later in the year. There can be no doubt that the immediate effect of the Summit Conference was a general relaxation of tension throughout the world and strengthened hope for the future. The tone of the discussions implied a common realisation that, as a result of the development of the hydrogen bomb, war had ceased to be a continuation of policy. It appeared that at last the processes of conciliation and negotiation were to be accepted as the

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only sensible means for resolving differences and disputes. The mandate given to the Foreign Ministers to negotiate on a range of subjects that lay at the heart of the divisions between East and West seemed to foreshadow that there were to be genuine joint efforts to break the old deadlock and to record some definite progress towards peaceful co-existence.
Alas! my Lords, the hopes raised by the first Geneva Conference were completely dashed by the second. The "spirit of Geneva" passed away with the dead leaves of autumn. It was hope that was broken; not deadlock. There was deadlock on German unity and European security; on disarmament and on East-West Contacts. I would remind your Lordships of what the directive had to say on German unity:
"The Heads of Government have agreed that the settlement of the German question and the re-unification of Germany by means of free elections shall be carried out in conformity with the national interests of the German people and the interests of European security."
That was an agreed directive, and it was the task of the Foreign Ministers to give effect to it. But what happened at the second Geneva Conference? The Soviet Government showed that they had no intention of permitting the re-unification of Germany through free elections.
It seems to me that Soviet objections here came closer to the truth and more into the open than at any time in the past. The rearming of Western Germany and its inclusion in N.A.T.O., previously placed in the forefront as an obstacle to any further discussion on Germany, had already been put into the background when the Soviet Union agreed to the July Conference immediately after the ratification of the Paris Agreements. Between the Conferences the Soviet Union had already started to implement its new line on Germany—co-operation and agreement between the two Powers—by its establishment of diplomatic relations with Western Germany and by beginning the repatriation of German prisoners-of-war. But at the second Conference the objections to unification were said to be a refusal to sacrifice Communist achievements in the Eastern Zone; and the whole question of free elections was described by Mr. Molotov as of "subsidiary importance." This meant that German
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re-unification through free elections was still a "non-starter." Progress on European security, having been linked with German unity, was equally impossible. Progress on disarmament, which is still being handled in the United Nations Sub-Committee, was less decisively blocked. But the refusal to allow greater freedom in East-West contacts was the most significant proof that the Soviet Union refused co-operation.
There is obviously a close link between the rejection of German unity through free elections and insistence on keeping up the barriers against freedom of contact between East and West. No one can really believe Mr. Molotov when he says that a free exchange of ideas would mean freedom for "the propaganda of war and the misanthropic propaganda of atomic attack"; that the opening of frontiers to travellers would permit "dregs of society" to conduct "unrestricted subversive activity." The truth is that the Soviet leaders fear the political consequences to Eastern Germany, and the political repercussions among the captive peoples of Europe, of both free elections and a free exchange of ideas. They are not willing to allow Germany to be reunited except on terms that will guarantee to the East German Communists an effective rôle and voice, no doubt calculating that they will be able to repeat in a united Germany the ultimate seizure of power on the Czechoslovakia pattern.
In adopting this attitude and proposing an "All-German Council" the Soviet leaders are fully aware that the Federal Government will not accept it. No doubt they are counting on the fact that there is a natural limit to the leadership of the present Chancellor. But resistance is equally true on the part of the Opposition Party. Its leader, Mr. Erich Ollenhauer, has recently declared in the Bundestag that
"the Social Democratic Party will never agree to any arrangement for re-unification which would include even a small part of the dictatorial system now prevailing in the Soviet-occupied Zone."
We must therefore accept, for the time being, the fact that the Soviet Union bars German unity through free elections, and will not lower the Iron Curtain. In the light of the completely negative results of the Foreign Ministers' Conference, there can be no other conclusion than that the Soviet leaders have gone

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back on the position which they had adopted at the Summit Conference. Most of the old fundamental differences remain without any easement at all. This does not mean that the method of negotiation has failed: negotiation never really got started. What it does mean is that the Soviet Government are not yet ready and willing to negotiate.
We must try to discover the real reasons for this Soviet change. There may have been strong internal pressures—a theory supported by Molotov's recent publicised apologia, and by his increased intransigence after his return from Moscow midway through the Conference; by the subsequent reports that further executions of "Beria men" had taken place; and by the offensive anti-Western line taken by Krushchev in India. Internal pressures may have played some part. But I think that the real cause is a different one. The tacit understanding of the first Geneva Conference—and this was responsible for the "Geneva spirit"—was the recognition that the hydrogen bomb had put large-scale war out of the question. Nothing at the second Geneva Conference contradicted this—indeed, the subsequent explosion by Russia of a nuclear device supports the view that the Soviet Union has something approaching parity with the West. The final sanction of preventive or retaliative war having been removed, the Soviet Union feel able again to resume a policy of pressure and expansion by political and economic means.
Soviet intervention and action in the Middle East, and the Soviet leaders' tour of Asia, fit in with this interpretation. The anti-West speeches of Krushchev were intended for Asian audiences rather than for Western ears. They were partly an effort to establish the Soviet position as the leading champion in Asia in competition with China. But they were also pointedly aimed at injuring the friendly relations and trust which exist between India and Burma, on the one hand, and Britain and the Free West, on the other. The ostentatious interference in the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, and the encouragement of Afghanistan in her demands against Pakistan were designed to increase friction, not to serve peace, just as the Soviet aim in the Middle East is to keep alive troubles in that area for her own purposes.
I do not think there can be the slightest doubt that the Soviet Union have started on a campaign of psychological and political warfare against the West. And they are having some success. The pro-panganda and other activities of the Soviet leaders during their tour was a most astonishing and flagrant example of visiting representatives of a foreign Government talking publicly over the heads of their hosts to create in the minds of the latter's peoples rancour and prejudice against friends and partners. Suggestions have been made that, because of this provocative indulgence in bad history and bad taste, the invitation to the Russian leaders to visit this country next year should be withdrawn. I hope the Government will take no such action. It would be a great mistake and one open to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. The invitation was given so that the Russian leaders might have an opportunity of seeing and learning something of this country and its people. They need to do that more than ever. And I think it is most unlikely that official Russian visitors would let themselves be tempted to abuse British hospitality in a similar way and vent hostility on our friends and Allies. What we should take seriously, against the background of their propaganda and other activities in Asia and elsewhere are their promises of economic aid, their commercial drive, and their trade arrangements. All this has two aims—to attract Asians to Moscow and to damage the West in the eyes of the Asians.
At the beginning of the year the slogan was "Peaceful co-existence." To-day, it is "competitive co-existence." There is a significant difference between these slogans, a difference of both spirit and content. The second Geneva Conference was the occasion for the launching of "competitive co-existence," and this will mean, as the Russians interpret it, a political and economic struggle for the support of, and eventual alignment with, the Soviet bloc of the neutral and uncommitted nations of the world. For the West, this constitutes a major challenge. It is not simply a question of countering distortions of history and unmasking hypocrisy. We have to meet and defeat cynical and self-seeking Russian efforts in the field they have chosen for their so-called peaceful operations. The challenge can be met only by effective

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Western economic action—by demonstrating that the democracies can provide equal or greater benefits without political strings and the danger of enslavement. The Governments of India and Burma know that we recognise and fully respect them as independent equals, and that all the help we give them is given on that firm basis. We are not seeking to buy or persuade them out of their chosen policy of neutrality.
My Lords, it must be clear to all of us that there is urgent need to give hard and clear thought to ways and means of combating, by economic aid, the Communist drive in the Middle East and Asia. I raised this matter in relation to the Middle East a few days ago, and I must frankly state that I do not accept the view which the noble Marquess, Lord Reading, seemed to advance: that there is no need for something on the lines of a Colombo Plan for the Middle East; that we can rely on the economic clauses of the Baghdad Pact for increasing economic co-operation in that area. Both in the Middle East and in Southern Asia we shall have to face increasing Communist efforts to win these areas from the free world, and that calls for planned collective action. The noble Marquess knows better than any of us the variety and extent of Western economic aid through the Colombo Plan, but I am sure that the masses of Southern Asia know more about Russia's economic promises than they do about Western economic deeds.
For all these reasons, I am glad that the Prime Minister is to visit Washington next month to confer with the President. There is just as much need for unity of purpose and action, and for a common policy now, as there was when, in the field of defence and security, we had to face up to Russia's threats in Europe and therefore establish N.A.T.O. Unfortunately, we have handicaps and embarrassments which are a present source of weakness to the West; troubles in the Middle East and in North Africa; our own economic difficulties, the domestic preoccupations which tend to distract America in an election year, and the political uncertainties in France. I regard it as a misfortune that the West is not to have, what I think it ought to have, a Summit Conference of its own,
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composed of the United States, Britain, France and Federal Germany, to re-assess the East-West position at this stage.
Soviet policy and aims need to be reexamined as a whole in the light of the results of the second Geneva Conference, taking account of Soviet activities in the Middle East and Asia, and the developing challenge of "competitive coexistence." We need also to review our policies and priorities and to work out what collective steps that can be taken to advance towards our common objectives. These include the unification of Germany through free elections; the maintenance of adequate collective security arrangements; progress towards a comprehensive disarmament treaty; an early peace settlement between the Arabs and Israel, and the co-ordination and expansion of Western aid to the neutral and undeveloped countries. This should include the speedy bringing into operation of S.U.N.F.E.D., so that economic aid from both East and West can be centralised under the auspices of the United Nations, thereby removing both scope for and suspicion of political or any other designs against the receiving countries.
Finally, in regard to disarmament, it is obvious that there are differences of approach which will be ironed out only by patient and persistent effort. But some progress might be made in respect of the suspension of hydrogen bomb tests, pending a report by scientists on the genetic effects and dangers of radio-active fall-out. This is a policy which is being pressed by Her Majesty's Opposition. At the same time, I must say, speaking for myself, that I should have been more impressed by the Soviet proposal had it not appeared that they were seeking to get the best of both worlds. They carried through their test before they proposed a cessation of tests. If they had said, "We are ready to make a test, but we will not do so if other nations will agree to stop tests," it would have carried a very much stronger appeal. As it is, having carried out their own test, they are seeking to have a stop put to tests by other countries and thereby to prevent Britain from attaining basic parity both with Russia and with America, and increasing our power of deterrence.
What I hope is that, subject to Britain's obtaining basic parity by her own first test, the President and the Prime Minister

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will seriously consider the desirability of a conference which could examine the proposal and see in what way effect could be given to it, either wholly or partially. Otherwise, competition in tests will continue, with increasing danger to the present and future generations of mankind. I hope that the President and the Prime Minister will also consider how to take advantage of the final statement in the communiqué of the second Geneva Conference, which recommended that the future course of the discussions of the Foreign Ministers should be settled through diplomatic channels. It is important that we should not accept the present stalemate but should press on with our efforts to break the deadlock by diplomatic action, in order to get negotiations going at the first suitable opportunity. That is, I believe, what the peoples of the free world will expect their leaders to do. The West must take and keep the initiative for peace. I beg to move for Papers.
11.39 a.m.
LORD REA: My Lords, I think there is little doubt that Her Majesty's Government are handling the grave responsibilities of international relations between this and other countries in a way which is approved by the nation as a whole, and even by noble Lords on this side of the House. After the long tenure of Foreign Secretaryship by Sir Anthony Eden, followed by a man of the stature, the imagination and liberality of outlook of Mr. Harold Macmillan, I am sure we shall all wish the best of good fortune to the new Foreign Secretary. The task that he has undertaken is an immensely important one and one that calls for a degree of responsibility and adaptability—probably as great as that required at any time in our history. It is perhaps a little difficult for some of us to understand the cause of this change in Cabinet offices. Prestige, after all, goes with tenure of office, and there are some people we are rather sorry to see give up posts which they have held with success and honour. On the other hand there is one Member of your Lordships' House here today whom we all want to congratulate on having attained Cabinet rank and Privy Counsellorship—I refer to the noble Earl Lord Selkirk. It is a well-earned honour and we express our best wishes to him.
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I think I express a feeling that lies in the minds, hearts and consciences of us all when I ask whether this nation is really marshalling its great powers of prestige and leadership, and even, in these days of parsimony and inadequacy, its financial resources, in the best allocation of proportions between the home objective and the international objective. It is a hard problem; and it is one which strikes me as particularly difficult of solution for a political Party whose beliefs and roots are understandably and justifiably planted more in the traditions of the past than is the case with the other two political creeds. For it is, of course, within the Party of today's Government that there exists that element of opinion to which conservation or conservatism seems normally safer, wiser and more respectable than inauguration. And that element of conservative opinion is, of course, existent in other countries of the world where it has not been exterminated by force, intolerance or corruption. Nevertheless, it would appear that in this age of speed and progress, in this age of acceleration and yet more acceleration, we as a nation are no longer confidently in the lead, or confidently amongst those in the lead, with a national faith and conviction (as we used to have) that there exists somewhere within our community a reserve of effort—a reserve of resource—which we can at any time, if we so wish, call upon and bring out to establish us ahead of, or at least equal with, cur rivals in the fields of diplomacy or commerce or general development.
It may be argued—indeed it is argued—that the pace today is so fast that none of us can afford to have any reserves; that we are spending to the full all our energies and all our resources. I suggest, my Lords, that while this may be true throughout the world in its application to material gains and material rivalry, it is not true of the spiritual, moral and philosophical reserves in human nature which, both in domestic affairs and in foreign affairs, have not really in the history of mankind been integrated to any satisfactory extent with the prosecution of purely political theories. I therefore suggest that evolution is leading us now, in this generation, to a point where such dichotomy between materialism and the things in men's hearts can no longer be maintained: the two cannot be kept right apart if we are to continue as a

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civilisation and are not to be exterminated by mere competition in destructive proficiency by the H-bomb or its successors. The practical problem is how to penetrate the Iron Curtain; not just the curtain of concrete material veto, but the parallel Iron Curtain which separates our Western ideology from the better human instincts and hopes which surely must exist among the millions of ordinary human beings who live behind that ugly and forbidding facade of Communism as it is presented to us by what seems to many people to be a handful of self-appointed juggernauts. Russia is not a democracy, and I believe that today there must be an immense potential of non-Communists—I will not say anti-Communists—in that vast country of 200 million souls. How are we to make contact with them?
First, I would urge Her Majesty's Government—the noble Marquess, Lord Reading, will forgive me—to reconsider the pitifully small allocation of funds which our country gives to all our information services, which alone can penetrate the fog of ignorance and distrust: a two-way fog, if I may so put it, for although it is vitally important that these people of almost another world should gradually be educated into acceptance of at least the bona fides of the Western world, I am also sure that innumerable people in Western Europe and America have a deep-seated prejudice that all the millions who have no choice other than Communism are themselves as Communistic as the figureheads which sometimes seem to us as of another, and certainly a less developed, civilisation. I feel convinced that most of those 200 million Russians would react to the humanities if only we could make some contact with them; and such contact can be built up only by slow degrees, first of all, as I maintain, through an information service whose size and product should not be almost ridiculous in comparison, for instance, with that of the United States.
Although I feel that the heads of this great Russian territory do not reflect the hearts of the millions whom they rule, they do offer at present the main channel of contact which is open to us. For that reason, like the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, I would discount their individual behaviour which may cause pain to the amateurs of a traditional diplomacy
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or even of a traditional courtesy. When one dines with a Moroccan sheik table manners are not the same as in your Lordships' House—each has a high standard, but they are different—and I would urge upon Her Majesty's Government not to seek to postpone or cancel the proposed visit of these guests whose behaviour may appear to be unreliable. In a country where cricket has never been taught one can hardly expect the inhabitants to play cricket according to the rules of cricket. Indeed, to cancel the invitation which has been given may well be to play right into the hands of those who are impatient to show, rightly or wrongly—wrongly, in particular—that the so-called imperialism and colonialism of the West is as unbending and as unconciliatory as a block of granite.
Apart from the greater use of information services, I would also urge Her Majesty's Government to concentrate their studies upon the political and psychological tendencies of that great country China, with her population, as your Lordships know, of no fewer than 450 million.
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (THE MARQUESS OF READING): It is 620 million.
LORD REA: I am obliged to the noble Marquess; that strengthens my case. If China were indeed truly and thoroughly impregnated with Communist-minded people, should we not have seen before now a very much more intimate link up between China and Russia than has actually occurred? We have in this country a centuries-old tradition of trade and of mutual understanding with the Chinese, and I do most seriously suggest that in that quarter there is an immense opportunity to try to re-establish our old sympathies and to learn, as well as to expose in regard to China, the essential differences between the Russian Communist outlook and the basic philosophic outlook of the oldest civilisation in the present world. It is through China, I suggest, that we can start to redress the world balance between the nationalistic self-interest of Russian Communism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the philosophies which, in essentials, are shared between the democracies of the West and the idealistic religions and ways of life of the Far East. Unless, my Lords, we can somehow once more align China with ourselves into the way of

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thought of the welfare world, if I may use that phrase, the outlook in the Far East, and particularly in South-East Asia, is indeed threatening.
I shall leave it to other speakers to expand upon the difficulties now facing us in the Near East, but the United Nations observation force on the Israeli borders is surely proved to be totally inadequate for the task which the United Nations have specifically undertaken—that of pledging themselves to take repressive action against any aggressor. How can an observation force carry out that great task? We must have an armed United Nations force—a mobile force with air observation—and until that force is established on the Israeli frontiers I see no hope of establishing there the peace which is essential, not only to Israel, Egypt and Syria, but to the whole of the world.
I do ask Her Majesty's Government to take a more positive line, in the confidence that this country is in favour of, and not opposed to, their present general line of foreign policy. We Britons think that on the whole they are doing quite well. But both in this House and in another place, we who sit in Parliamentary Opposition to the Government are, if I may say so, continuously faced with a sort of prevarication—a most courteous prevarication—and with appeals—again most courteous and disarming appeals—not to press too far our interrogations upon subjects which they say are still delicate and under negotiation. We appreciate that these matters are delicate, and we know that they are under negotiation. Our last wish is to embarrass the Government, but our first wish is to show that, in general, we do approve the broad principles of the Government's foreign policy today with a remarkable paucity of reservations.
I would repeat, standing here in my present position, having succeeded my noble friend on my right, what I have said before to your Lordships: that, in my opinion, the function of an Opposition in a democracy is to support, so far as it can, the elected Government of the people, and only in matters of divergent principle to oppose. Your Lordships' House is one of the two Chambers of a great national Assembly, and we who compose it are proud of our opportunity to show, whenever we can, a united front.
11.52 a.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF CHICHESTER: My Lords, as the noble Lord who has just sat down has made plain, there is general agreement among the three political Parties on the foreign policy of this Government, and there is great disappointment with regard to the two Geneva Conferences, especially the last, and criticism of the intransigent attitude shown by the representatives of the Soviet Government. I have great sympathy with this disappointment and criticism, but I want to approach the matter from a rather different angle and to invite Her Majesty's Government to make a contribution of another kind to the International debate.
Mr. Harold Macmillan, in his statement of November 16 at the close of the Geneva Conference, analysing the attitude of the Soviet representatives and also the general opinion, as he conceived it, of the Russian people, made this telling remark:
"All the suspicion is on top; all the friendliness down among the people."
So far we have been dealing with the top, we have been hammering away at the summit, and have not made much progress. Our spokesmen tackled the hardest task of all in the reunification of Germany, and they found deadlock. In disarmament there is a greater approximation to agreement, but deadlock in the matters of inspection and control. In the development of contacts between the East and the West there has been a slight lowering of the barriers in communication, but deadlock where free exchange of ideas is proposed.
So far, our Governments have been talking in military and political terms: our Government spokesmen have used the language of strength. We have pursued a policy of negotiating from strength, and, up to a point, of course, that policy is sound. There is, however, a limit to the usefulness of that policy, and I believe that we have got as far as we can get on this line at the present moment. We are strong, and there is no point now in talking to Mr. Molotov about the strength of the Western Powers. Mr. Molotov, Mr. Krushchev and Marshal Bulganin know all about that. There is no gain, in my judgment, in harping on retaliation. A threat of massive retaliation with hydrogen bombs brings no

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additional knowledge to Mr. Molotov's acquaintance with the great military resources of the West. Rather, it heightens suspicion at the top, it chills friendliness down among the people, and gives the Soviet Government ample material for deceiving the multitudes in Russia with the outrageous suggestion that the West are warmongers. Moreover, it raises moral issues of a very grave kind.
During the last war, I was a member of a small group of British Churchmen, consisting of Archbishop Temple, Archbishop Garbett, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Moderator of the Free Church Council, and a few others, which was in constant discussion with a similar group of American Churchmen led by Mr. Foster Dulles on the principles of a just and durable peace. Statements were exchanged between us, and were published in both countries. We were in constant correspondence, and occasionally our representatives crossed the Atlantic. Quite early in those discussions a statement of guiding principles towards a just and durable peace was published. It had been prepared by a Commission, of which Mr. Foster Dulles was Chairman. It was adopted, after America had entered the war in March, 1942, by a large and representative conference of some 377 delegates of American Churches right through the United States, with an editorial committee of which Mr. Foster Dulles was the Chairman.
The third of the guiding principles, which were so drawn up as to be acceptable both to Christians and non-Christians in that particular section, ran as follow—this is the American statement sponsored by Mr. Dulles:
"We believe that it is contrary to the moral order that nations in their dealings with one another should be motivated by a spirit of revenge and retaliation. Such attitude will lead, as they always have led, to renewed conflict."
Mr. Dulles is now Secretary of State in the United States. I should like to appeal to him, as to an old friend, to think again about those guiding principles, and especially that third guiding principle which has never been repudiated, and to ask him to consider what is wrong with that guiding principle
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now. I want to suggest—and here I believe I am in full accord with what fell from the noble Lord who has just spoken—that there is no point in talking to the people at the top in Soviet Russia for the time being. All the friendliness is down among the people. I would beg our Government spokesmen to turn to public opinion and to make their target world opinion, opinion in Soviet Russia, opinion in the satellite States and opinion in China.
I was grateful for what the noble Lord, Lord Rea, said about China. China has more than twice the population of Soviet Russia and still has great reserves in its contact with Soviet Russia. It is the moral leadership in the West, and in particular the moral leadership of our own country, which is the chief human factor that is able to make that change in the spiritual climate which is indispensable to a new and fruitful beginning in international affairs. It happens that I enjoy the acquaintanceship of Professor Radakrishnan, the Vice-President of India. When he was over in this country I had several conversations and, in fact, a correspondence with him. About three or four years ago, when he was the Indian Ambassador in Moscow and we were talking about the international situation at that time, he made this pregnant remark. He said:
"No doubt it is true that Britain is no longer the great Power it was before the war in the military and the economic realms, but it has enormous strength in its moral leadership if it will only use it. Why do you think India, which was quite free to decide either way, decided to enter into or remain within the British Commonwealth of Nations? The reason was mainly because we believed that Britain knew how to deal with foreign countries better than any other nation in the world."
But he expressed his disappointment at that time with the way in which we were failing in our moral leadership and failing to handle the international situation in accordance with our old traditions.
I suggest that we are not dealing with foreign countries today with our traditional ability. I believe that this is largely because we are not putting our fundamental ideals in the forefront of our policy. The hydrogen bomb has no power to deter or destroy the Communist creed: only a purer and a better creed can do that. We have that purer and that better creed, and it happens to be

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a true one; but we must put it into a definite form. We must not indulge in a few vague phrases or what Mr. Macmillan called bonhomie. Our statement must be the expression, or a series of expressions, of an inward spirit, and should be addressed not to Mr. Molotov, Mr. Krushchev or Marshal Bulganin, but to the public, and it should be in the nature of an appeal, and not of an attack.
In order that I myself may not be accused of indulging in vague phrases, I have, rashly no doubt, ventured on an imperfect formulation to give your Lordships an idea of the kind of manifesto which, as it seems to me, the Western Governments, and in particular our own Government, might well put out. As I see it, it is a statement of guiding principles for our policy on these lines, addressed to the people of the world as a whole—principles that, though we may sometimes fail, we try to live up to. They are these—I apologise for putting them in this concrete and daring form to your Lordships:

(1) We believe that there is a higher law than the law of the State.

(2) We believe in the free exchange of ideas, free speech, free elections, free Parliaments and the free practice and teaching of religion.

(3) We believe in a scrupulous regard for the pledged word.

(4) We believe that all nations should recognise and safeguard the inherent dignity, worth and essential rights of the human person, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.

(5) We believe in the right of the individual person to freedom from arbitrary arrest, and are opposed to all "purges."

(6) We believe in tolerance for opinions and policies different from our own.

(7) We believe in the development of international responsibility in place of the old colonialism.

(8) We believe that relations between peoples hitherto subject and ruling should be those of partnership and co-operation; and that countries enjoying new political freedom urgently need and should receive economic and technical help.

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(9) We believe that the world is one world, in which all nations must recognise their inter-dependence, and contribute freely, according to their means, to the welfare of the whole.

(10) Remembering the first Article of the San Francisco Charter defining the purposes of the United Nations, we will do everything in our power both to secure the universal elimination of all weapons of mass destruction, and to abolish war.

If we are asked or challenged to translate into concrete deeds those words, we could point to the Mother of Parliaments, our courts of law, our perpetual debate of things secular and sacred, and the great achievements of the Welfare State. If the lips of the Communist spokesmen speak of imperialist colonial Powers, we can point to the great nations—India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and others, which have received full independence at our hands in recent years; to the dependent territories in Africa which are in process of acquiring self-government; to the Colombo Plan; to the economic and technical assistance which we are steadily and systematically developing, and to the general trend of a policy of liberation everywhere. We might even contrast another Power, the imperialist Power of Soviet Russia, with its unremitting control over the Baltic peoples, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the East Germans, the Czechoslovakians, the Hungarians, the Roumanians, the Bulgarians and the Albanians, where we can see no sign of either a gift or a restoration of independence in any single one of those territories.
By way of contrast to the policy which I believe is really, and should be proclaimed as, our policy, we could quote the formulation of the Communist policy by Stalin in the fifth volume of the 1947 edition of his works, where he says
"The tasks of the Party in foreign policy are, first, to utilise every contradiction and conflict among the surrounding capitalist groups and Governments for the purpose of disintegrating Imperialism; secondly, to spare no means to assist the proletarian revolutions in the West; thirdly, to spare no means to strengthen the national liberation movement in the East, and fourthly to strengthen the Red Army."
Let us hope that this will cease to be the policy of Soviet Russia. In any case, it

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is well to proclaim as clearly and loudly as we can the much different policy of the West.
12.15 p.m.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, as the first Private Member on this side of the House to speak in the debate, I should like to associate myself with the congratulations that have been given from both sides to the noble Earl, Lord Selkirk, who is not here now, on his most well-earned promotion.
The noble Lord who opened this debate started by saying that he saw little progress in improved relationships between East and West during the past year. I think that is something of an understatement, because it seems to me that the initiative in the cold war is with the Soviet Power at the present time. If one looks around the map of the world, in Europe, particularly Berlin, India, Burma and the Far East, British diplomacy is engaged in countering Soviet initiative and penetration, and, as the noble Lord said, the Geneva spirit has turned sour. It seems to me that this is in sad contrast to the last occasion, when we could say we had had a year (it was the year 1951) when we really thought that the Western world had turned the corner in the long, patient, arduous journey to stable peace.
During the year 1951 Soviet imperialism did not advance one inch. Indeed, west of the Iron Curtain the initiative had shifted from the Communists to the Western free nations. If your Lordships will cast your minds back, you will remember that, instead of starting things as she is now, Russia was trying to block the Western initiative. Let me give your Lordships some examples. The Japanese Peace Treaty, the Pacific Pact, the expansion of N.A.T.O., the revision of the Italian Peace Treaties, the check of the Communist threat to Greece, the efforts by Russia which failed to displace Tito, and the Russian failure in South Korea, were all measures which the West had initiated and which Soviet imperialism was endeavouring to counter. Since then, the tide has turned, and in spite of the West's growing political unity and armed strength, gradually the initiative is passing in an increasing degree from us to the Soviet. I submit to your Lordships that the most urgent question we should ask
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ourselves is why we have slipped back and lost the initiative we held then, in spite of the increased political unity of the West and the increase in our armed strength.
Today we are striving to counter Communist initiative with economic aid. There is a sort of upward auction going on now, as to who can give most aid to various countries. The Colombo Plan has achieved much. We declaim at U.N.O., but U.N.O.'s best friends must admit disappointment at its present position as a world-powerful force. We throw open for all the world to see the contrast between our form of free life within our own frontiers and within the British Commonwealth, as compared with the Communist form of life; and we warn all who listen to us of the dangers of Communist imprisonment of mind and, quite often, of body as well. Yet, in spite of this, the poison gas of the gospel of Communism is spreading across ever more greater portions of the globe. I believe this is because we are late in realising and accepting the implications of really fighting the cold war against the ruthless and unscrupulous Soviet determination to continue, if possible without hot war, to achieve their grand aim of Communist supremacy in the world.
The noble Lord, Lord Henderson, spoke about the minimum and lesser aims, but I believe that the grand aim is there all the time. Though we may gain or lose in small manœuvrin as the grand aim remains nothing less than a Communist-dominated world. I repeat this since I think that, because so far we have failed to accept the implications of what it means properly to fight the cold war, the initiative has passed from us and gone over to the other side.
After what was called the "phony war" days of 1940, when we really got down to the job between 1940 and 1945, this country gave up much liberty in order to preserve liberty. We said, in broad terms, that the end justified the means, and justified even that most obnoxious Regulation 18B which was repellent to us all. I cite that only as an example of how far we were willing to go in those days in giving up something in order that we should preserve something precious for all time. To check the Communist advance in the cold war and eventually to confine Communism within its accepted frontiers, we may of

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necessity have to accept, in the cold war, some measures which are alien to our ideas of freedom in peace time. We shall have, first, to secure our home base and then to advance into more distant fields of cold war action. Thanks to the common sense, tolerance and political education of the average Briton, our home base is, by and large, fairly secure. I say fairly secure, because I believe we must guard against being over-tolerant to the limited few who, by their irresponsible actions, may be able to do great harm to our economic safety and perform acts of economic sabotage almost overnight, before the real effects of what they are doing are appreciated. The question of security on the home front, of course, lies beyond the scope of this particular debate.
I believe that in this period of the cold war we should scrap any reserve we may feel about using Government resources in the dissemination of information to expose the policies and aims of Soviet imperialism. We should not hesitate to use Government resources, to a far greater degree than we do at the present time, to counter Soviet propaganda and to expose Soviet aims and the individuals who are in the forefront of furthering those Soviet aims. If I may mention some popular papers, I would say that the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, do great service in exposing the aims and actions of Soviet imperialism, particularly in the Far East at the present time, through the very remarkable despatches from their teams of correspondents.
LORD PAKENHAM: Would the noble Lord agree that the Daily Herald does just as much?
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: Certainly. I at once apologise and would add the Daily Herald. Mine was not a selective list, and I was taking papers with the greatest circulation; unfortunately for the noble Lord the Daily Herald cannot claim a circulation quite equal to that of some of the more popular dailies, although I would not for a moment detract from its foreign services.
LORD PAKENHAM: The Daily Herald has a circulation as large as at least one of the papers mentioned by the noble Lord.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: I believe we should continue to do all we can in the field of giving economic aid, as we are doing. We must accept that this cold war is a warlike action, even if the guns and bombs do not explode. It is a matter for regret that in the Far East as well as in certain portions of Europe Soviet radio propaganda is allowed to go unjammed. While they jam our propaganda we respect an international agreement to do no such thing, so that they get their propaganda across while we do not do so. Where there is a really violent Soviet propaganda of a lying character against, say, the administration of our colonial territories, I would not at all mind steps being taken to ensure that such propaganda does not get across to those the Communists hope to reach. I should like to see Her Majesty's Government encourage the anti-Communist Press wherever Soviet influence and Press operate in Asia, the Near East or the Far East.
The noble Lord, Lord Rea, who spoke on behalf of the Liberal Party, pleaded for more money to be spent on information services and for new methods of disseminating information. That will cost money, but it is cheaper than dropping bombs or having bombers. I should like Her Majesty's Government to send trade unionists—not necessarily the leaders—to these far places, to tell the truth about life here in Britain: men who, if necessary, can dig coal and can themselves speak and show that they are not enslaved citizens of a capitalist State. We want to show the British way of life by sending out to these territories representatives of all sections of our community, in order that they may speak freely upon life in Britain. The British Council does very good work, but it is no good teaching English folk dances in the Persian Gulf: that will get us nowhere. We want good, tough, aggressive propaganda by ordinary men from Britain. That may be an unconventional suggestion, but I believe it is one which would yield good dividends in showing what life in this country is really like.
Two noble Lords have spoken of the visit of Russian leaders. The noble Lord, Lord Henderson, said that the danger of their visit lies in an abuse of our hospitality. I do not think it matters whether their abuse of our hospitality is

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bad manners. Her Majesty's Government have to consider what will be the world effect of this visit. Is the world to say we are broadminded and tolerant people, turning the other cheek? Or will the world say, "Those Britons are awful 'mugs.' They get pushed around and then they wine and dine the very people who push them around "? It is a balance of view and it is for Her Majesty's Government to take the decision. I hope that when the Minister who is to reply comes to deal with this particular point he will tell us that there has been serious consideration of the pros and cons, and that, if Her Majesty's Government have come down on the side of continuing to extend this invitation, it is because they feel that, on balance, there is greater advantage than disadvantage in doing so.
If we fully accept the challenge of the Soviet Union in the cold war, we need not only new aims and arguments but also some revision of executive governmental control and direction on policy in the conduct of the cold war. If we are to fight this cold war effectively in the future, we must accept that, like Civil Defence at home in the last war, it embraces many Departments and the activities of many Ministers. In overseas operations the Foreign Office is closely concerned, of course; but, with respect to the noble Marquess who will reply to the debate, I do not believe that the Foreign Office is, by tradition and training, necessarily the most suitable centre of direction for executive action in the cold war. There are the Government information services, the trade unions, the employers, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Service Departments, the Board of Trade, the Ministry of Supply, the Post Office and, of course, the Treasury—I cite only some of the Departments—all of whom have some part to play if we are to have coordinated executive action in fighting this cold war.
Just as in the war we had the Home Defence Committee, which noble Lords
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will remember worked under the chairmanship of Mr. Herbert Morrison, so we should now have a body to see that all these various interests are pooled together to work along a broad Government directive of policy. And the task is one which will call for exceptional administrative ability on the part of whoever holds the chairmanship of that Committee. He must not be an unproven man. He must, while accepting broad Government policy, be free to drive through his executive action. He must command the respect and confidence of organised labour and the trade unions. I do not think his politics matter a bit. Such men are few.
If I may, I would make one suggestion to your Lordships as to the sort of man I have in mind. One name thrown up by the wheel of fortune occurs to me—Mr. Herbert Morrison, I think it is fortunate that he is now free of any national activity. He is not actively employed as a Party leader or as a Deputy leader. All of us who served in the last Government remember his brilliant chairmanship of the Civil Defence Home Affairs Committee. Indeed, if someone like Mr. Herbert Morrison, would take on the task of chairmanship and the direction and co-ordination of the efforts of all these various Departments in the cold war, it might well be, if the last, not the least important task that a man like that could do. That is purely my own suggestion. In an assembly like your Lordships' House, we have no political boats to burn or axes to grind. Nor, really, have we any knives to sharpen. Therefore, I throw out this suggestion merely to show your Lordships how my mind is working. I should like to see all these Departments co-ordinated and brought together under such an administrator as that. I conclude by saying this. I feel convinced that we are still almost in the "phony war" days of the cold war; and if we are not to be labelled for our actions, by those who come along in the future, as inadequate and hesitant, we must revise our outlook and our efforts in order to counter properly the enemy we see before us.

THE AGREEMENT WITH IRAQ
12.34 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, may I intervene for a moment to make a statement which has recently been made in another place concerning the Agreement with Iraq which was made on April 4 of this year? The statement deals with the Special Agreement of April 4, 1955, betwen the United Kingdom and Iraq. That Agreement was printed with other ancillary documents in Command Paper 9544, which was presented to Parliament in July of this year.
Your Lordships may recall that the Memorandum which was attached to Note No. 2, and was amongst the documents printed in that White Paper, referred to the Special Agreement and provided that certain property in Iraq was to be handed over to the Government of Iraq and paid for at its in situ value. As a result of subsequent negotiations, the value of this property has been agreed at £2,755,000. It has also been agreed that the common interest of Her Majesty's Government and the Government of Iraq in the defence of the area will best be served by an arrangement whereby Her Majesty's Government waive the payment of this sum, and the Government of Iraq undertake, in return, to devote in the years 1956 and 1957 at least £2,000,000 to the purchase in the United Kingdom of arms, equipment and defence stores, and the remainder to expenses connected with the training of Iraqi forces in co-operation with our own. The Government of Iraq has also undertaken to make available in Iraq, free of charge, certain facilities for the British armed forces. Details of this Agreement are contained in an Exchange of Notes between the Prime Minister of Iraq and Her Majesty's Ambassador at Baghdad, which were signed in Baghdad yesterday. The text will be available when I have finished this statement.
By this Agreement we are in effect putting installations which we have built up over the years in Iraq for the defence of the Middle East area, at the free disposal of the Government of Iraq, as our friend and partner in the Baghdad Pact, to be used by them for the same common purpose. For its part, the Government of Iraq is undertaking to provide free of charge certain essential facilities for our
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Forces and to purchase arms in this country.
These measures are designed to strengthen the close connection between British Forces and the forces of Iraq and thereby to consolidate the new defensive association of the Baghdad Pact. My right honourable friend was greatly impressed during his recent visit to Baghdad by the need to use the new opportunities offered by the Pact to develop co-operation in the Middle East region which, as your Lordships are aware, is now faced with a serious new threat to its security and independence. This new Agreement is an important contribution to this end.
12.37 p.m.
LORD HENDERSON: My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Marquess for giving us that information about this new arrangement which, as I think we all understand, is merely the fulfilment of an agreement as part of the Baghdad Pact arrangements. The only point to which I would call attention is that under the new arrangement Iraq is to get arms during the next two years to the extent of £2,000,000. That is all very good in so far as it relates to the building up of the defence of the Middle East under the Northern Tier. But I should like to draw the noble Marquess's attention to this point—it was raised in our debate on the Middle East last week and ought not to be lost sight of—that what is done under these bilateral Treaties with Arab countries, such as this, and the provision of substantial arms for perfectly proper purposes (and I am not complaining about the provision of arms) does, in fact, further unbalance the position as between Arab countries and Israel in the field of the provision of arms. I think it is only right that attention should be called to that matter, because, with the development of these bilateral Pacts and their fulfilment in terms of arms supplies, we are creating disbalance which we think calls for attention by Her Majesty's Government with a view to the provision of some compensating supplies.
LORD HORE-BELISHA: My Lords, is the noble Marquess going to answer that question, which I think is one of very great importance?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: I am not going to answer it because it was not a question. The noble Lord called my

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attention to a position. That position, of course, has been borne in mind in coming to the arrangement of which I have spoken.
LORD HORE-BELISHA: The noble Marquess will be aware that the constant stressing of the military aspect of this Baghdad Pact is already having a disrupting influence, not only among Arab countries but within Arab countries—particularly in Jordan. Would it not be as well to take an opportunity to stress the non-military aspects of our relationship with the Arab world; and would it not be possible to present some kind of statement relating to the more economic and pacificatory aspects of our relationship with the Arab world?
For instance, no statement has been made to the House—perhaps the noble Marquess is going to make it to-day—about the proposed arrangement with Egypt for the financing of the construction of the new dam. It does seem a pity that it is always upon the military side that we give this information. I entirely associate myself with what the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, has just said, and I would emphasise that there is advantage in giving the constructive forces an opportunity of taking shape and appeasing a bad relationship in the Arab world, and in giving a chance for arrangements between the Arab world and Israel to develop. How can that happen within a military context and particularly within a military context in which the unbalance is stressed?
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, the noble Marquess did not understand my noble friend's intervention as a question. I should like to ask him a specific question. He says that the question of the balance of arms between the Arab States and Israel has been taken into account: could he tell the House in what way it has been taken into account? On the face of it this is a substantial addition to the Arab strength, and nothing has been said about the position of the other side. Could the noble Marquess give the House a little more information?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, what I meant a moment ago was that in considering an arrangement with Iraq, the kind of criticism which the noble
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Lord, Lord Henderson, has made of the position also occurred to Her Majesty's Government, and that was a matter which we had to bear in mind in connection with this Agreement. I meant no more and I go no further than that. As regards what the noble Lord, Lord Hore-Belisha, said in this connection, I thought I had at least tried to make it clear, in the debate we had a few days ago, that we did realise the economic as well as the military aspect of the Baghdad Pact. It so happens that this agreement has been reached at this point of time and I thought it was right to tell your Lordships what had taken place. But that does not mean that we are in any way oblivious to the considerable economic aspect of the Pact. I can only repeat that, in addition to what I said in the same connection in the debate a few days ago.
LORD HORE-BELISHA: My Lords, if it be that the Government are aware of the economic aspect of this matter—I do not dispute it—why is there no statement made about what we are doing for Egypt in that regard? The House is rising today, and on the last day we have a statement on special arrangements about military bases in Iraq. That is the last word said, whereas we can all read in the newspapers that some considerable arrangement has been made with Egypt on the economic side. I do not dispute at all that the Government are considering the matter and I did not ask that. I asked the noble Marquess whether he intended to say anything about that, if not now, in his speech this afternoon. This is not a destructive question, but a helpful one.
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, I was not proposing to deal with the matter of Egypt because, although certainly discussions have been proceeding here and in Washington, as is apparent from the papers, there is no concluding direction and it would be inadvisable that I should get up and tell your Lordships of any negotiations that might be proceeding, and of the nature and terms of them, until those negotiations were concluded. If it so happens that they are concluded at a time before Parliament meets again, that is a matter which none of us can regulate; but certainly for me to say anything at this stage would be quite irregular and inopportune.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, may I get the position clear? I take it that the noble Marquess is saying that Her Majesty's Government fully realise the effect of the provision of further arms to Iraq. They recognise that this will result in an even greater unbalance. That has been taken into consideration: but are they going to do anything about it? Are they going to allow this greater unbalance to continue?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, I do not propose to add anything to what I have already said.

THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION
12.45 p.m.
Debate resumed.
LORD WINSTER: My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I should like to recur to the question of Cyprus. I feel that I should apologise to your Lordships for speaking twice on that subject in the course of a week, but we are adjourning to-day for a month and the situation there gets no better. There are signs that it may get worse, and if it does so it is likely to prejudice our international relations in certain aspects. Replying to our debate last Wednesday, the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, was kind enough to say some flattering things about my speech. I regret all the more, therefore, to have to say that I did not find his own speech at all convincing when he was speaking on the subject of Cyprus. For instance, I could not agree with the noble Marquess that Cyprus to-day is not an international question. After all, it directly concerns America, Turkey, Greece and ourselves. It is a question which is discussed at the United Nations Organisation and one of great importance to all the N.A.T.O. countries. Yet the noble Marquess said that it was not an international question and gave as his reason for saying that [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 195 (No. 47), col. 251]: "because we British are there." I think that Cyprus has become an international question largely because we have kept it, or have endeavoured to keep it, a purely British affair, instead of bringing N.A.T.O. into it as, in my opinion, we should have done, or tried to do, long ago. We are not in Cyprus
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in pursuit solely of British strategy. We are there in pursuit of N.A.T.O. strategy.
Again, the noble Marquess said [col. 251] that the problem is "the direct concern only of Britain and Cyprus." If that were true, why did we invite Greece and Turkey to the London Conference? It is obvious from that fact alone that Cyprus is not the sole concern of Britain and Cyprus, but of many other countries also. The noble Marquess "profoundly" disagreed with me over something which I never said. He said that if we left the island, it "would be immediately claimed by Turkey and Greece." But Turkey now knows, after the debate in another place last week, that we stand for the Cypriots' deciding for themselves to whom the island is to belong; and there is not the least sign that the Cypriots are likely to opt to belong to Turkey.
We are going to leave the island—we have given our word for that—but who in his senses would suggest leaving the island before the future of the island had been settled? Certainly I did nothing of the sort; nor do I suggest, as the noble Marquess intimated, dealing with Cyprus as "an isolated problem in the context of Middle East policy"—I think those were his words. Quite the contrary. I want the problem of Cyprus settled because of the gravity of the Middle East situation. I do not want 14,000 men locked up in an indefensible island while the situation in the Middle East is so threatening, and I do not want a N.A.T.O. ally estranged at such a time because the Cyprus question is unsettled. Nor do I want Middle East planning to be carried on at a base surrounded by hostile population, which could not be held in the course of a nuclear war. In the last war, before vie were confronted with nuclear weapons, we held Malta only "by the skin of our teeth." Over and over again, it looked as if Malta might go. There was also the instance of Crete where, in spite of a well-planned and resourceful defence, carried out with remarkable courage, we failed to hold the island. So who could imagine that now, confronted with nuclear weapons, we could possibly hold Cyprus in case Of a major war? I certainly do not want us to be threatened there by a stab in the back in the event of such a war; and from every aspect of Middle Eastern

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policy it is advisable to get the question of Cyprus settled.
The noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, speaking for the Government, said:
"… we must go ahead as quickly as possible.…"
But could we not be told something of what is being done to the end of getting the question settled "as quickly as possible"? Certainly we were not told in the course of the debate in another place—a debate which, I notice, had a unanimously bad Press. What exactly is being done to get this question settled? May I ask for instance whether Mr. Macmillan's important and vital declaration, that we now admit the right of Cyprus to self-determination, which hitherto, until the time of that speech we had stubbornly refused, has been communicated by our Ambassadors to the Turkish and Greek Governments? It seems to me that it certainly should have been. May I ask, also, whether the Governor of Cyprus has been instructed to bring it to the notice of the Archbishop? Again, I feel that that certainly should be done—and I should be almost surprised if I were told that the Governor had not been given such instructions. No signs of our going ahead quickly seem to be visible. Instead, we see the horrid calendar of repression in progress—whippings, punitive curfews, searches, collective fines and so on—while British residents now find soldiers with Sten guns in their gardens defending their houses and their lives—a very sad thing to think of happening in what was such a peaceful island.
That leads me to ask another question to which I hope there may be some reply. The local correspondent of a London newspaper writes as follows:
"At Kyrenia Castle a joke execution was held by a British Army lieutenant. Twenty schoolboys detained during disturbances were told that three of their number were to be shot. They watched as three boys were led away and later they heard three shots. Then a soldier returned with three empty cartridge cases. It was all a practical joke."
And says the correspondent:
"I agree with the Army spokesman who said to-night that this officer showed a misguided sense of humour."
I am the last man to credit all that I read in the Press, but that report is cabled home from a correspondent in Cyprus, and I venture to ask whether any inquiry into those statements has been made. If
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they are untrue, I suggest that it is a matter which might be brought to the attention of that rather abortive body which concerns itself with the ethics of the Press. But if it is true, I think that the gravest notice should be taken of such a performance, so likely to exacerbate the situation in Cyprus, already bad enough. If it is true, it would not surprise me to hear that the officer in question is to be court-martialled.
For the reasons that I have mentioned, briefly—because I know your Lordships are anxious to adjourn—I find it difficult to feel confidence in the Government's handling of the situation at present. I think it is profoundly disturbing for Parliament to be adjourning for a month while affairs in Cyprus are in such a mess, and I hope sincerely that the noble Marquess, Lord Reading, will be able to give us some reassurance, supported by facts, that the Government really are handling the matter as the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, said, with a view to going ahead as quickly as possible.
LORD FAIRFAX OF CAMERON: My Lords, it will be convenient if the House adjourns now during pleasure until a quarter past two.
[The Sitting was suspended at three minutes before one o'clock and renewed at a quarter past two.]
2.15 p.m.
VISCOUNT ASTOR: My Lords, I should like to raise one or two points with regard to the forthcoming visit to this country of the two Russian leaders. I suggest to Her Majesty's Government that this visit must be reconsidered, in the light of what has taken place since the invitation was issued. It was issued after the first Summit Conference at Geneva, in which it appeared that there was some good will on the Russian side and that fruitful negotiations were likely to take place at the subsequent Foreign Ministers' conference. Since then, the situation has changed. At that Foreign Ministers' Conference, Mr. Molotov took a more intransigent attitude than anyone could have expected. Since then, the Russian leaders have gone on tour of the East, indulging in insult and innuendo against this country. Surely, therefore, it is a matter for consideration as to what the purpose of this visit may he, and, if it takes place, what should be its form and content.

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Because the two Russian leaders may appear to us to be carrying out various antics, it does not mean that they have not been extremely clever men and made a considerable effect on those countries where they have been. It can well be argued that it shows a lack of dignity in this country to offer a welcome to people who have gone out of their way to insult us. None of us who gave an invitation to somebody to enter his own home, and found that the visitor subsequently abused him in such a way, would be likely to keep that invitation open. We must think of what will be the effect on the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, who still maintain a resistance against Communist domination, if they see pictures of Marshal Bulganin and Mr. Krushchev being welcomed with flags and banners in this country. We must consider what the effect will be on countries less politically sophisticated than our own.
It is easy enough for us to take a sophisticated view, but we must think of the effects upon the unsophisticated countries. We must also remember what the Russians themselves have said: that personal cordiality bears no relation to contradictory policies. The Russians are most amiable people personally. The Russian leaders have always been prepared to indulge in happy convivial evenings with the leaders of the West without modifying their policy or changing their inherent hostility. The right reverend Prelate was speaking earlier to-day about the necessity for organising moral force. But is it not rather difficult at one moment to say that we stand for all these freedoms and, at the next, to welcome representatives of the countries who are actively oppressing freedoms over a large enslaved portion of the old world's surface and making constant attack on the Christian religion?
If, however, in spite of these considerations, Her Majesty's Government decide to continue with the visit, may I suggest that it cannot be of the same form as it might have been if there had been any genuine signs of good will on the other side. It would be wholly inappropriate to put out the flags in the same way as we do when we welcome loyal and friendly allies, as we did recently the President of Portugal. The visit should be marked by restraint and civility, rather than by gushingness. Public speeches should be severely
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limited, and it should be made quietly clear to our guests what embarrassment would be caused if there are attacks upon our allies, either in Europe or the United States. That is the most, I think, that this country, with dignity, could give; but one hopes there may be occasion for quiet talks.
Surely one of the lessons to be taken from this tour is that we must not forget our friends in the East. We have been perhaps too inclined to treat friend and neutral alike. And now, at a time when our friends and allies in Pakistan have been subject to these demonstrative attacks by the Russians, would be the moment for a further gesture of increasing our arms and military aid to that friendly and great Dominion The way in which our influence has diminished in the East since the war is incredible. While in many ways we all admired Mr. Bevin, it is strange that he should have managed to get out of the Middle East and Palestine without the friendship of either the Jews or the Arabs. So far as the safeguarding of any Christian interest was concerned, he made Lord North appear a great diplomatist. Surely, we have to make sure that we send men of distinguished personality to deal with Eastern countries and not make merely routine office appointments. If there is one part of the world where personality counts, it is in the Eastern countries. The Government should consider making appointments in the East from that point of view and whether the organisation of Ministers of State which, surrounded by good officials, worked very well in the last war, should not be revived, both in the Middle East in connection with M.E.C.O. (I suppose it is called) and in the Far East with S.E.A.T.O.; and whether they should not have a political personality rather than a Ministerial routine Civil Service appointment.
But I would submit that in the present state of the world Europe is still the key, and Europe is weaker now than it was two years ago. We have had a weakening of the position of France through the troubles in North Africa, by which most of the French divisions have had to be withdrawn from Europe to Morocco. We have had the collapse of French policy in the Saar. We have had its weakness in the ability to form a Government. We have had a Germany which genuinely

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tried to collaborate with France in building up European institutions, seeing a great deal of those efforts come to naught and many of the opponents of the Western Alliance saying, "May we not do better by direct negotiations either with Russia or with Eastern Germany?" Quite rightly, after the war, to build France up we left the initiative in building up the European system to France, and many fine French statesmen tried their best. It is no fault of M. Schuman and others that they did not succeed.
If we are to build up a solid buttress in Europe, which is the key to the world, it will be done now only under British initiative. We have to realise that we cannot do it on a very narrow "little Europe" basis; it must be based on the wider organisation of N.A.T.O.; that the building, extending and strengthening of N.A.T.O.'s organisation is the primary political task in front of us; that N.A.T.O. must not be a purely military organisation but must be able to deal with political and economic problems; that it must not, as it is at present, be confined purely to the home countries involved, but that it should include consideration of their overseas territories.
I will give your Lordships three examples of how this is necessary. First, let me take Cyprus. The whole N.A.T.O. strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean is in danger because of political quarrels over Cyprus. We have had to tackle it, in fact, on a N.A.T.O. basis, bringing Greece and Turkey into the consideration of this matter. Secondly, there is North Africa. The whole of the American strategic air force support for Europe may be endangered if the political situation goes wrong in North Africa. There is every hope that French statesmanship will solve these problems. We should congratulate the French on the flexibility they have lately shown in a new approach to the problems of North Africa, and wish them well in their efforts.
Thirdly, may I mention Africa. One thing I know something about is the Benguela Railway, which goes through Portuguese West Africa up to the Congo and links up with our copper belt. That railway, which can carry to the Atlantic the products of Rhodesia and strategic materials which at present go to the Indian Ocean at Beira, would have immense importance in time of war, cutting
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out sea journeys of thousands of miles and enabling ships to avoid the great submarine danger area, which has always been around the Cape itself. Whether that railway and that port should be developed for war-time strategic reasons could not be considered by N.A.T.O. because N.A.T.O. has not been allowed to deal with the overseas territories of its members. Surely it is time that that unnatural limitation should be stopped; because in a war there would be no boundaries and the N.A.T.O. Command would have to deal with all the resources of its members and not merely the metropolitan resources.
Then, surely, it makes no sense to exclude Spain from N.A.T.O., especially if the North African bases may be subject to political danger. As the son of a Virginian, I know what fun it is to re-fight the civil wars of the past and to keep up these memories; but that is an unprofitable form of sport. Surely the form of government in Spain is not much different from that in Portugal. There is a slight element of hypocrisy in keeping the differences alive. If war came the Spanish forces would have to be integrated with the N.A.T.O. forces, and aeroplanes would go from one base to another. Surely it would be better to get Spain firmly into N.A.T.O. If we get the organisation of N.A.T.O. stronger and take leadership there, it will do a great deal to increase our prestige with the United States. The great danger is never American imperialism; it is always American isolationism. There is always a danger that America will get "fed up" with the results of its efforts in men and money abroad. We do not want America to be disillusioned by what is done in Europe. Surely if we can take a lead to strengthen N.A.T.O. and the forces of freedom, we shall at once assume primacy in the councils of our great American Allies. These considerations apply just as much to S.E.A.T.O. and to the Middle Eastern organisation as they do to N.A.T.O. Each must be strengthened and some form of organisation worked out to cover all three.
I believe that British Governments have been too frightened of their own electorates when it comes to closer union with international organisations. Having fought three Elections since the war, I

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would say that one cause of the return of the Conservative Government in 1951 was the line that Mr. Churchill (as he then was) had taken about the closer union of Europe with the Commonwealth and United States. It showed a new outlook and hope, where previously there seemed to be little. I think the opposition generally comes from within the Government organisation itself. I can say from my experience that, if one were to put the case for giving up some of our powers to friendly international organisations, the response of the British elector would be entirely different from what most people think. If there is one criticism one would make of Sir Winston Churchill and the present Prime Minister, it is that the promise of greater British leadership in the unification of the free forces of the world, which Sit Winston made when in Opposition, has not been entirely carried out. So I think we can hope that the new Foreign Secretary, who I am sure everyone in all parts of this House will congratulate on his elevation, will make good in his performance. If he will take his courage in both hands and give a British lead, I imagine that he will have far greater support in the world and in this country than anybody.
House adjourned during pleasure, and resumed by THE LORD CHANCELLOR.
2.34 p.m.
VISCOUNT ELIBANK: My Lords, the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, will forgive me if I do not follow him in the major part of his thoughtful and interesting speech. Indeed, if I may be permitted to say so, I think that this debate has been remarkable for the thoughtful and common-sense speeches to which the House has listened, amongst them being that of the noble Viscount who has just sat down. I had not intended to give my views on the forthcoming Russian visit. It is only the remarks which fell from the noble Viscount which impel me to do so. Whether or not the invitations for this visit of Marshal Bulganin and M. Krushchev would have been issued in present circumstances is beside the point and does not arise. It was issued, and up to this moment it stands, and I for one welcome it. I think that the bulk of the British people have a desire to see these gentlemen, and I think, too, that they ought to see the British people. If they
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were to indulge in any of the verbal antics to which the noble Viscount has referred and which characterised their visits to India and Burma, then I think they would have the greatest surprise of their lives, for undoubtedly they would cause a roar of laughter throughout this Island which would have a most stimulating effect on them.
Passing from that topic, I take a leap across to the Pacific and to China. At the outset I should like to say that, as it seems to me, the position in the Pacific shows a tendency towards less tension than existed, certainly two years ago. If there is anyone who has played a notable part in that diminution of tension it is the present Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, most ably assisted by the Minister of State, the noble Marquess, Lord Reading, who sits opposite. My feeling is that the lessening of tension results directly from the statement made by Sir Anthony Eden at the Bangkok Conference. He withstood all pressure, and said, in effect, that neither side—neither the Pekin Government nor the authority on the island of Taiwan (Formosa)—should retreat from the positions which they had taken up, but that, whilst not retreating, from those positions, they should, at any rate, agree not to engage in hostilities. I think that statement had a remarkable effect upon the position; that it was welcomed by both sides; that it was welcomed throughout Asia, and that it had a great effect in increasing our prestige throughout the Asian Continent.
On more than one occasion I have drawn attention in your Lordships' House to the subject of British trade with China. In that connection, may I welcome the initiative recently taken by Her Majesty's Government vis-à-vis British trade and the question of its relation to matters connected with "Cocom"—the Consultative Group in Paris—as portrayed in recent approaches by Her Majesty's Government to Washington. Perhaps, as it would be helpful to me, I may be allowed to quote to your Lordships from an article in the Sunday Times of two weeks ago in which the Washington correspondent of that newspaper reviewed the effect of British approaches to the United States administration. The article begins:
"The Eisenhower administration fears that the sands on which its China policy is based are beginning to shift too soon and too fast

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for comfort on the eve of the Election year …"
It goes on to deal with four recent events which have tended to accentuate that feeling. While that may be so, I am sure that British traders, particularly in the export market, who are so vitally affected in this matter, are extremely glad that Her Majesty's Government have not waited until after the Presidential Election to make these approaches. The article says that one of the events was:
"Britain's desire, communicated to the State Department lately, that she is anxious to ease the stringent restrictions on trade in non-strategic goods with Communist China, which at present are much more severe than those enforced against Russia."
The noble Marquess, Lord Reading, will remember that this is one of the factors which I have several times taken the liberty of stressing in this House. The difference between the Rusian embargo and the China embargo places our traders at a disadvantage with others from foreign countries who, as I have shown on one or two occasions, have been able to obtain licences for their goods ahead of British exporters. I do not want to spend much time on this particular point but I will thank Her Majesty's Government for the steps they have taken in Washington and express the hope that those steps will be continued and in no sense marked down.
In this debate there have been frequent references to the position of what is called "East-West." Despite what has been said by some noble Lords, I believe that British power and prestige in Asia are very high. Unquestionably the British word is trusted throughout Asia, and I believe that Her Majesty's Government have done much to help that situation. While wishing that in every sense our relations with the United States may remain firmly based on the same bonds of friendship and strength as in the past, I feel that we should not forget that for two centuries Britain has been, in effect, an Asiatic Power. In this country to-day there are many who know China and Japan, families who have remembrances of, if not relations in, various Chinese Treaty ports, and who have Chinese friends there. When the present state of tension disappears they will again take up those relations, with the greatest advantage to Britain and the world at large.
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It is useful to remember the overall position in the Pacific. The same jockeying for position that has gone on for the last half century is going on there to-day. Russia is still desirous, as she is perennially, for the warm water port which took her southwards in the early part of the century from Vladivostok to Port Arthur. Japan is always fearful lest a major Power be located in Korea. The China of to-day is occupied in securing her frontiers and is doing what, in effect, every other Power is doing—pushing back her frontiers as far as possible against any likelihood of attack. To-day China has secured herself against the U.S.S.R. in Tibet, in Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia, and is determined to do the same in the North.
Let us see what is the present position in Formosa, an island to which I was first introduced when I landed on it after being wrecked in a typhoon on the other side of the Formosa Straits. An article, again in the Sunday Times of March 13, 1955, includes a description of Formosa by Mr. Iain Lang, a gentleman who has a great knowledge of the Pacific. He called it, "Isle of Make-Believe." Knowing the island, and having a little knowledge of the position that obtains there to-day, I feel that this article gives a graphic description of Formosa and its problems.
Mr. Lang wrote this:
"Formosa is indeed an island of make-believe. A fragment of 13,000 square miles making believe that it is 'the Republic of China.' A Police State making believe that it is a 'bastion of democracy in the Far East.' Its army of 300,000 men makes believe that it is preparing to recapture the Chinese mainland from Mao Tse-tung's massed millions.
"However, one or two hard certainties do emerge from this amorphous background. One is that exile has not changed the essential character of the Kuomintang régime"—
That régime, as noble Lords will remember, was set up to carry out the ideas of the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who was the principal initiator and carrier-through of the Revolution of 1911. The régime was taken over in 1924 by Chiang Kai-shek, whose ideas differed somewhat from those of Mao Tse-tung, who finally broke away from him and marched north—
"though it has modified some of its grosser abuses. Unlike the Bourbons, Chiang Kai-shek has learned something, but, like them, he has forgotten nothing. He is still the same kind of Oriental despot as he was in pre-revolutionary China, and still relies on the same political techniques as he did in Chungking and Nanking."

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My Lords, I will not bother you by reading any more of this article but it seems to me to give a very graphic description of Formosa as it is to-day. As to the future, of course one cannot prophesy; but I am very hopeful that with the help of Her Majesty's Government—and, in this matter, in my view, they can be extremely helpful, as they have been in the past—this Formosa question can be amicably settled. I think that both sides may be ready to settle, particularly looking to the lessening of claims as months go by on the island of Formosa itself. I stress that hope, and I again congratulate Her Majesty's Government on the part they have played in the Far East to date. I feel sure that their efforts in the future will be fruitful.
2.54 p.m.
LORD STRANG: My Lords, the difficulty about speaking in these general Foreign Affairs debates is that on each occasion one finds oneself saying the same thing over and over again. The reason for this is obvious enough. The situation which we are discussing is still, in essence, the same situation, however much appearances may seem to change and whatever facet of the situation is uppermost in our minds at the moment. The position is quite plain, or, at any rate, it seems quite plain to me. It can be described in half a dozen sentences. Western civilisation still faces the supreme challenge of its history. The Soviet power is bent on the destruction of the free world, as we call it. The Soviet power will take its own time in trying to achieve its purpose. Its purpose is implacable, and the methods employed are kaleidoscopic in their variety. The Soviet power is not to be appeased or bought off. The end, it holds, is inevitable. The capitalist world, it says, will be finished off by the march of history, with a measure of well-directed assistance from the Communist Parties in each country and, if need be, with the support of the Soviet Armed Forces.
We should not overlook that all this destructive process can be carried on progressively in the presence of the present deadlock of what I might call mutual nuclear deterrence That is the position, and it will remain, I think, until there is a real change in the Soviet outlook. And of this change there is as yet no clear sign. After Stalin died there was a great
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deal of talk about a "new look." There have been several "new looks" since then, but none of them seems to be much of an improvement on the old look. In his day Stalin took risks: he took a risk in Berlin in 1948; he took a risk in Korea in 1950. But whatever the anxieties of those days—and they were grievous anxieties—it was possible to think it unlikely that a man so shrewd and so wary would carry the issue to the final extreme.
I remember discussing this point two or three years ago in London with a former official of the Soviet Service whom I had known well in Moscow some years before. He said that Stalin's claim to a permanent place in history would lie in the fact that he had brought about the massive industrialisation of the Soviet Union just in time, and that he had led Russia victoriously through what was perhaps the most terrible ordeal in her history. Stalin, he said, was conscious of that and would do nothing to put to hazard the achievements of the Revolution, or to forfeit the place he had won for himself in history. So long as Stalin was there, this man thought, there would be no resort to general war. But when Stalin died and power passed to other hands, he could make no such confident prediction. No-one could tell what would happen then.
We can now see into what hands this vast Soviet power has passed. Can anyone say that the world is any safer for the change? Stalin had to build and rebuild his power with pain and travail. Krushchev has merely had to pick it up, and it looks as though it may have gone to his head. However that may be, there is among the Soviet leaders as a whole a new confidence, a new arrogance, as though they saw themselves the masters of the world. They are throwing themselves with a new zest and a new abandon into their campaign to draw the neutrals, the uncommitted Powers, into their orbit. It is natural enough that, in doing so, they should vilify and misrepresent this country. They cannot fail to have seen in India and Burma how widely spread and how deeply rooted are the material and moral benefits which the British administrators have left behind them. Clearly, they had to make this their first point of attack.
I do not myself altogether regret the speeches which have been made on their travels by the Soviet Prime Minister and

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the Communist Party boss. The more plainly the Soviet leaders can be led to state their real minds, to reveal the extent of their delusions, to disclose the distorted view which they hold of the world, the better, it seems to me, the rest of the world will know them for what they are, When they come here next spring, I think it might do our people good, as for example it did the Yugoslays good, to see M. Krushchev as he really is, but I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, that perhaps an attitude of reserve might not be out of place on the part of their hosts. I would say that if our visitors disregard the rules of hospitality, as they have done elsewhere, on occasions when any of Her Majesty's Ministers are present, it is to be hoped that the latter will not hesitate to make an immediate riposte; and if there are occasions when no immediate reply can be made, it might well be that an official statement could be put out with Ministerial authority with the least possible delay. There are things about free elections, about the enslaved peoples of Europe and about the Soviet colonial peoples in Central Asia that could usefully be said, if we were provoked to it.
In the same way, it seems to me that one of the chief advantages of the Foreign Ministers' Conference at Geneva was that Mr. Molotov dispersed the roseate hues of the Summit Conference and stated the Soviet position in such unbending and unequivocal terms. It is to be hoped that our own public and the public of the rest of the free world will not be too quick to forget the lessons of that Conference; and those Ministers of Asian countries who are now so hopefully consorting with the Soviet Union might do well to reflect on the fate of Dr. Benes. As Sancho Panza used to say:
"Many a man has gone out for wool and has come home shorn."
That is how I see the situation. Once again, as so often before, we ask ourselves: If these are the dangers, how best can they be met? What ought our policy to be? Fortunately, our policy is, broadly speaking, on the right lines. The defensive coalition is in being, backed by the nuclear deterrent. N.A.T.O. is working smoothly and although our combined ground forces in Europe are painfully inadequate, yet the Supreme Commander and his staff are alert to perfect the
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mechanism and to increase the cohesion of his forces. On the political side, the Foreign Ministers meet to keep the situation under periodic review and make known their conclusions. The policies on which the three Western Powers took their stand at Geneva were fully explained at that Conference. They are intelligible and well-founded policies and have received wide approval, and I see no reason at all why there should be any modification of them. They are well-conceived and well-explained but, as the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, said, at the moment we are passing through a difficult and dangerous period. The new Soviet campaign falls within the period of an American election; France is grappling with difficult external and internal problems; opinion in Western Germany after Geneva is taking stock and testing once again the foundations of Dr. Adenauer's policy of unification in freedom, in partnership with the Western Powers. In those circumstances, a special responsibility lies on the United Kingdom to give stability and continuity. Happily, these are the things which Her Majesty's Ministers—the new team as well as the old—are well qualified to provide. So much for Europe.
What about the debatable lands, the neutral areas in the Middle East and in South-East Asia? Here, again, it is possible to say that our policy is on the right lines: that is to say, first, respect for independence; secondly, collective defence agreements where possible; and thirdly, the supply of economic and technical assistance on the lines of the Colombo Plan. But we ought not to suppose that economic and technical assistance, however generous, which we and the Americans may make available, are in themselves alone an effective barrier against Communism. Revolutions, though they may be facilitated by human misery, are not made by human misery alone. France was flourishing and in full economic activity in 1789. Czechoslovakia was not in material distress or want in 1948. Revolutions result, I suggest, rather from a breakdown of authority, from the disintegration of the functions of government, brought about by the concerted action of a skilful and resolute minority and exploited by that minority to seize power for themselves. The technique of this kind of operation has been exhaustively studied. Its exponents are well-trained and they are at work in

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all lands. From This I suggest that it is clear that communities which are the target of Communist threat or blandishment require not merely material welfare; they require also inner moral strength, and we must make it our business, so far as we can, to supply this kind of reinforcement also.
In this matter, we in this country not only can rely on what we can do in the present, but can also draw on what we have done in the past. The good that men do lives after them and is not merely interred with their bones. The majestic British achievement of the past century and more has not only brought the Commonwealth of our own kin into being, but it has led, and is leading, a whole range of peoples of varied races and creeds towards self-government and independence. This process is going on in full flood before our eyes, in all its variety and ingenuity of resource. Of course, some peoples come to self-government and independence before, on a cool assessment, they are ready for it. Then we hear talk about a "policy of scuttle." Sometimes, on the other hand, we may hold on too long. Then the criticism is: Too little and too late." But, by and large, even when the achievement of self-government may be held to have been premature, the result is usually a good deal better than one might have expected. Peoples do, in fact, make shift to govern themselves in their own way, and they do it the better if they have a good model to follow.
We can have good hope, for example, that the devoted work of the Sudan Civil Service has not been wasted. Sir Stewart Symes, a former Governor General of the Sudan, wrote a letter to The Times the other day, in which he said:
"Those of us who believe that standards of honest and efficient government set up by British administrators in the Sudan will not easily be overthrown may retain our optimism undeterred by inevitable growing pains of a young and inexperienced State."
These seem to me to be words of great wisdom. It so happens that the weight of the new Soviet offensive in the debatable lands, whether by threat or by blandishment, is in a number of cases being brought to bear on communities in whom the British tradition has been implanted. I believe that, from this very fact, they will find a reinforcement of their own inherent strength the
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better to meet the challenge. It is now, when, for example, India, Pakistan and Burma are independent, that the free world may, in fuller measure than before, reap the benefit of the faithful work of the Indian Civil Service and of the officers of that magnificent body, the old Indian Army. Some years ago, in Delhi, I asked one of the most revered of the elder statesmen of India what the British would leave behind them in India. He replied that we had given great gifts to his people: these were, he said, the rule of law, the heritage of a great literature, the freedom of the individual and an instinct for liberal democracy So, my Lords, I say we can play our part by what we have done in the past, as well as by what we do now. But, in the long run, these newly enfranchised peoples must save themselves. That is what independence means. And if, in the exercise of that independence, they opt for neutrality in the great contest, they should not, I suggest, forfeit our sympathy or be shut out from our support, in so far as they are willing to receive it.
What about our own people here at home? We usually say, comfortingly, to ourselves that the heart of the people is sound. That may be. But we shall need all our soundness of heart and all our steadiness of judgment in the long-drawn-out trials in the international field in the months and years to come. It is true to say that we have managed our affairs pssably well since the war, for six years under one kind of Government and for four years under another kind of Government. We are making a successful attempt to solve the perennial problem of reconciling liberty with order. But, like the other peoples of the free world, we must in the last resort save ourselves, because it is the people themselves who make and unmake Governments and who, in the largest sense, determine policies. Our people have shown themselves to possess many shining qualities, but they are not immune from threat or temptation that may impair their inner strength. One such threat, as it seems to me, is the persistent debasement of public taste and sense of responsibility by the extreme vulgarity and irresponsibility of some of the most widely circulated organs of the Press. The values which these newspapers inculcate are not conducive to good citizenship and can only weaken the body politic.

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Then, again, there is the danger that the common man, in the innocence of his heart or at the prompting of evil counsellors, will persist in buying present ease without recognising, perhaps without caring, that the price of present ease may be future disaster. That is apt to be the besetting sin of the common man. It can lead in the international sphere to what is called appeasement; it can lead in the domestic sphere to what we know as inflation. Governments, it seems to me, have a plain duty here to educate and counteract, and Oppositions, too, have a responsible part to play. As regards resistance to inflation, all our Governments since the war, perhaps out of undue tenderness for the susceptibilities of the common man, have done all too little. As regards the avoidance of appeasement, they have done a good deal more, and the Russians themselves have helped them. But the siren voices are still there, and to counter them the public needs to be kept constantly informed about the state of the world. This can be done in a number of ways. It can be done by Ministerial broadcasts, like that of the former Foreign Secretary the other evening; it can be done by maintaining close relations with the Press; and it can be done by debates in Parliament. That is one reason why I feel we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, for bringing the international situation once more before your Lordships to-day.
3.16 p.m.
LORD HARVEY OF TASBURGH: My Lords, first of all, I should like to refer briefly, in my turn, to the recent Conference at Geneva and to the attitude adopted there by Her Majesty's Government. While sharing the general disappointment at the lack of progress, I must say that, things having turned out as they have, I feel also a sense of immense relief. There is always a strong temptation at high level international conferences of this kind to appear as having achieved something, however bleak the result, so as not to disappoint public opinion. That is a most dangerous thing, and I was more than relieved when it became clear that the Foreign Secretary and his colleagues had resisted that temptation and had not sponsored some face-saving formula which, far from adding to our security, would only have
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papered over the cracks between the Western position and that of the East. Indeed, it is much more than cracks which divide us—it is a chasm; and it is healthier, I feel sure, that everybody should see that it is a chasm.
The danger of these political conferences at high level is that people at home may be misled—not the Governments, but plain people; our own people, the people of France and the people of America—to suppose that because the leaders are so often in each other's company, and making such friendly declarations, and appear so smiling in the photographs, they can relax and safely go back on the hard sacrifices which they are making and must make if the strength of the Western front is to be maintained. While, therefore, obviously it is necessary and desirable that the Allied leaders should be ready to meet and discuss with the Soviet leaders at regular intervals, it is equally necessary that the results of such talks, whether positive or negative, should be left in no doubt. No agreement at all is better than a dishonest agreement. The fact is that it is not possible at the present time to reach agreement; the gap between the two systems and the two policies is far too wide. We should be very careful not to blur the edges.
If, therefore, I think there is cause for relief at the more clear-cut position in the East-West situation as it was left after Geneva II, the situation in other directions, I am afraid, has certainly not improved. Indeed, I believe there is cause for much fresh anxiety, especially as regards the internal position in Western Germany herself. I believe the situation there is slipping. Dr. Adenaur, great statesman that he is, is getting older and his team is getting more unruly. He has suffered, as the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, said, severe set-backs in his European policy, first, by the rejection by France of the European Defence Committee, and then of the Saar Settlement by his own Parliament. A further and perhaps fatal blow would come were anything done to weaken the High Coal and Steel Authority at Luxembourg.
None the less, German nationalists and industrialists, the neo-Nazis and also German Socialists now seem united in advocating very dangerous doctrines. Though of different origins, some good and some far from good, they all have this in common: they all lead back to

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autarchy and neutralism. The argument all these dissidents use comes roughly to this: that since Soviet Russia will not agree to German reunion whilst Western Germany is allied to the West, therefore the Federal Government should renounce its Western connection and should become neutral and demilitarised, after which there would be no objection to the two Germanies reuniting. That argument seems to me altogether too simple and begs far too many questions. One thing is certain, and I think everybody should know it: a neutral Germany, balanced between East and West, would be as great a menace to stability in Europe as a divided Germany. It would be a perpetual menace to peace. I doubt whether such a situation could be tolerated any more by Soviet Russia than by the West.
Now what does neutralism amount to in German eyes? Above all, it means that there should be no foreign bases, Soviet Russia retiring over the East frontier and the Allies over the West frontier, and Germany becoming a sort of "no man's land." But the pressures to which she would be subjected would be quite unequal. The Russians would step back a few kilometres, but where would the Allied forces be able to stand? Is it likely that the United States would allow her ground forces to remain in the narrow zone between the Rhine and the Atlantic? And what of our own troops? The withdrawal of Western Germany would entail an entirely new conception of N.A.T.O. The defence of Europe would have to be recast and might have to become entirely peripheral, Western Europe being defended by air power alone from the edges. Germany would become a vast neutralised zone, demilitarised and open to invasion or bombing. I doubt whether that would suit Germany any more than France or Britain. The more the idea of a neutralised, demilitarised Germany is looked at, the more unrealistic it is seen to be. Some Germans may fondly imagine that Germany would be so powerful that she could hold the balance between East and West and remain free of both. How long does anyone suppose that such a Germany would
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remain demilitarised? A reunited Germany, with a population of 60 million or 70 million, would be far too big and her outlook far too dynamic for her ever to be neutral. She is not an Austria or a Switzerland, and she can never be an India. Neither the East nor the West could possibly tolerate it.
To-day, it is a commonplace that no Power, however great, can stand alone. Germany must stand in with the West or with the East; she must make up her mind to which side she belongs. She must make her choice between the Communist bloc and the free world: she cannot be neutral. It is for her to make a decision. We, for our part, have no doubt that Germany is, and should be, one of the Western nations, having been civilised and Christianised from the West and forming part of Charlemagne's dominions. We believe that it is our duty —and I think we are doing it—to do everything possible to strengthen her Western ties and her European ties. We should obviously do everything to make Germany feel at home with us. The Western Defence Community, alas! has gone, good plan though it was, but N.A.T.O. remains; and here everything has been and is being done to make Germany feel at home and that her contribution is welcome. There also remains the High Authority for Coal and Steel at Luxembourg, which also stands for a great political conception. Here, I regret to say, our record has been much more hesitant, but I hope that no effort will be spared now to strengthen our participation and influence there.
THE EARL OF ONSLOW: My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord for interrupting his most interesting speech, but your Lordships will know that on the Order Paper there is a Royal Commission at 3.30. Therefore, I beg to move that the House do adjourn during pleasure.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.—(The Earl of Onslow.)
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

ROYAL COMMISSION
3.30 p.m.
The following Bills and Measure received the Royal Assent:

Finance (No. 2),

Aliens' Employment,

Friendly Societies,

Agriculture (Improvement of Roads),

Diplomatic Immunities Restriction,

Expiring Laws Continuance,

Edinburgh Corporation Order Confirmation,

Runcorn-Widnes Bridge,

London County Council (General Powers),

British Transport Commission,

Hillingdon Estate,

Diocesan Education Committees Measure.

House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION
3.44 p.m.
Debate resumed.
LORD HARVEY OF TASBURGH: My Lords, as I was saying, the European Coal and Steel Authority, like all other organisations designed to bring France and Germany together, simply will not work unless Britain actively participates. If we once allow it to drop, we shall start up afresh the old economic rivalry between the Ruhr and Lorraine which obsessed Europe between the wars. The same is true of the Council of Europe and its associate bodies. It is not so much a question of whether we should like to join in, but rather that we must join in and actively participate if we are to achieve the objectives of our policy.
Then, finally, for Soviet Russia herself, I believe that this solution—the policy of linking Germany definitely with the West —must be the best solution. We can perfectly well understand Russia's need for security and her alarm of a free and unattached but reunited Germany. Her Majesty's Government have refused, as I
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understand, and quite rightly, to offer Soviet Russia any guarantee in respect of a reunited Germany so long as she is unattached. That seems to me to be perfectly right and nothing but common sense. How can we accept a guarantee in respect of an unattached Germany of sixty million people balancing loose in the middle of Europe? But if the reunited Germany decides to be a member of N.A.T.O., then the guarantee will be forthcoming. Then it becomes a guarantee worth having, with Germany forming part of a group of stable and disciplined, and democratic, Powers. It is a natural grouping to which, by history and by origin, Germany belongs.
3.46 p.m.
LORD CHORLEY: My Lords, before this interesting debate comes to an end, I should like to put a point of view which has not so far been expressed, although I am afraid it may possibly be rather an unpopular one. Before doing so, I should like to extend my own congratulations to the noble Earl, Lord Selkirk, on his promotion. As one who has crossed swords a good deal with him in the past, it is a great pleasure to see him honoured in this way. Naturally, we have heard a great deal this afternoon about the failure of the renewed Geneva Conference; and, perhaps equally naturally, we have heard all the blame for that failure put upon the U.S.S.R. The noble Lord, Lord Strang, almost welcomed this failure, and the noble Lord, Lord Harvey of Tasburgh, I think, positively welcomed it. I must say that I felt it was a great disappointment indeed. I did not regard it as being inevitable in the way they seemed to regard it as such. Indeed, I think that more blame for the failure rests upon the Western Powers than upon the U.S.S.R. No doubt there is blame on both sides, but if one had to apportion the blame, I think that that is the way in which I personally should be inclined to apportion it.
It is interesting to note that in a remarkable article which was contributed to the New York Herald Tribune, and which many of your Lordships will no doubt have read, Mr. Walter Lippman, who is perhaps one of the shrewdest and most impartial observers of the foreign scene now writing and is far from being Communist in his sympathies, as I think everybody will agree, pointed out that

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if the policy of the N.A.T.O. Powers towards Russia at the resumed Geneva talks did not become rather less wooden than it had been, and did not develop a flexibility which had certainly not been evident up to that stage, the inevitable result would be not only the failure of the resumed discussions, but to leave the U.S.S.R. in a stronger position than she had held before the discussions started. Of course, that is exactly what has happened.
I must say that I think the theory that the Western Powers have a monopoly of reasonableness just will not stand up to examination. In this they have in fact pursued what seems to me to be quite obviously the policy of old-fashioned power politics. On the other hand, the U.S.S.R. has, I think, made quite substantial concessions and has pursued a policy which is much more flexible, and as a result of that has obtained the advantage. About a year ago, in foreign affairs discussions in this House, we all assumed that the position of Austria was solidified. Russia showed no signs whatever of making any concession, and joint occupation of Austria for many years seemed inevitable. We now knew that, as a result of concessions on the part of the U.S.S.R., that is not so.
Again, great surprise was expressed only last week when, as a result of Russian flexibility and willingness to make concessions, the difficulty about new entrants into the United Nations was overcome. Had it depended upon the United States of America that difficulty certainly would not have been overcome. Again this is symptomatic of much greater Russian readiness to behave reasonably. I know that many people will regard this as merely proof that the Russians are exceedingly subtle and are playing a deep and underhand game. Where concessions are made they can always be explained away in that fashion. Russian intransigence in respect of Egypt and, more recently, of India has been prayed in aid of such a proposition. What right have we to expect Russia to keep out of the Middle East and other parts of the world? It seems to be assumed that Egypt, India, Palestine and everywhere else, are completely forbidden ground to one of the great world Powers, a Power obviously as entitled as any other to take part in discussions concerning
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these matters. It is completely unrealistic to expect the Russians to keep out of world politics as apparently they are expected to do.
So far as my reading and knowledge of debates here and in another place goes, no attempt has been made to bring the Russians into discussions concerning the exceedingly difficult and complex problem which has grown up in the Middle East since the end of the war. Treaties are entered into between the Americans and ourselves, and the Turks, the Iraqis, the Iranians, and everybody else along the borderline of Russia; yet those are apparently not regarded as any threat to that country, while at the same time we seem to deny that even those problems which are much closer to the frontier of Russia than to our own are any concern of theirs. If we insist on keeping the Russians at arms length when we are attempting to get a solution (and God knows! we have not made the strenuous attempts we should have made), and to settle this very difficult and dangerous Israel-Arab problem, it is not surprising that, after all these years, they should decide to intervene, and to do so, naturally, in the way which they think best suits their interest It is very unrealistic to expect them to do anything else.
Your Lordships had a discussion about the problems of the Middle East only a few days ago. I do not wish to go over that ground again, but the Baghdad Pact was accurately described by the noble Lord, Lord Hore-Belisha, in a remarkable speech, as a very obvious threat to the Russians; and he pointed out how absurd it was for us to protest that Russians, having had that Pact levelled against them, should engineer a riposte. The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, in a most interesting speech this afternoon suggested to your Lordships that the world had nothing to fear from American imperialism and that what the world should fear was American isolationism I am not so sure that the noble Viscount is right. I think the world has a good deal to fear from all kinds of imperialism. The fact that American imperialism takes a rather different form from that of imperialisms of the past does not necessarily mean that it is not dangerous. To Russians looking round their own frontiers it must appear a very considerable danger.

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Where is all the oil going that comes from the great oilfields almost abutting on the frontiers of Russia? Though there has been talk of oil imperialism, certainly a large part of the oil is crossing the Atlantic to America I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hore-Belisha, is perfectly right in suggesting that for reasons of this kind the Russians do have cause to fear. What happens to the money paid for this oil? Must almost all of it go into the pockets of sheiks and princelings and others? How much of it goes to improving the lot of the unfortunate fellaheen and working peoples of the lands from which that oil is extracted?
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester, in one of his forthright speeches which always interest us so much, said that if we are to defeat the Communist creed it must be by substituting for it a finer and purer creed. Not only must we have a finer and purer creed; we must practise it, too. I suggest that there has been no practice of any such finer creed in the exploitation of these great oil reserves of the Middle East. Until we can put our hands on our hearts and say that this money is going to the peoples of those lands, and is not to be spent on expensive motor cars, planes and such other luxuries as we are told are already remarkable in the capitals of these small kings and princelings, we cannot really object to the Russians' taking a hand.
VISCOUNT ASTOR: My Lords, if the noble Lord will forgive my interrupting, may I ask whether he is not aware that Iraq has a Development Board taking practically the whole of the revenue from oil, which is being applied to long-term development for the benefit of the people?
LORD CHORLEY: My Lords, there is no doubt some difference between one country and another in these matters. My own information as to what is going on in Iraq is not quite the same as that of the noble Viscount, though I believe the situation there is rather better than in Saudi-Arabia, for instance, where it calls aloud to the heavens for redress.
In all these circumstances I do not think we can reasonably blame the Communists for attempting to spread their faith among the peoples of these lands, many of whom are getting such a raw deal at the present time. For this reason,
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also, the campaign we have recently seen conducted by the touring commissars from Moscow is very understandable. It is highly original, and for that reason exceedingly disconcerting. It is a new form of diplomacy which certainly does not fit into the pattern to which the noble Lord, Lord Strang, is accustomed. Naturally, therefore, a great deal of feeling has been caused in the Western world. Their statements have been couched in language altogether too strong, often very unfair, and exceedingly irritating, and one can well understand why it has so greatly upset people. But different people have different ideas of what language can properly be used, and, indeed, so have different ages. In many ways the Russians have only reached a stage of culture and development which we have long ago passed by, and for that reason it was a little tactless of Krushchev to make those historical references.
I had the interest during the luncheon adjournment to look at the record of a State trial in this country, at which a very great Lord Chief Justice, then Attorney-General, prosecuted Sir Walter Raleigh. I looked at this just to refresh my mind. I see that the Attorney-General, as he then was, referred to Sir Walter Raleigh as "Thou viper," and he said: "Fie, I thou thee thou traitor"; and, again "Thou art a monster." That is the sort of thing which was accepted as proper language from an Attorney-General in this country three hundred years ago. But, even more recently, perhaps the most famous of our most recent Prime Ministers, writing about the exiled Trotsky, used these words:
"Trotsky possessed in his nature all the qualities requisite for the act of civic destruction—the organising command of a Carnot; the cold detached intelligence of a Machiavelli; the mob oratory of a Cleon; the ferocity of Jack the Ripper; the toughness of Titus Oates. No trace of compassion, no sense of human kinship, no apprehension of the spiritual, weakened his high and tireless capacity for action. Like the cancer bacillus he grew, he fed, he tortured, he slew in fulfilment of his nature."
I suggest that nothing stronger than that has emanated even from the Russian leaders, and that we should think twice before we condemn them for using language of a similar character to that which great leaders in Western Europe have used against their leaders. I certainly endorse everything said by both the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, and the

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noble Viscount, Lord Elibank, to the effect that this sort of thing should not allow us to be inhospitable to them when they come to see us in the Spring.
The right reverend Prelate, the Lord Bishop of Chichester, asked us to return to a policy of "international responsibility." I wish we could do so. But I also wish I could think our foreign policy had always been so clearly marked by a sense of "international responsibility" as the right reverend Prelate evidently does. I wish I could feel that our foreign policy in the, years just before the last great war was marked by any such feelings of international responsibility. Our foreign policy is naturally based on what we regard as preservation of our own national interests. It may well be that it is sometimes more far-sighted than at other times. I like to think of those acts of withdrawal from imperialism which were associated with the great Labour Government of which I had the honour to be a junior member. The withdrawal of our imperial domination from India, Pakistan and Ceylon was marked by that very far-sighted feeling for national interest which leads to really fruitful results.
But when I look round on the world I cannot altogether agree that we have completely given up our imperialistic ways. And when the right reverend Prelate reproaches the U.S.S.R. for practising a form of colonial imperialism—the inference being that we no longer practise anything of the sort—I cannot forget that in many parts of the world British troops are still to be seen in the streets of the towns, and the administration is carried out by British administrators and judges. There have been a great many scandals in Kenya in recent time over the conduct of the police in that unhappy country—a fact which is well known all over the world. I am far from suggesting that there is not in Russia a form of colonial imperialism, but one cannot overlook the fact that Russian troops are not seen in the streets of Warsaw, or in the streets of Prague, or in the streets of Bucharest; and that in all those sections of the U.S.S.R. in Asia which have been referred to as if they were held down, we really do not know whether they are held down or not. People who have been there give very different accounts of what happens there. At arty rate, it is not yet for us to throw taunts
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of this sort in the faces of those people with whom we must make peace if the world is to be saved. I deplore this unmannerly conduct—because unmannerly it certainly has been—of the Russian leaders in India, and of those who have given way to unmannerly retorts so that we have had almost the beginning of a slanging competition in the West. That sort of thing will never lead to what we all want to see: solid progress towards a more peaceful world.
My Lords, I would finish by taking up some of the observations made by the noble Lord, Lord Harvey of Tasburgh. I felt it was rather unfortunate that he should have adopted almost a threatening tone in his admonition of Germany. The Germans must be left free to decide what they think best for themselves. It may well be that the idea of a neutralised Germany as a sort of buffer between Western Europe and the U.S.S.R. is not a practicable one. But I confess that I was far from being convinced by the noble Lord's arguments. He suggested that if this neutralised Germany were brought into being, Western Europe could he defended only by peripheral air action. Many distinguished military students, however, are sure that Western Europe can, as it is, be defended only by peripheral air action. Certainly if Germany could in fact be neutralised, the Russian armies and the Russian bombers would be farther away from our frontiers by many hundreds of miles, and the great danger that a world war might be brought about again as a result of some frontier incident, some upset leading to a great and violent forest fire, would clearly be put further into the background.
I do not feel that the last word, by any means has been said on this problem of a neutralised Germany. I should have said that to say to the Germans: "You have got to come in on our side," as in effect the noble Lord did say, was altogether too threatening. To say that neither we nor the U.S.S.R. would tolerate a neutral Germany was a very extreme statement. The Germans themselves must clearly decide what they want to do. If I had to choose between a neutralised Germany and a Germany which had joined up with the U.S.S.R. I should have no difficulty in knowing where my choice would lie. For these reasons I cannot agree with the view put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Harvey of Tasburgh.

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I hope that Her Majesty's Government will take a rather more realistic view in regard to the solution of these problems, and will be ready to take steps of a kind, which they certainly have not taken so far, showing that they are prepared to meet the Russians half-way, or at any rate at some distance, in order that some method may be found of solving, if not the fundamental difficulties which divide us and which we are now a long way from solving, at any rate the smaller ones. If we could do this, I think it would at any rate take us some little distance along the path towards peace.
4.10 p.m.
VISCOUNT HAILSHAM: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, expressed the view that his opinion was an unpopular one. I do not think that in a free Parliament those who express a view held sincerely ought ever to be unpopular. But had he said that his view represented a tiny minority of opinion in this House and the country, I should heartily have agreed with him; and I must say that I rejoice in the fact, because I think that the attitude which the speaker presented is wrong-headed, incoherent, illogical and, above all, dated. It is dated not by the best period of English political thought but by the period between the wars, when we were busy building up for ourselves one of the greatest catastrophes in human history; and nowhere was it more dated than when he used the conventional catch-phrase "old-fashioned power politics." The noble Lord used "old-fashioned" like the word "rosy-fingered" in the dawn of Homer—conventionally. What are politics except about power and about right and wrong?
LORD CHORLEY: There is a tremendous difference between right and wrong and power.
VISCOUNT HAILSHAM: That is precisely what politics are about—the marriage of power with right. That is why we are here. Nobody realises the relationship between power and politics more than the Russians, and we who believe that there is a right and a wrong, as well as power, should not forget either category in the equation of our thinking.
There was a period, not long ago, when the views of the noble Lord were fashionable, when it was thought that we
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could afford to ignore the category of power in the preparation of policy. Where I would condemn the noble Lord's speech even more heartily is that in my view he is not only forgetting the category of power in politics, but is compromising with the category of right and wrong. It is not only a question of meeting people halfway—what the noble Lord said was very nearly halfway. There is such a thing as trying to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire. There is such a thing as trying to meet people halfway to hell.
If, having made up your mind that ultimate human values are involved in policy, you find yourself faced with an opponent, it is no good trying to find a formula which will meet him halfway. That is the way in which you will lose your own soul and lose your life as well. It is because politics are a marriage between power and right or wrong that they are interesting and important. It is also for that very reason that they are dangerous. In my opinion, we cannot afford to entertain opinions like that of the noble Lord, Lord Chorley.
But I think that he and all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate have been troubled, as I am troubled—and I frankly say, deeply troubled—by the bitter contrast which exists between the festival which we are all about to celebrate when the House rises for the Recess, the festival of warmth and friendliness, the festival of children and the hearth, the festival of faith and redemption, and the black, forbidding and, so far as one can see, deteriorating aspect of international affairs. This is a contrast which we can all deplore and which I think has been the underlying theme of this debate. It is about that contrast, and about the part which the Russians have played in it, that I want to say something in the minutes which remain to me.
I have said that the present situation, in appearance at least, is deteriorating. I believe it is deteriorating in reality. There are, however, aspects of the matter which give one some grounds for relief. I have always been afraid of making a situation worse by saying harsh words about the less reputable aspects of Russian policy I have never said in blunt terms, as I say now, that the threat to the world lies not in the hydrogen bomb but in the conventional armaments which the Russians

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possess and by which they are holding down half of the world and threatening the other half. The hydrogen bomb will never be used unless conventional armaments are brought into effect, and it would never have been brought pinto being if Russia had abandoned the policy of world revolution to which she is committed, as we know from the quotation from the late Josef Djugashvili read by the noble Lord.
The sense of relief I have mentioned is simply this. I had originally thought, in my folly, that it might be considered inflammatory to say that the Russians were sitting on the necks of the Ukrainians, of the Catholic Poles, of the Moravian Christians in Czechoslovakia and of the other subject peoples who, I say with boldness and without hesitation, are held down by one of the most brutal and villainous tyrannies the world has ever seen. Held down—why doubt it? Have these countries ever held a general election? Is there a country among them which would venture to admit free opinion from the West to challenge the orthodox view? Is there a country amongst them which does not have execution without proper trial, in the ordinary sense? The noble Lord, Lord Chorley, purports to be a law teacher. Is it not incontestable proof that a country is held down when it has censorship, secret executions, secret political police and the absence of fair trials?
No, let the noble Lord have the boldness of his convictions and legal knowledge, and he will not hesitate to say that these countries are held down. I had originally thought that such language might possibly be considered inflammatory. Now I know to the contrary. We know now, on the best authority, on the most unimpeachable Marxist authority, that it is no longer even a breach of be traditional laws of hospitality to say that one country has been "sitting on the neck" of another. It is merely an amenity of international debate to condemn the policy of the Russians as brutal imperialism, rendered all the worse because of the use it makes of traitors and tyrants and quislings in the countries which it abuses and exploits. These statements are now the common coin of international controversy. Let us follow their example and their lead. Hitherto, we have been afraid of stating our sympathy with the subject peoples of
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Eastern Europe. In future, we need have no such fear.
We now know that when the Russians put arms in the hands of the Egyptians, whose sole purpose is to destroy the state of Israel, they are indulging in nothing more than a "common commercial transaction." Her Majesty's Government can well infer that when the Russians, as rumoured, intend to arm the frontier tribesmen against a fellow-member of the Commonwealth, Pakistan, that will be described in like language. But let the Russians not forget that if they are engaged, as they are engaged upon an attempt to exploit the contradictions and the difficulties of the West, that is a game that two can play. And when they are sitting, as they are sitting, upon the necks of subject people, who hate them, as one knows they hate them, more than any tyranny has been hated for centuries, with a hatred worse even than the hatred inspired by Hitler's Germany, then we need have no fear but that they are more vulnerable to this type of attack than to any kind of attack which can he presented against the West.
They have now freed us from any obligation not to speak about the satellites in terms in which the satellites themselves will be the first to recognise as the truth. And I hone that Her Majesty's Government will not mince language when they speak to the Russians, because peace is not to be won by saying nice things about nasty conduct. It may have been something of that kind that was in the mind of the spokesman of the Foreign Office when he spoke of Marshal Bulganin's speech as "hypocrisy." That no doubt was a terrible impropriety and a gross breach of protocol. But there are times when breach of protocol and impropriety are to be applauded, rather than condemned. I must say that I should feel much easier about the Foreign Office if its subordinate members had more outbursts of patriotism—and in those circumstances one would have had less to say about Burgess and Maclean. I must say, frankly, that I was sorry that Her Majesty's Government were not the first to describe as "hypocrisy" this kind of talk in India from the Soviet leaders. I am glad that they have, at any rate in part, made up for that omission.
I think we must face up to what the Russian Government are really after.

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They have, in fact, pursued a perfectly intelligible line of conduct, as clearly laid down in the theory of their movement as that of Hitler was laid down in the book Mein Kampf. Personally, I find Problems of Leninism, by the late Josef Stalin, a highly illuminating work. It tells us nothing which is not useful to us if we read it with intelligent anticipation, and it forms an admirable guide to Russian policy, even after Stalin's death. The theory of the Russian Revolution is expressed in didactic, if not actually pedantic, language: that the success of the October and November Revolution of 1917 was rendered possible by the use of the Communist Party as the spearhead of the proletariat, but only after its alliance with the peasants, who were to be controlled and exploited, as they have been. In point of fact, it is the application of that lesson, by analogy, upon which the Russian Government have been engaged since 1945.
The spearhead of the proletariat is now the Russian Army in the West of Europe. It is intended for use, but not at present. The objective is to undermine the imperialisms of the West by forming an alliance with what the Russians would call the subject peoples of Asia and Africa. That is what Messrs. Krushchev and Bulganin were about in India; that is what they were told to do by their departed leader, and everything they have done in the East has been an example of it. For myself, I prefer them when they are being rude about us to when they are being polite, because I take the general view that they mean the opposite of what they say. When they were talking about peace, they were waging war in Indo-China. Now that they are talking in bellicose terms, I am led to believe that they are thinking of peace. For that reason, I somewhat rejoice at their roughness of approach, and perhaps they will understand it when I reciprocate, because one of the most difficult things in the world is not to get on with your friends, or to persuade your enemies, when you know that that is likely to be impossible. One of the most difficult things in the world in politics is to try to treat your declared enemy like a civilised being. That may involve a condemnation of his action without a positive attempt to destroy his person. Maybe the Russians are beginning to
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think along those lines, and if so, I hope that this will be a happy omen.
I had a great deal of sympathy for my noble friend who sits beside me in his approach to the question of the projected visit of these two Russian statesmen to this country, but on the whole I do not agree with him. I heartily agree with the view that we are doing ourselves no good by trying simply to be nice to people who have insulted us. That, in itself, has no advantage, diplomatically or materially. If it were simply a question of telling them that we, too, are people who must be wooed, and that if insulted we do not respond favourably, it might be advantageous to tell them that they are not wanted. Personally, I doubt whether they will come, because I think they will be afraid to come to the atmosphere of freedom which exists in these islands; but if they do come, I should make them welcome. I believe that it would be a very educative experience for them to come here. If they come, they will see presented to their gaze for the first time the spectacle of a people that has been free for centuries.
LORD CHORLEY: Has the noble Viscount forgotten that they were in Switzerland which, equally, has been free for centuries?
VISCOUNT HAILSHAM: Perhaps the noble Lord is right—but evidently the experience requires to be repeated in order to achieve the necessary educational result. At any rate, these statesmen will see here the spectacle of a people that has been free for centuries; a people, on the whole, I hope, fearless in its criticism. I hope the visitors will get this fearless criticism when they come—but accompanied, let it be added, by the offer of devoted and loyal friendship and comradeship, from every man and woman in this country, which the Russian people can have for the asking if they desire to seek it. That has been true, certainly within my knowledge, ever since our alliance in the war. They will find here a people brave and successful in war, yet wholly devoted to the arts of peace a people sure, from a deep spiritual conviction, as well as from bitter recent experience, that peace is always better than conflict, and friendship always better than hatred.
I do not think the Russians will lose by the experience of meeting such a

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people. They seem to fear—or until recently they seemed to fear—that contact with England has a kind of infectious result; that (to quote the language of an old Common Law judge) there is in the air of England some kind of infection of freedom. I hope that there is, and I hope that the virus may enter even those stony hearts when the Russians do come, because, in truth and in fact, we have something which we can teach them if they are willing to learn. Liberty is not a luxury to be enjoyed but to be cast aside in times of difficulty. There is nothing more certain in political experience than that freedom works. It works, and has worked, in English history; and it works on the other side of the Atlantic where our great Allies are situated.
We hear much of the social experiment in the Soviet Union. But has there ever been in the long history of mankind a social experiment comparable with those here and in the United States of America? Russia, an established country, was taken over by violence and has never yet reached a state of society in which it was possible to hold an election. In America, when our ancesters came there with the idea of liberty under law, they had no established country but a howling wilderness. There were added to our own peoples speaking the English language, and carrying with them English traditions, the outcasts of every race in Europe—the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed and the exiled—and within a period of three or four generations they built up a living society which, in little more than twice as long, has produced the highest concentration of wealth and power that the world has ever seen. Is this not a social experiment from which our friends on the other side of the Iron Curtain would agree to learn something?
Our own country is not very large, but in the history of mankind it is not always the large countries which have taught the lesson. When we learn the elements of philosophy or religion at school we do not seek the records of Egypt or Syria or Babylon: we look to Athens, with a population little more than twice that of modern Oxford; we look to Rome, smaller than Manchester or Leeds, or we look to Jerusalem, little bigger than an English country town. I doubt not that when the history of mankind comes to be read the history of this small island,
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anchored off the north-west coast of Europe, with its great people, its united people, where privilege exists only as an opportunity to serve, and where society has been, within my own lifetime, by common experience and common suffering, reunited to a state never before reached, will offer as much in its own way as any of the three cities which I have mentioned. We need not be afraid to show the Russians our country. It is they, I fear, and sincerely fear, who will be afraid to see the spectacle of so much happiness accompanied by so much freedom in the world.
Therefore, although I began this speech with a sad reflection upon the bitter contrast between the warmth of our Christian Christmas at home and the cold bitterness of the international scene without, I must end it on a note of hope, because even as against the Americans we, in a real sense, are the true forum of free society. It would be no criticism of the American Congress to say that it has never developed into such a forum of free speech as we have in both Houses of Parliament in Westminster. What we say here re-echoes round the world. We can afford to hold our banner aloft in confidence that it will win. We believe —and this is the point of difference between us and the Russians—that the natural sentiments of the human herd, the search for objective truth, the desire for justice, the yielding to sentiments of equity and compassion, are not strange phenomena brought about and determined by some purely material chain of causation, but are part of the wide universe itself. It is because we hold this belief that the Russians will be welcome here. It is in that spirit that I offer to Comrades Bulganin and Krushchev a very happy Christmas. I hope they will have the sense to allow themselves to enjoy it and give it to other people.
4.33 p.m.
LORD PAKENHAM: My Lords, we have just listened to one of the few real orators in this House, or in the country, and I am sure we all hope that he will make many speeches of similar eloquence and elevation in this House. I am sorry that he felt it necessary to assault my noble friend Lord Chorley so vigorously at the beginning. I do not myself agree with all the observations—indeed, with quite a large part of them—which fell

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from my noble friend, but I felt the noble Viscount was somewhat severe. I myself am indebted to the noble Viscount. But for him, I suppose I should not be here at all. He elevated me by a defeat inflicted on me in Oxford, and by a defeat inflicted on another member of my family he saved me from dancing attendance at the stage door of another place. I am bound to say that when the noble Viscount referred to the period between the wars, when, to use his own expression, we were building up for ourselves one of the greatest catastrophes in history, he seemed to have overlooked the fact that he made his own contribution when he was first elected at the time of Munich. He won his seat on the strength of the Munich issue, at a moment when that policy was vehemently condemned, as we all recall, by the present Prime Minister, the former Prime Minister, the noble Marquess the Leader of the House and others. So if we are going to ask where my noble friend Lord Chorley learned his politics, I can only say that I hope the noble Viscount will climb into the same white sheet.
VTSCOUNT HAILSHAM: I do not want to interrupt the noble Lord, but I should like him to know that I do not regret a single syllable of what I did or said then.
LORD PAKENHAM: If that is so, that is the only complaint I have with the noble Viscount: that he never regrets anything. That is the only complaint, and a small one. I am bound to say that I was sorry when I read my morning newspaper that I did not find the name of the noble Viscount included in the list of new appointments. I should welcome someone with his strength and vigour in this list of somewhat tired men. I know it is my duty to wish all success to Her Majesty's Government, and certainly I do—it is a patriotic task. The News Chronicle is, I suppose, a fairly objective paper. At any rate, it represents the view of the noble Lord, Lord Rea, who told us—and he went rather far, I thought—that the duty of the Opposition is not to oppose but to support the Government. So I suppose the News Chronicle is thoroughly harmonious and well disposed towards the Government. But they informed us that the Prime Minister
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"will also be relieved of an increasing physical strain which has been causing some concern to those close to him."
They say also that Sir Walter Monckton
"leaves the Ministry of Labour because of the strain."
I am afraid we all know and deeply regret the reason why Mr. Butler is understood to be a very tired man. So, in this Government of convalescents, I feel that the noble Viscount would have struck a fine, bustling note; and I deeply regret his absence.
However, I will turn to the issues before the House. We have listened to a number of valuable suggestions, but I will not refer to them: it is the task of the noble Marquess to reply in a moment. The noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Inch-rye, raised our spirits by suggesting that Mr. Herbert Morrison should be made "C.-in-C. Cold War." That seemed very acceptable. I was a little surprised, because I always felt a personal affinity with the noble Lord, but not on the political "tie up," to use a colloquialism.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: I did say it was not a question of politics at all. I was talking about the need for somebody of the highest administrative ability, and during the war we all knew of his abilities.
LORD PAKENHAM: Of course, in this House, if one wants to propose something at all unusual, it is always as well to say that it is a non-political move. I entirely agree that it was the most tactful way of saying it. The noble Lord went on to say that 1951 was the last year in which we showed any real initiative in the cold war, and that since then the initiative had passed to the Russians. He did not draw the conclusion, but unless my memory is wrong, that was the last year in which a Labour Government was in power. So I feel that the noble Lord has been exceptionally helpful in this debate.
I turn to the main issue, and I do not want to keep the House for very long. It is an issue on which we have all concentrated in one way or another, the issue of our relations with the Russians. In particular, may I discuss the proposed visit of the Russian leaders on which, more than anything else, we have focused this afternoon? I ask the House to consider just for a moment whether, as a people, we have at the present time an agreed policy towards Communist Russia. I think we generally say in this

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House that there is a broad agreement; I do not dispute that. We know what kind of method we have in mind, a method of firmness and strong armaments on the one side, and, on the other side, a readiness to negotiate.
I am a little less certain whether we are quite sure of the objectives of our policy. They can be formulated in different ways, but I would place them under headings of this sort: first, peaceful coexistence; secondly, military containment; and, thirdly, peaceful conversion. It seems to me that the last is important and that we should clearly accept it as part of our duty daring this terrible time. I do not feel—and I do not think perhaps many noble Lords feel—that if we merely scrape through somehow during our lifetime without any war with the Russians we shall figure very gloriously in history I agree with the language, much more eloquent than mire, in which the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, expressed the same feelings. We should have left vast areas of the world under an evil tyranny, and if our generation were to pass away leaving a ghastly situation of this kind, I submit that we should deserve the most severe censure of future ages if we made no attempt to bring it to an end without war.
But once we accept an active responsibility for trying ceaselessly to bring home to Communist Russia the wickedness or foolishness of her ways, it seems to me—I think this has been generally accepted, certainly by the noble Viscount—that we accept a responsibility, in practice, for making contact with the Russians at first hand, whether on a high level or a low level, for getting to know them well, and for exerting the personal influence which no threat, and certainly no long-range propaganda, for that matter, can ever exercise to the same extent. It seems to me that we must believe in ourselves; and, having a belief, we can exercise an influence for good. It will come only from intimacy, mutual awareness of one another as human beings and, where possible, personal friendship.
I recognise—and the noble Viscount who has just spoken so eloquently about this point has put it much better than I could—that here we are faced with a dilemma. In a sense, it is the dilemma that always arises when one tries to shake hands with evil men and do one's bit to try to reclaim people whom one con-
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siders evil, so far as it is in one's power to judge other human beings. To me, and to nearly all of us—perhaps to all of us—Communism is an atheistic, materialistic philosophy, and it is practising unrelenting torture over wide areas of the earth. On every level, therefore, the attempt to win Communists through friendship is bound to involve all of us who are Christians, or who adhere to anything in Christian, ethical values, in a soul-racking dilemma. When we are dealing with delinquents, if we try to help people in prison, they are people who are under control; if we try to help people who have been in prison, they are people who are trying to rehabilitate themselves; but here we are dealing with wrongdoers who are glorying in their misdeeds and are anxious to continue their life of misbehaviour. It is a difficult situation. It is easy to say that we should condemn the sin and yet forgive the sinner. I think that is the right slogan; and yet how impossible it seems to be to apply that Christian value in practice when we are faced with a concrete issue like the visit of the Russian leaders.
Once again, I seem to be coming into a rather unusual collaboration with the noble Viscount, but I think I find myself in sympathy with a good deal that was in his mind. I do not regard the revolting speeches made in India as ranking particularly high among the crimes of the Communist leaders. I do not stop to discuss these speeches, because they are utterly execrable, but there are many worse things that the Communists have done. It may well be that they would not have been invited if they had revealed their thoughts before the invitations were issued. I can recognise the diplomatic arguments to be used against maintaining those invitations now, but, without wishing to pursue the argument backwards and forwards at any length, I say that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, and I hope the Government will persevere with their plans for the visit so long as they have any hope at all that good rather than evil will flow from it. My own strong conviction is that to cancel the visit would be to set back for years the whole dream, which has recently become a little more of a reality, of peacefully breaking down the Iron Curtain and getting to know the Russians on some kind of terms of intimacy and,

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it may be, friendship and understanding, and winning them ultimately in that way—and it can be done only in that way—to elementary Christian ideas.
I do not attach such high hopes to the conversion of the great twin brothers who are shortly to visit us. I expect they are pretty "tough nuts," and will be the last two men in the whole of Russia to be converted: but let us see what can be done. I set great hopes on the kind of contacts that are being made in the way of the visits to Moscow of the Hamlet actors and of the "Wolves," and the links which are being established by B.E.A. Therefore, I feel that such things as the acceptance of these Russian leaders, and the seeing by the Russians of something of Mr. Peter Brook, the producer of Hamlet, and of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, the Chairman of B.E.A., form the only process which in the long run will work. Unless it works, the Iron Curtain will remain, and if the Iron Curtain remains long enough a great war will come to blot out what we know by "civilisation" I firmly believe that that visit should be persevered with.
If they come, as I suggest they should come, I believe that the real danger will be not to them but to ourselves. I agree that the heart of the people is sound and that we need not think of any widespread Communist movement here. I see the danger rather differently. It seems to me that the danger is in our misleading, and it might even be corrupting, ourselves.
Before I close, I should like to mention a line of thought which has not been placed before this House this afternoon. I have recently been reading a number of profoundly interesting books about the years that led up to 1939. One was Lord Templewood's book The Diaries of Mr. Tom Jones; another was the biography of Mr. Geoffrey Dawson, and there were others of that kind. Like others who have been reading those books, I suppose, I have been reflecting on the policy of appeasement which this country followed during those years and which still seems to me, as it seemed to me then, to have been wrong, not only in its tactics and calculations but also in its ultimate criteria. And yet it was embraced and supported by men of the highest moral character, whose careers have been shining examples in many ways.
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If I must provide a clue in a sentence, I should find it in a letter which Mr. Chamberlain wrote after his first meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. It is quoted in Mr. Keith Feiling's The Life of Neville Chamberlain. Mr. Chamberlain wrote, after his first meeting with Hitler, that he had a certain confidence in him and, in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness he thought he saw in his face, he got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word. How can Mr. Chamberlain have thought any such thing? To say that Mr. Chamberlain was so municipally-minded that he could not judge a man unless he was a candidate for the post of waterworks superintendent under the Birmingham Corporation is to do an absurd injustice to a very remarkable and patriotic Englishman. The truth is, or seems to be, that, when you embark on negotiations, particularly under fierce criticism, there seems to be a general law that you persuade yourself up to the last minute, and sometimes beyond, that these controversial figures are all that your policy appears to require them to be. You acquire a kind of vested interest in their honesty.
I yield to no one in this House—and that is saying a great deal—in my almost fanatical admiration for Sir Winston Churchill. I should have thought that nobody has made a stronger stand against Communism than he. But after the Yalta Conference Sir Winston used words in another place which he quotes in his Memoirs. On February 7, 1945, Sir Winston Churchill said:
"The impression I brought back from the Crimea and from all my other contacts is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to have honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond."
That is what Sir Winston said in 1945. In his Memoirs he added that he felt bound to proclaim his confidence in Soviet good faith, and in the hopes of procuring it. May I give one more quotation, a few lines from Mr. Truman's recently published Memoirs? He took a critical view of the Communists early on. He describes his impression of his first meeting with Stalin at Potsdam in these words:
"I was impressed by him and talked to him straight from the shoulder. He looked me in the eye when he spoke and I felt hopeful that we could reach an agreement that would be satisfactory to the world and to ourselves."

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Mr. Chamberlain opened his eyes after Prague, by which time a great mischief had been accomplished. The eyes of Sir Winston and Mr. Truman were opened more readily.
I urge that our Russian visitors should now come to us as invited. But let us on no account deceive ourselves as to the nature of the forces they represent. On no account let us suppress or muffle any voices raised in protest in this country against the suffering which they are inflicting on humanity. Let us do what we can, consistent with our position as hosts, to bring home to the Russian leaders our real view of Communism and what it stands for. And, above all, let us never forget that the people we want to rescue, and in whom we are really interested, are not this handful of leaders but the millions who are now their deluded supporters or their intimidated victims. Let us never forget that, from our point of view, the real purpose and the only justification of a visit of this kind, can be the hope that it will help us to promote so many and such intimate contacts between ourselves and the people of Russia that the Russians themselves will decide to have done with darkness and will join us in groping for the light.
4.54 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, I do not propose to intervene in the retrospective Oxford City by-election which took place at one time between the two noble Lords who have just spoken; but in looking at the whole field which has been covered by this debate I am at once confronted— and I am bound to say somewhat depressed—by one fact in particular. In all the speeches that have been made to-day. I think there has been only one passing, incidental, reference to the existence of the United Nations and what it has been endeavouring to accomplish. When we are having a Foreign Affairs debate over the entire field of international relations it is perhaps rather a depressing thought that the United Nations should figure to so small an extent.
I call attention to that fact only because I want just to remind your Lordships of one particular aspect. In various ways I think that the United Nations has had an eventful, though perhaps not always an entirely fruitful, Session, which is just coming to an end. I thought that, from
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some quarter, there would come during the course of this debate a recognition of the view that we have always taken, which is not peculiar to this side of the House: that the greater degree of universality that can be produced in the United Nations the better hope there will be for its ultimate success. I thought, therefore, that the recent proceedings at the United Nations, which resulted in the admission of at least a further sixteen nations, would have achieved the tribute of some comment from some quarter in the course of the discussion.
LORD PAKENHAM: May I interrupt the noble Marquess to tender my apologies for not making some comment? It seems to me beyond all doubt that the inclusion of Ireland alone would justify the greatest possible satisfaction.
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Lord, whose local patriotism is no less great than his general patriotism in these matters. But what I particularly wanted to point out to your Lordships was that much of the credit for this definitely improved state of affairs ought to be given to the Canadian Government for the lead which they have given in that direction. Having watched from a distance the proceedings in New York, I think it is true to say that those Commonwealth countries which were already members of the United Nations played a notable combined part in bringing about the present improved state of affairs, and I think it will be a source of satisfaction to them, as it certainly is to Her Majesty's Government, that one of the successful results of this recent development has been the ultimate admission of so fully qualified a candidate as Ceylon.
My Lords, I do not think it necessary to go into the somewhat abstruse, and perhaps not always exhilarating, manœuvres which preceded and, indeed, seem to have succeeded some of the discussions on this matter. But in passing —and in passing only, because I do not wish to discuss it at length—I would express regret that, although it proved possible to admit these sixteen nations, the exclusion of Japan still persisted, much to the regret of Her Majesty's Government, who were of the opinion that Japan would be entirely justified in obtaining election. Only to-day, I think,

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we have taken such steps as seem possible to us at the United Nations to endeavour at least to lay the foundation, at the next meeting of the United Nations, of circumstances which will permit of the admission of Japan.
LORD CHORLEY: Before the noble Marquess leaves that point, would he not perhaps be generous enough to allow that the Russians did prove accommodating in the matter?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: Well, my Lords, if the noble Lord is desiring to extol the part which the Russians played in that election, I think perhaps the best approach to it is to say as little as possible.
LORD CHORLEY: That is as generous as the noble Marquess can be, is it?
LORD HENDERSON: May I intervene? Does not the real trouble in this matter lie not with Russia, whose tactics, I agree, were not very good, but in the occupation of the China seat in the United Nations by the Nationalist Government? Is it not time that the Chinese seat was taken from the Nationalist refugees?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, there is a good deal of manœuvring and counter-manœuvring, as the noble Lord knows, but what is gratifying about it, at least in the end, is that the United Nations has been increased by sixteen new countries.
Before coming to the main point that has been the basis of most of the speeches, I should like just to say one word—it will be a very brief one—to the noble Lord, Lord Winster, who again raised the question of Cyprus in this connection. As regards the incident which he had read in the Press and to which he called the attention of the House, all I can say is that, the report having been printed, it is of course a matter for the War Office. I have made inquiries into the matter, and I am informed that although the War Office have no definite information yet they have called for a report. At this stage I cannot take the matter beyond that.
With regard to Lord Winster's question as to what was said by my right honourable friend concerning self-determination coming at sonic time, that
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matter was published in the Press, in Hansard and elsewhere. The noble Lord will not really expect me to inform the House on the instructions given by Her Majesty's Government to our Ambassadors in Ankara or in Athens or to the Governor in Cyprus.
LORD WINSTER: My Lords, may I ask the noble Marquess whether a volte face of that description is not worth bringing to the attention of the Governments concerned and of the Governor in Cyprus?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, I said I would not give the House any account of what instructions we had issued, and I also said that, plainly, anybody could read in the Press what had happened.
On the wider subject that has been discussed in most of the speeches this afternoon, our general relations with Russia, it is true—and it has come out in speeches to-day—that Russia still prides herself on being, and at the moment is set upon remaining, so far as she can, the great enigma in international affairs. The mystery with which she contrives to surround herself is, no doubt, a considerable asset in the propagation of the doctrines she wants to put over, and I believe it is true to say that for this purpose, from a geographical point of view, she is not unfavourably situated, for she can operate on interior lines and seek to drive at least a psychological salient, or series of salients, into the free world at those points in its defence which at any time may seem to her weakest. This is a very obvious reflection, but one which is often brought home to those who, in any degree, have to try to cope with the situation. Russia has the advantage that, by her mere system of government, changes of policy, however drastic and revolutionary they may be, can be made behind closed doors, from one moment to another, by a handful of people who are unaccountable to anybody and whose decision is certainly not liable to be questioned by those who have regard for their personal safety. They also have at their disposal, and do not hesitate to use, means which are effective to suppress public criticism or even discussion, except such discussion as they themselves may believe it advantageous to put out by broadcast or by the Press.

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As the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, said in opening this debate, we can all see that there ha; been a change in Russian policy since the first Geneva Conference, and I agree that it seemed to develop, or at any rate to intensify itself, after the temporary break in the second Geneva Conference, when Mt. Molotov went back to Moscow and later returned apparently in a considerably more rigid mood. So far as we are concerned, the reason for that must largely remain a matter for speculation. There are many possible theories I incline to that which commends itself to the noble Lord, Lord Henderson: that the Russians began to find that the "Geneva spirit" was maturing a little too fast, and that some of the satellites were showing signs of slight inebriation as a result of their draughts of the "Geneva spirit." Consequently it was necessary to bring them up short and to make clear to them that total abstention from any such heady doctrines was required of them.
They were pulled up short, and the chief evidence that that was certainly the main contributing factor is to be found in another matter discussed by noble Lords in their speeches to-day—that is, the almost complete refusal of the Russians to make any significant forward move on the third item of the Geneva agenda for the Foreign Ministers—relaxation of visits of many kinds. There has been some relaxation, but the terms, already quoted by the noble Lord, Lard Henderson, in which Mr. Molotov dealt with the general suggestions and proposals of the West in this regard, certainly towards the end of the conference, took on a quite unexpected degree of rigidity and unresponsiveness. All of us who follow these things thought that the second Geneva Meeting, which had to pass from the area of generalities to the area of particularities, was likely to be a very much more difficult operation than the Summit Meeting, because it was difficult for us to obliterate from our minds the thought that, though there had been certain changes of mood and approach after the death of Stalin, the position was still that never in any single instance that we could define had the Russians made any concession which caused them any disadvantage. They had held the position, from their point of view absolutely rigid in its essentials and had merely made demon-
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strations of concession which caused them no harm.
Though I do not want to deal in any detail with the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, I am bound to say that nothing in it surprised me more than his statement that the Russians had made substantial concessions in regard to the Austrian Treaty. When one turns one's mind back to the early stage of the Austrian Treaty and remembers the endless discussions at the Palais Rose in order to achieve even an agenda on which the Treaty could be discussed; and when or e recalls that at a later stage the Western Powers went so far as to say, "We will give away everything that you ask in this Treaty now, after all our discussion, we will make all the concessions you are asking—here is the Treaty as you have asked for it; now sign," and that the Russians immediately found another reason for evading responsibility to put their signature to a Treaty, I find myself entirely unable to understand the noble Lord's somewhat dubious thesis that the Russians made substantial concessions on the subject of Austria.
LORD CHORLEY: My Lords, the noble Marquess must agree that, in fact, they did give way and sign at Geneva this summer.
THE MARQUESS OF READING: That seems to me a typical Russian concession.
LORD CHORLEY: Does the noble Marquess deny that in fact Russian armies have left Austria? Is that not a very considerable gain?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: My Lords, probably the Russians wished that it should be so. The history of the Austrian Treaty which the noble Lord Lord Chorley proceeded to give was, I feel, indicative of the somewhat personal approach which he makes to the problem with which he was dealing.
To revert to Geneva and the post-Geneva situation, the whole position was certainly not advanced on this third item —which, as I say, was the one on which we had thought that, however unrelenting the Russians might prove on the question of Germany and the question of disarmament, there might well be substantial progress. Yet when they came down at the second Geneva Meeting to deal with these matters it was found that there was

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no advance to be made. I think what my right honourable friend Mr. Macmillan said not long ago was probably right: that they were afraid of normal interchanges, and of the impressions that contact with the free world might make upon their people's minds and upon the minds of peoples of the satellites. Ideas, from their point of view, are marked "for export only." No ideas from outside are encouraged, or indeed permitted, to penetrate across the frontiers.
A good deal of comment has been made in the course of the debate to-day on the pros and cons of the visit next spring of Mr. Bulganin and Mr. Krushchev. The ethics and the politics of the visit have been argued by various noble Lords. May I point out one aspect of that visit which seems to have escaped certain writers in the Press and also certain noble Lords who have spoken to-day? Reference was made to "putting out flags," and a parallel was drawn with the recent visit of the President of Portugal. Do not let us make any mistake. There was never any suggestion that this should be a State visit: it is not in any sense a State visit. It is the case that an invitation was extended on behalf of Her Majesty's Government by the Prime Minister to these two Russian leaders to pay a visit in their official capacity to this country. That is a very different thing from a State visit.
I do not think it is necessary to go, from the Government's point of view, into any detail about the position, because that remains the same as it has been since the visit was first mooted and the invitation accepted. As my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said recently in another place [OFFICIAL REPORT (Commons), Vol. 546, (No. 66), col. 2519]:
"On behalf of Her Majesty's Government, I extended an invitation to these visitors. I think that this country, with its broad democratic intelligence, would be able to handle any situation that might be created by any visitor of any country."
That represents my right honourable friend's view as Prime Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Inchrye, asked whether this matter had been considered recently. Of course, in connection with the answer to this and other questions which have been put in another place, the whole matter was, naturally, assessed, and various factors were taken
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into account. Mr. Bulganin and Mr. Krushchev have been conducting these peregrinations in certain Eastern countries, and in the course of their wanderings they have no doubt done their best not only to set East against West but also to set East against East: by references to Kashmir, for the purpose of inflaming opinion in Pakistan, and by references to Pushtunistan during their sojourn in Kabul.
I am not going over the somewhat unedifying record of their public oratory in the course of their wanderings, because I think that in the long run—or even in the short run—the effect of these orations may prove to be not quite what they had intended when these pronouncements were made to the world. I think it probably has not dawned upon them that the strength of the Commonwealth is something a great deal more powerful than they had ever conceived. It would not, perhaps, enter into their minds that nations can come together voluntarily for peaceful purposes, and not under compulsion, and that they can value an association one with another just because that association is free. If they have learned anything from their observation of that aspect, the reaction which their speeches drew in those parts of the world may have justified the making of some of the speeches. And it will not be forgotten that the Prime Minister of India was at pains, during the period of their visit, to emphasise the importance he attached to the Commonwealth connection.
The Russian leaders have gone about those parts of the world preaching against colonialism, but apart altogether from the fact (which has already been commented upon) that talks on colonialism do not come very happily from Soviet leaders, do they really consider it a tribute to the intelligence of the Burmese or the Indians, or any of the other peoples of that part of the world, to be told that they are now suffering from a delusion that they are free and independent people, when in fact they are still in colonial shackles? I have seen a certain amount of those countries in the last years, and I have been increasingly struck by the friendship and the confidence which those countries at the present moment place in this country.
I do not believe it is true to say, as was said by one speaker to-day, that the

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prestige of this country is steadily deteriorating in Asia. I do not think that that represents in any way the actual state of affairs. The Burmese, for example, know better than to accept the sort of stuff which has been served up to them by these travellers in their midst. They know that they are independent; perhaps, after a first interval of doubt, they k low they can depend upon the friendship of the United Kingdom; and—if I may once more refer to this matter—anyone who has had the experience of attending, as I did only a few weeks ago, a meeting of the Committee of the Colombo Plan, knows that it bears no resemblance to truth to say that country is brushed aside as being no longer of any importance in the opinion of the Asian countries or that any other sentiment animates those countries towards this country than these of friendship and confidence.
It is true that a considerable Russian economic offensive may be impending at the present time. At the same time, I recall that as long ago as February, 1952, when I attended a meeting in Rangoon of the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, the Russian delegates were very loud and very long in their protestations of what they were going to do by way of contributing capital goods for the benefit of the Asian countries. Three years have passed and the same protestations have been made, although in the interval the original protestations do not seem to have achieved any considerable fulfilment. It may be that this time matters will be different, but as the result of their earlier experience I funk that a certain scepticism has crept into the minds of the Asian countries about whether the Russian promises are ever likely to mature.
We have certainly learned one thing which the Russians do not yet seem to have learned about the people of Asia —that is, that they are neither children nor fools, but men in a world of men. When the Russians find out that, then they may find a better technique of dealing with them. The peoples of Asia are not less expert than the peoples of the
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West in sizing up who are their friends and who are not their friends, and where, in the long run, their best interests lie. For the moment, Russia is concentrating upon the Middle East and Asia. I do not seek for a moment to deny, or to minimise, the importance of the directions in which her policy seems to be moving, but it would be wrong to think that Her Majesty's Government are not alive to what is happening and are not making very definite and vigorous efforts in ways open to us to meet that danger and to defeat it.
In the discussion to-day there has been a certain note of gloom about the general international situation. I am not going to contend that at this juncture it wears a particularly promising appearance. Nevertheless, in these past four years I have seen a good many oscillations of the pendulum: at one moment things have looked encouraging; yet at another the pendulum has swung over to considerable discouragement. The important thing is that we should not relax cur attempts to face up to the problem with which we have to deal and to forestall, whenever we can, or, if we cannot fore-stall it, at least to grapple with the problem, with all the vigour at our command. The problem, whatever form it may take for the moment and in whatever direction it may at the moment turn, is essentially the same—that is, the preservation at all costs of the freedom of the free world.
LORD HENDERSON: My Lords, I rise to ask leave to withdraw my Motion. I would only say that we have had an interesting and useful debate, and I have this personal satisfaction: that one of my Motions has kept your Lordships' House sitting after the other place has risen.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

DUNDEE CORPORATION BILL
Committed.
House adjourned at twenty-five minutes past five o'clock, until Tuesday, 24th January, 1956.