Lords Sitting of 14 July 1960

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Sheffield
The Lord Burgh—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

WESTERN AVENUE ROAD WORKS
3.5 p.m.
EARL HOWE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how long it is anticipated that the road operations in the Perivale area of the Western Avenue will continue, and if anything can be clone to hasten them in view of the very great bottleneck which they constitute on one of the main arteries of traffic leading out of the London area.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY TRANSPORT (LORD CHESHAM): My Lords, I assume that the noble Earl refers in his Question to the construction of two subways under Western Avenue at Horsenden Lane and Medway Parade. The duration of the work, which affects the dual carriageways of Western Avenue, has been reduced to the minimum. I expect that the full width of the carriageways will be open to traffic again in about three months time. I regret that no further speeding up of work is practicable.
EARL HOWE: My Lords, I hope that the contractors or the Ministry will keep up to the date, because it produces an awful bottleneck in a very important arterial road. It is important to get on with it.
LORD CHESHAM: Yes, My Lords, I do, of course, know that. It was for that reason that within the full contract
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time of nine months it was specified that the work that actually affects the carriageways should be done in five months.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords which is worse: a very great bottleneck or a very narrow one?

REPLACEMENT OF REFLECTING ROAD STUDS
LORD FARINGDON: My Lords, I beg leave 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 they will take steps to secure that whenever in the course of road repairs or reconstruction "cats' eyes" have been removed they will be replaced as early as possible.]
LORD CHESHAM: My Lords, as regards trunk roads, for which the Minister of Transport or the Secretary of State for Scotland is the highway authority, the replacement of reflecting road studs as promptly as possible after their removal in the course of road works is normal practice, although circumstances may occasionally make some lapse of time inevitable. As regards other roads, my right honourable friends have no reason to think that the position is sufficiently different to justify their making representations on this subject to the responsible highway authorities.
LORD FARINGDON: My Lords, may I, in thanking the noble Lord, thank him for informing me what is the correct description of these objects, and also ask him whether he is aware that in many cases a number of months pass before theses road studs are reinstated? Is he also aware that this constitutes an additional hazard since, if one is expecting road studs and they disappear, in foggy weather one is liable to find oneself in a most dangerous situation?
LORD CHESHAM: Yes, My Lords, I agree with what the noble Lord said. I also would have called them "cats' eyes". I am sorry to hear that the noble Lord has experience of months of delay, because I think that perfectly adequate steps have been take to make quite sure what value is attached to the use of these studs; and while the use is not prescribed, it is heavily recommended. I

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do not know whether the noble Lord would like to let me know of any positive instances so that, if there are many, I may see whether it is worth doing anything about. But I did not up to now think that it was.

USE OF CENTRAL AFRICAN FEDERATION FORCES
3.9 p.m.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH: My Lords, I beg leave 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 they have any statement to make on the report in the Daily Telegraph of July 12, 1960, that:
"Sir Roy Welensky said that the Federal Government would use its forces in any role which best served the interests of the Federation … Britain was in no way concerned with the use that the Federal Government intended to make of its troops."]
THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL AND SECRETARY OF STATE FOR COMMONWEALTH RELATIONS (THE EARL OF HOME): My Lords, under the Federal Constitution, defence, which includes the control of the Federal armed forces, is a Federal responsibility. The Federal Government are also responsible for such external relations as may from time to time be entrusted to the Federation by Her Majesty's Government. Her Majesty's Government have entrusted to the Federation a large measure of responsibility for external affairs, subject to the responsibility which they must continue to have in International Law so long as the Federation is not a separate international entity. Since the entry of Federal troops into foreign territory would involve the ultimate international responsibility of Her Majesty's Government, this is obviously a matter which would involve consultation and agreement between the Federal Government and Her Majesty's Government. As the Prime Minister stated on July 11, we are in consultation with the Federal Government and are maintaining close touch
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with them about affairs in the Congo, which are naturally of deep concern to both Governments.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH: My Lords, I am much obliged for the Answer. I am not quite sure of the actual wording in the relative paragraph in the Constitution about the Federation being entirely responsible for defence. Certainly it is a difficult situation, so long as Her Majesty's Government have the responsibility for the safety and welfare, as it seems to us, of those parts of the Federation which are still under our protection—they are Protectorates. I should like to hear what the noble Earl's view is upon that point. There was some dubiety in people's minds in 1957, when there was an explanation made, I think, at the time when there were discussions going on over here, as to the position of the Federation in foreign affairs. I think that the latter part of the noble Earl's Answer this afternoon seems to be satisfactory on that. But, surely, it is fundamental that we should have not only such consultation but, in the event of disagreement, full freedom to carry out our responsibility to those who are still protected.
THE EARL OF HOME: My Lords, yes; I think that the noble Viscount has fully understood the last part of my Answer, and that it is perfectly clear. What we have to do in these matters is to proceed by close consultation and by agreement; that is the essence of this matter. And so far as the internal situation of the Federation is concerned, of course the Federal Government is responsible for defence and the territorial Governments are responsible for internal security. So, there again, this is a matter in which we must proceed always in close consultation between the territorial Government and the Federal authorities; and that we do try to achieve.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH: My Lords, I am much obliged. I hope that the noble Earl's words will be be duly noted by Sir Roy Welensky.

KATANGA AND NORTHERN RHODESIA
3.12 p.m.
VISCOUNT STANSGATE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what changes would be made possible in the economy of Northern Rhodesia should the Katanga Province be freed from the control of the Central Government of the Congo.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR COLONIAL AFFAIRS (THE EARL OF PERTH): My Lords, I am sure that the noble Viscount will understand that cannot attempt to answer this hypothetical Question.
VISCOUNT STANSGATE: My Lords, it is a little more than hypothetical. The Katanga Province has declared itself independent. We understand and recognise that. What I am asking is: is the independence declared by Mr. Tshombe sufficient to make possible some commercial arrangements which have been talked about and which would have the result of impoverishing the Congo Government? That is the point.
THE EARL OF PERTH: I am afraid that I still believe that this is a hypothetical contingency, and cannot be drawn on this.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear!
VISCOUNT STANSGATE: Does the noble Earl really say that the assertions made by Mr. Tshombe in the Katanga Province are hypothetical?
THE EARL OF PERTH: I have seen reports of that declaration in the newspapers, but whether they stand in International Law one way or the other, I have no judgment at the present time.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH: My Lords, could the noble Earl say which of the statements of Mr. Tshombe he has seen? There have been three different ones.
THE EARL OF PERTH: No, I do not think I can.
VISCOUNT STANSGATE: I do not want to press the noble Earl, but if it happens that Mr. Tshombe succeeds in
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his attempt at separation from the Congo, will that enable these interests to join together and impoverish the exchequer of the Congo Government?
THE EARL OF PERTH: All I can say, I think, is that this does show that it is a hypothetical situation which has not yet been reached.

THE CONGO
3.14 p.m.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH: My Lords, with the permission of the House I should like to ask Her Majesty's Government the Question of which I have given Private Notice. The Question is: Whether they will make a statement on the United Nations Resolution with regard to the Congo Republic?
THE EARL OF HOME: If it is convenient to the House, I should like to do so just after half past three.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
THE EARL OF HOME: I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order No. 35 be suspended until the House adjourns for the Recess for the purpose of giving Government Business (except with the consent of the Government) precedence over other Notices and Orders of the Day, and that Standing Order No. 41 (no two stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) be suspended for the aforesaid period. (The Earl of Home.)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and ordered accordingly.

MONOPOLIES AND RESTRICTIVE PRACTICES (IMPORTED HARD- WOOD AND SOFTWOOD TIMBER) ORDER, 1960
3.15 p.m.
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (THE EARL OF DUNDEE): My Lords, this Order proposes to make illegal any arrangements under which importers of hardwood or softwood timber undertake to deal only with agents who are on approved lists, or vice versa. The Monopolies Commission, who looked into this question some time ago,

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reported in 1953 that, while there were no price rings on a national scale, arrangements of the type to which I have referred were not in the public interest, and they recommended that any such existing arrangements should be abrogated and that no new arrangements with a similar effect should be made.
In the following year, 1954, the Timber Trade Federation assured the Minister of Materials, who was then responsible for these matters, that these recommendations would be implemented, which in fact they were. But in subsequent years several complaints were again received from individual timber merchants, and the matter was referred again to the Monopolies Commission by the Board of Trade, who had by that time taken over the duties of the Ministry of Materials; and the Monopolies Commission gave their next report in July, 1958, just two years ago. They reported that the arrangements which had been objected to had, in fact, been abrogated, but that since then fresh arrangements had been made in the hardwood and softwood sections of the trade, but not in the plywood section, which, though different from the original ones, nevertheless had similar effects; and they recommended that they, too, should be abrogated. The timber trade assured the Board of Trade that those new arrangements had been made under a genuine misunderstanding as to the purport of the Monopolies Commission's original recommendations, and my right honourable friend the President of the Board of Trade has fully accepted that assurance.
A great deal of time and care has been spent in discussing this subject with the timber trade, because it was thought desirable that whatever action might be taken should have the agreement and the co-operation of the trade. It was finally decided, with the agreement of the trade, that the best course would be the issue of an Order under Section 10 of the Monopolies Act. 1948, and this Order, in paragraph 2 (1) makes it unlawful for any person to make or carry out any agreement or arrangement relating to the supply of imported hardwood timber or imported softwood timber having effects similar to the original arrangements. It also makes illegal retrospectively any
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agreements already entered into, but there is a proviso exempting any parts of such agreements which would be lawful if they had been made separately.
My Lords, this Order, which has the support of the trade—and we rely on them for their co-operation—was approved in the House of Commons last week. I hope that any of your Lordships who are interested in the matter have to-day managed to get the right copy of the right Order from the Printed Paper Office. I beg to move that the Order be approved.
Moved, That the Draft Monopolies and Restrictive Practices (Imported Hardwood and Softwood Timber) Order, 1960, be approved.—(The Earl of Dundee.)
LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH: My Lords, I can assure the noble Earl that I have procured the right copy of the right Paper, and that, as far as noble Lords on this side of the House are concerned, we shall not do one thing to prevent this Order from coming into operation, as we on this side of the House have argued for years that these restrictive practices, these price-fixing arrangements, should be done away with. But what I want to ask the noble Earl is this. It was in 1953—a long time ago now; eight years—that this matter was first brought to the attention of the Monopolies Commission. They said:
"What appears to us objectionable is not so much the Lists themselves as the agreements and undertakings by traders on the Lists to deal only with each other upon which the system rests. Our conclusion is that these agreements and undertakings operate against the public interest. We recommend that they should be abrogated and should not be replaced by any other arrangements or undertakings having similar effects."
The Government immediately entered into discussions with the appropriate Federation. It is clearly stated in the Report of the Monopolies Commission in 1958 that:
" … the Government intended to implement the recommendation that the agreements and undertakings between listed traders should be abrogated. … The Minister expressed the hope that the T.T.F. would put forward its own proposals for doing this as quickly as possible."
The noble Earl has said that this matter dragged on for years because there was a genuine misunderstanding by the

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Federation about what was meant. I am not going to quarrel too much with him; he has his own opinion. But, on reading carefully all the evidence, I am afraid that I come to another conclusion.
The Report goes on to quote the Federation as saying:
"In view of the consequences which we consider would follow if the Commission's recommendation is implemented, we must reserve our right to reopen the matter at any time."
"The Memorandum referred to set out in detail the T.T.F.'s arguments to the effect that the Commission's conclusions were wrong and contrary to the weight of evidence."
There was no misunderstanding at all. And this went on year after year.
In 1955, the President of the Board of Trade had his attention drawn to the fact that these agreements and restrictive practices were still being carried on. He did not take what I consider to be sufficient notice of the seriousness of the matter. When asked in another place whether he was aware that these agreements were being carried on in another way, he said:
"The Monopolies Commission did not recommend that the approved list should be abrogated. They recommended that exclusive dealing agreements and undertakings between traders on these lines should be ended. The Timber Trade Federation agreed to this and I am assured that no such arrangements are now in force."
Yet in 1957, owing to the disquiet, the Board of Trade had to refer the matter to the Monopolies Commission again, and the Commission have reported as the noble Earl has said: the Monopolies Commission have said quite definitely in this document that these restrictive practices were going on all the time. I would ask the noble Earl why the Board of Trade dragged their feet all these years.
Our concern on this side of the House—and I am sure that it must be also the Government's concern—is that this kind of thing is going on to-day to circumvent the activities of the Restrictive Trade Practices Court. These federations employ the most skilled lawyers. If your Lordships want to read how they circumvent the regulations by private dinner parties and by not having written agreements, I commend this Report of the Monopolies Commission. Nothing is put in writing and the whole thing is carried on in precisely the same way.
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This has gone on since 1953, and it is not until 1960, as the noble Earl admits, two years after this Report was produced, that the Board of Trade bring in an appropriate Order and make it strictly illegal to do any of these things. Why do two years have to elapse between the Report of the Commission and action on behalf of the Board of Trade?
As your Lordships are aware, on many occasions I have complained about the law's delay in connection with these restrictive practices. The noble and learned Viscount who sits on the Woolsack and who was responsible for setting up the courts under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, will remember the disquiet we voiced on this side of the House. Here is a classic example of circumlocution, from 1953 to 1960, before definite action is taken by the Government to bring to an end restrictive practices affecting 95 per cent. of our imported hardwood and softwood. All these years elapse before the Government bestir themselves to do anything. I hope that the noble Earl will take note of w hat we have to say about this. There can be no excuse for it, except perhaps dilatoriness—that is the kindest and politest expression I can use.
3.27 p.m.
LORD EBBISHAM: My Lords, this is the first time I have ventured to address your Lordships, and I should not now have inflicted myself upon the House had it not been for the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas of Chilworth, which I thought laid a certain portion of blame on the Timber Trades Federation. Of course I stand to be corrected if that is not so. I must say at once that I myself have no connection whatever with the timber trade, but I do know that members of that trade have been much concerned at the way in which the question of agreements and undertakings between lists of importers and agents have been treated in certain quarters ever since the Monopolies Commission published their Report in 1953.
The noble Lord, Lord Lucas of Chilworth, mentioned in his speech the question of price rings. Headlines such as "Timber Price Ring to be Busted" have no sort of relevance to this question today, as this is a matter not of prices but of agreements and undertakings between

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importers and agents in the trade to deal only with each other. When the timber trade abrogated those lists, although the Federation has never imposed—
LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH: My Lords, I will not interrupt a maiden speech—
LORD EBBISHAMM: Please do.
LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH: The noble Lord said that it is only a question of dealing with each other, of a "closed shop". I think the noble Lord should have added: "On certain terms and conditions."
LORD EBBISHAM: My Lords, so far as I know, that is all these agreements come to. There were lists of importers and lists of agents, and the idea was that each should deal only with the other members on the lists. So far as I have heard, there is no question of prices or anything else coming into the matter. Although the Federation have never imposed any sanctions after these agreements were abrogated, or even circulated the name of any member who may have traded with someone not on the lists, the Commission found (it is in paragraph 132 of their Report) that an arrangement need not be in writing or contain sanctions. The real sanction for any arrangements of this kind, whether formally provided or not, is in the known existence of a substantial body of common opinion in the trade. I quote from the Report:
"The Federation is at a loss to understand how anyone could prevent the existence of a substantial body of common opinion in the trade."
This feeling was evidently shared by the Board of Trade, who pressed the Federation to accept alternatives to the making of an Order, such as the giving of a voluntary undertaking which the Federation would be expected to police, or the reinstatement of agreements, to be followed by their reference to the Restrictive Trade Practices Court.
The Federation, finally; in April, 1959, indicated that they would prefer matters to run their course and to let the Board of Trade make an Order. All subsequent delay was stated to be due to the legal complications in the drafting of that Order. Now that it has been published, it is obvious that the action it renders
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unlawful is far from clearly defined and there is ample scope for the repetition of genuine misunderstandings, to which the President referred, as to the exact meaning of arrangements or undertakings having similar effects to the original agreements. Nor does, or can, the Order deal with the existence of a substantial body of common opinion in the trade. The reasons for the pressure on the Federation to accept some alternative course, and for the long delay in the appearance of the Order, are perfectly clear. It is difficult to see how this Order will effect very much change in the day-to-day affairs of individual firms. But the timber trade is quite content with it, as it will bring to an end a long period of uncertainty during which the trade feels that it has quite unjustifiably come under something of a cloud.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships will wish me to convey your congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Ebbisham, on his maiden speech. It is valuable not only on account of the exceptional knowledge which he is able to bring to your Lordships' service on this question, but also, I think, because he was drawn to his feet by the course of the debate and did not come here with a set speech ready to deliver. I hope that we may often have the pleasure of hearing the noble Lord again. I think what he has said has been most helpful in your Lordships' consideration of this subject and in explaining the answer to a number of questions which were put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas of Chilworth.
I should prefer not to indulge in expressions of opinion but to stick as closely as possible to the facts. I would remind your Lordships that, according to the First Report of the Monopolies Commission, there were not any price rings in existence; and I do not think it has been suggested by anybody that there is not so much competition in the timber trade that this is likely to have any great effect on prices. It was simply because of the possible unfairness to certain individual merchants in carrying on their business that the Monopolies Commission made the recommendations they did. I think that what the noble Lord, Lord Ebbisham has said shows how important it is for the Board of Trade to

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take the greatest trouble to ascertain all the complexities of these questions, to carry the trade with them whenever they can and to win its co-operation. I am glad that the trade has agreed to this Order which we are now moving, and I feel sure that we may count on the co-operation of the trade in seeing that it is effective.
The noble Lord, Lord Lucas of Chilworth, said a good deal about delay. So far as we are concerned, the last Report of the Monopolies Commission was published only in July, 1958, and I do not think it is an excessive interval of time since then in which to have carried on consultations with the trade in order to make quite sure that we were doing them justice and not interfering with legitimate arrangements for orderly marketing and so on.
LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH: It is two years.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: It is not quite two years, because it was agreed in the Spring that this Order should be introduced, and it was laid on the Table on June 21. But whether your Lordships think our anxiety to carry the trade with us has led to a somewhat unduly prolonged delay or not, I am glad that agreement has now been reached, and I hope that your Lordships will approve the Order.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

PUBLIC BODIES (ADMISSION TO MEETINGS) BILL
3.37 p.m.
Order of the Day for the Third Reading read.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: My Lords, in rising to move the Third Reading of this Bill I should like to thank very much those noble Lords opposite who were good enough to cooperate during the Committee stage, and, in particular, the noble Earl, Lord Waldegrave, for his kindness in resolving a somewhat knotty legal point which has now been included in the Bill on an agreed Amendment and which I hope and believe has improved the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, made some comments about the Bill having been piloted through both Houses by Back Benchers, which indeed is true.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: Note quite in those words.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: I hope that it is none the worse for that. The noble Lord has been the chief spokesman on this Bill from the other side. He has had years of experience in another place, and naturally one knows of his great expertise. The only thing about myself in connection with this Bill is that, although the noble Lord has had great experience in the other place, on this occasion I am the older creation in this House. Neverthless, I should like to thank him for his help in connection with the Bill. I read somewhere the other day:
"Here shall the Press the People's rights maintain,
Unawed by influence and unbridled by gain."
I very much hope that these words may be said of this Bill, and that its influence may be wholly useful among our public Statutes. I beg to move that the Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Baroness Elliot of Harwood.)
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Baroness for her kindly references. I hope that in connection with the very apt quotation which she made there was not any implication that I had been guilty of influence. For our part, we should like to thank the noble Lady and the Government for the consideration they gave to the Amendments we put forward. I think we can all say that your Lordships' House has done a good job in connection with this particular measure, as indeed did the Members of another place, and that it is a much better Bill than it was before. I do not recall having described the noble Lady and the corresponding Lady in another place as "Back Benchers"—I thought I called them something else: but perhaps I was near the border-line of indelicacy, and I will not pursue that matter, beyond saying that I think it was a fair and just description. The noble Lady has been reasonable; the Government have been reasonable, and I think that this will be a useful measure in clearing up the state of the law on a matter which is undoubtedly of considerable importance. Therefore I would

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advise the House, with the noble Lady, that we should now give the Bill a Third Reading.
On Question, Bill read 3a with the Amendments, and passed and returned to the Commons.

MATRIMONIAL PROCEEDINGS (MAGISTRATES' COURTS) BILL [H.L.]
Order of the Day read for the consideration of Commons Amendments.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (VISCOUNT KILMUIR): My Lords, in rising to move that the Commons Amendments be now considered, I should like your Lordships to know that in my view they deal with points that are little more than drafting. Of course, I shall be pleased to answer any question upon any point, but if your Lordships do not indicate that you have any questions I hope that it will meet with the approval of the House, in view of the quite considerable remaining Business on the Order Paper, if I move the Amendments en bloc. In the meantime, I beg to move that the Commons Amendments be now considered.
Moved, That the Commons Amendments be now considered.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question. Motion agreed to.

COMMONS AMENDMENTS
[The references are to Bill [75] as first printed for the House of Commons]
Clause 1, page 2, line 10, after ("1956") insert ("or under section one of the Indecency with Children Act, 1960")
Clause 3, page 6, line 18, after ("children") insert ("and, for the purposes only of contributions by the child himself at a time when he has attained the age of sixteen and is engaged in remunerative full-time work, Part III of that Act (which relates to contributions towards the maintenance of children in the care of a local authority)")
Clause 3, page 6, line 44, leave out ("a child care officer") and insert ("an officer of the authority employed in connection with functions specified as aforesaid")
Clause 4, page 8, line 1, leave out ("child care officer") and insert ("by such an officer of a local authority as is mentioned in subsection (7) of section three of this Act")
Clause 4, page 8, line 20, leave out from ("given") to first ("that") in line 21 and insert ("under paragraph (a) of ")
Clause 8, page 12, line 1, at beginning insert ("Subject to section four of this Act")
Clause 10, page 15, line 45, leave out from ("the") to ("order") in line 1 on page 16 and insert ("powers of the court under subsection (1) of section fifty-five of the Magistrates' Courts Act, 1952, shall be deemed to include power, whatever adjudication the court makes on the complaint, to")
Clause 16, page 18, leave out lines 37 to 40.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, taking silence for consent, I shall, with your Lordships' approval, move the Amendments en bloc. I beg to move that this House doth agree with the Commons in the said Amendments.
Moved, that this House doth agree with the Commons in the said Amendments.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE CONGO
3.42 p.m.
THE EARL OF HOME: My Lords, the Prime Minister in another place is making a statement about the resolution of the United Nations Security Council regarding the situation in the Congo.
The Security Council to-day adopted the following resolution:
"The Security Council; considering the report of the Secretary General on a request for United Nations action in relation to the Republic of the Congo,
Considering the request for military assistance addressed to the Secretary General by the President and the Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo,
Calls upon the Government of Belgium to withdraw their troops from the territory of the Republic of the Congo,
Decides to authorise the Secretary General to take the necessary steps, in consultation with the Government of the Republic of the Congo, to provide the Government with such military assistance as may be necessary, until, through the efforts of the Congolese Government with the technical assistance of the United Nations, the National Security Forces may be able in the opinion of the Government to meet fully their tasks,
Requests the Secretary General to report to the Security Council as appropriate."
Before the vote the Council rejected three Soviet amendments. The first called for a condemnation of Belgium for armed aggression against the Republic of Congo; the second called for the immediate withdrawal of Belgian troops from the Congo; and the third amendment specified that the military assistance should be supplied by African States. Our

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representative in the Security Council voted against all the Soviet amendments and abstained on the final resolution. In his explanation of his abstention Mr. Beeley who is the Acting Head of the United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations said that Her Majesty's Government were entirely in favour of the resolution except the part which called for the withdrawal of Belgian troops. Her Majesty's Government did not feel that it would be right in the present state of knowledge of the situation of the Congo to call for Belgian troops to withdraw without any qualification.
Nevertheless, so far as the action by the Secretary General authorised by the resolution is concerned. Her Majesty's Government are informing the Secretary General that they will give him full support.
3.45 p.m.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH: My Lords, I am much obliged to the noble Earl for the statement that he has made, and I should think that, taken as a whole, it can be called a very satisfactory statement of the situation. There is some little anxiety, I dare say, in some places, regarding the resolution which has been carried by the United Nations, as to what might arise in any interim period when the Belgian troops are withdrawn, and before there were really effective United Nations Forces in the area. All foreign countries are likely to have some nationals of theirs in the area. On consideration, I think that the action of abstaining on this particular resolution was justified from the point of view that, if we were placed in a similar situation, we should want to give first place to the safety of our nationals. Therefore I think that, taking it by and large, this is a satisfactory statement which has been given to Parliament to-day. I hope very much, of course, that we shall do everything we can to assist those very experienced authorities under Mr. Hammarskjold in raising a satisfactory force to do this particularly difficult job.
THE EARL OF SWINTON: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend the Leader of the House this question?—I do not know whether he is in a position to answer it. While I think we should all accept the resolution which was passed, and certainly be in the most emphatic agreement with what the noble Viscount
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the Leader of the Opposition has said about the vital interest of everybody, not least the Congo itself, in having some forces there to maintain, or restore and then maintain, law and order, and that there must be effective forces of one kind or another for that single purpose, can my noble friend the Leader of the House throw any light upon this point? When the United Nations force reaches the Congo, to whom will it be responsible—to the Prime Minister and President of the Congo, or to the United Nations? Will it act on its own discretion, or will it be like a force when troops are called in in aid of the civil power, when the military authority has discretion how to exercise those functions? What will be the position of this force?
THE EARL OF HOME: We are, of course, in touch with the Secretary General on these matters, and he is very skilful in arranging them and has great experience. I would take it that, as in other previous cases, the force would be responsible to the Secretary General and to the United Nations. I say that, of course, without having consulted the Secretary General. But I should think that would be the process, as it has been in other cases.
VISCOUNT ASTOR: My Lords, is it not a matter for serious consideration that we should be in rather less of a hurry to admit new members to the United Nations? In the old days, there used to be some considerable precedent, diplomatic law and international practice, as to the de jure recognition of new Governments. They would have to be a de facto authority in a well-defined area, with proper civil administration, with their troops under control, providing protection for foreigners, accepting international obligations, and so forth. That used to be the criteria before people were admitted, certainly to the League of Nations, and had de jure recognition. Is it not possibly worth considering that we should be sure that these criteria are objective facts before admitting new members to the privileges and responsibilities of members of this organisation?
THE EARL OF HOME: My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the noble Viscount's question, but this is a matter which is in the hands of the

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members of the United Nations themselves. In our territories, as we lead them to independence, we try to secure that there is political stability upon which to build a real nation which can hold its own in world affairs. I hope we shall always have the support of this House to do that.

PUBLIC HEALTH LABORATORY SERVICE BILL [H.L.]
3.49 p.m.
Order of the Day read for the consideration of the Commons Amendment.
EARL BATHURST: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Hailsham, I beg to move that the Commons Amendment be now considered.
Moved, That the Commons Amendment be now considered.—(Earl Bathurst.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

COMMONS AMENDMENT
[The reference iv to Bill [77] as first printed for the House of Commons]
In the Schedule, page 4, line 5, leave out from ("seal") to end of line.
EARL BATHURST: My Lords, this is a drafting Amendment, the intention of which is to bring the Bill into line with the provisions of the Charities Bill which completed all its stages in your Lordships' House on April 28. I think there is nothing more that I need say about this Amendment, and I commend it to your Lordships. I beg to move that this House doth agree with the Commons in the said Amendment.
Moved, That this House doth agree with the Commons in the said Amendment.—(Earl Bathurst.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

BETTING AND GAMING BILL
3.50 p.m.
Order of the day for the Third Reading read.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, before I move the Third Reading of the Bill may I ask your Lordships' approval to the procedure that I suggest? What I propose is that I move the Third Reading formally and we take it formally; that I then move the Amendments, which meet points raised on the Report
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stage; and that if the House accepts the Amendments, we then go to the Motion that the Bill do now pass, on which we can have any discussion desired of the contents of the Bill.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, I am sure that procedure will be entirely satisfactory to the whole House.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I beg to move that the Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill read 3a, with the Amendments.
Clause 7 [Betting with young persons]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved to add to the clause:
"(3) In paragraph (b) of subsection (1) of section seven, and in paragraph (d) of subsection (1) of section sixteen, of the Betting and Lotteries Act, 1934 (which empower the licensing authority to refuse to grant or, as the case may be, to revoke a licence in respect of any track on the ground of a conviction of the applicant for or holder of the licence, or, where the applicant or holder is a corporate body, any director or the manager thereof, for an offence under Part I of that Act) the reference to an offence under that Part of that Act shall be construed as including a reference to any offence under this section."
The noble and learned Viscount said: My Lords, this is a technical Amendment, consequential upon the addition of Clause 7 to the Bill in another place and to facilitate consolidation. Since the Report stage, your Lordships may care to know, the draftsman has been making a final examination of the Bill from the point of view of consolidating it with the other Statutes relating to betting, and during that examination he discovered the need for this Amendment. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 7, line 5, at end insert the said subsection.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 28 [Interpretation]:
THE LORD CHANCELLORhad given Notice of several Amendments dealing with review of bookmakers' licences, the first being in subsection (2), after the words "First Schedule," to insert:
"(including the said paragraph 25 as applied by sub-paragraph (2) of paragraph 25D of that Schedule)".

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The noble and learned Viscount said: My Lords, your Lordships will remember that on the Committee stage and again on the Report stage there was considerable discussion of two questions: one, the review of bookmakers' licences in cases where there were allegations of default, and secondly on occasions where there was a change in the structure of a bookmaking company. I promised the House that I would consider this matter again between the Report stage and the Third Reading, and the remaining Amendments on the Marshalled List are all concerned with those two issues. With your Lordships' approval I think it would be convenient to consider them together.
The substance of the Amendments is to be found in Amendment No. 10, at page 36, line 31, to insert into the First Schedule four new paragraphs, 25A, 25B, 25C and 25D. The First Schedule deals with the procedure for the grant and renewal of bookmakers' permits, among other things, and this is the appropriate part of the Bill to make provision for cancellation of a bookmaker's permit in the middle of the licensing year. The House may find it convenient first to look: at the new paragraphs 25B and 25C—the Schedule will, of course, he renumbered when the Bill is reprinted. These provide procedure whereby a bookmaker's permit can be reviewed at any time during the licensing year by the licensing authority on representations made by any person, and can be cancelled by the licensing authority on the grounds that the holder is no longer a fit and proper person to be the holder of a permit. The review is triggered off (if I may use that expression) by an application under sub-paragraph (1) of paragraph 25B made at any time to the clerk of the licensing authority requesting that the permit be cancelled; and the application will have to be in the prescribed form and manner, and must be accompanied by two copies of the statement of the grounds on which it is made, if the licensing authority decide to review the permit, one of the copies of the statement of grounds will be sent to the permit holder. An application for the cancellation of a permit can be made by any person, and so, in particular, Tattersall's Committee, the Bookmakers' Protection Association or the chief officer of police will be able to take advantage of the procedure. In the
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case of an application made at the instigation of Tattersall's Committee, the statement of the grounds on which the application is made would normally be a statement that the holder of the permit had been declared by Tattersall's Committee to be a defaulter, with a brief statement of the reasons for this decision.
One of the difficulties which I had always in mind in connection with this scheme is that the licensing authority might be overburdened by a considerable number of complaints by members of the public, many of which might be unreasonable, or even frivolous, and some of which ought more properly to have been raised at earlier renewal proceedings or dealt with under Clause 8. For this reason, sub-paragraph (1) of paragraph 25B provides that an application should first be scrutinised by a single member of the licensing authority; that is to say, in England and Wales by a single justice and in Scotland by a single member of the licensing court. There is a precedent for such an arrangement: there is the scrutiny by a single justice in Section 18 of the Maintenance Orders Act, 1958, which relates to applications requesting that a warrant of commitment for the enforcement of a maintenance order be not issued, or, if it has been issued and executed, that to be cancelled. Of course, there is tie procedure with which your Lordships are more familiar, that one justice can still decide whether there is a prima facie case against a defendant before sending him to trial on indictment.
May I explain to your Lordships the difficulties that were in my mind on this point, and how I think this solution will meet them. The single member will have to decide whether the matters referred to in the statement of grounds are sufficiently weighty to justify a review of the permit then and there, or whether they should be left for further consideration until the permit comes up for renewal in the ordinary way. The consideration of an application by the single member will not take place in court and will not involve any call upon the holder of the permit to state his side of the matter. All the single member will have to do is to decide whether the application reveals, on its face, a sufficiently weighty complaint to justify a review in the

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middle of the year. Obviously this would normally be the case where the bookmaker had been declared a defaulter by Tattersall's Committee. This scrutiny will thus provide a filter and secure that only substantial complaints will come before a meeting of the full licensing authority and have to be answered by the bookmaker.
If the single member of the licensing authority decides that there is a sufficiently substantial prima facie case to justify a review of the permit, then he will refer the application to the licensing authority. The permit-holder will be informed that the licensing authority will consider the application for cancellation, and he will receive a copy of the statement of the grounds for the application. The applicant will be similarly notified, so that he may appear or be represented at the hearing to support his case. Sub-paragraph (1) does not say in terms that the application is to be considered at one of the quarterly meetings of the licensing authority which, under the First Schedule, are to be held for the consideration of new applications for permits and licences, but the authority, obviously, will normally find it convenient to appoint one of those meetings as the time for the consideration of the application for cancellation. But there is nothing to prevent them from doing it at some other time if the matter is of sufficient urgency.
Sub-paragraph (2) provides for the permit-holder to be heard in person or by counsel or a solicitor, and adapts paragraph 14 and 15 of the First Schedule, which deal with various precedural matters. Sub-paragraph (3) provides that the procedure shall not, in effect, duplicate criminal, or earlier renewal, proceedings. Sub-paragraph (4) gives the grounds on which a permit may be cancelled and is comparable with paragraph 17 of the Schedule. Just as, under paragraph 17, the licensing authority may refuse an application for the grant or renewal of a permit on the ground that satisfactory evidence was produced that the applicant is not a fit and proper person, so, under sub-paragraph (4) of the new paragraph 25C, they may decide to cancel a permit on the ground that satisfactory evidence is produced that the holder is no longer a fit and proper
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person. Paragraph 25D provides a right of appeal.
I must apologise for taking up so long on this point, but your Lordships will appreciate that I wanted you to see what I have done, and I thought it might be convenient, when the Bill goes back to another place, if I had explained the provisions at slightly greater length than otherwise I would have done. During the discussion on the Report stage on the proposed new clause dealing with a change of control of a limited company bookmaker, I said that the practical issue was a change of directorship. Paragraph 25A of the Amendment deals with this. It requires the limited company to notify such a change to the licensing authority and to the chief officer of police. If the chief officer then finds that the new director is not a fit and proper person, he will be able to make an application for cancellation of the permit under paragraph 25B, so triggering off the review procedure of paragraphs 25B and 25C.
This is not quite what the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, and my noble friend the Duke of Devonshire asked for, since they envisaged that the licensing authority might, on its own initiative, call for a review in the event of change. But the licensing authority are not an inquisitorial body and they have no information about the fitness of a new director of a limited company unless it is brought before them. The British people, including your Lordships, do not like one body being both prosecutor and judge in the same matter. This question as to fitness would normally be raised by the police who, under paragraph 25A, will be notified of the change; but there will be nothing to prevent any other person—for example, the Bookmakers' Protection Association—who happens to get to hear of the change from making an application for cancellation under paragraph 25B. If it was expedient that the police should make inquiries, the results of such inquiries could be heard as—I quote:
"representation made by, or by any person authorised in that behalf by"—
the chief officer of police, under subparagraph (2) of paragraph 25C.
The other Amendments are consequential. If we may consider them together, I will willingly explain anything on

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which any noble Lord is interested. Again with apologies for that lengthy speech, I beg to move Amendment No. 2.
Amendment moved—
Page 25, line 28, at end insert the said words.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
4.4 p.m.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, the noble and learned Viscount need not have apologised for the length of his observations, because the Amendments, taken as a whole, are long and complex and were in need of a full explanation. I can assure him that they are entirely acceptable to myself, and I hope to all those who took part in the discussion which brought these Amendments into being. This indicates the advantage of perseverance. The noble and learned Viscount will remember that when an Amendment—not on these lines, but with the same object—was first moved by the noble Duke, we were told that it was quite impracticable, that it would overburden the licensing justices, and was not acceptable. Nevertheless, the noble Duke persevered and brought to his help noble Lords from this side of the House; and the combined pressure resulted in the noble and learned Viscount giving an undertaking that he would look at the matter again.
As we all know in this House, once the noble and learned Viscount gives an undertaking we are half way there, because we know that he will certainly look into the thing fully and with every desire to meet the case that has been made. I am glad to say that he has met completely the case that was made. Indeed, I would say that he has gone even further than we dared to hope. Whereas we were under the impression that the Government might go so far as to arrange that there might be a half-yearly session of the justices, it would appear now that if the justices receive a complaint and it is regarded as being worthy of consideration, it can be dealt with at any time in the course of the year. The noble and learned Viscount has already met the case of the change of directorship to the full, and we are very grateful.
May I say this in conclusion on the Amendments? They indicate the value of a full discussion in this House. A day or two ago I had occasion to make some observations about the statement
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of a noble Lord who was in charge of a Private Bill that if we passed an Amendment that had been put on the Marshalled List, even though the majority of those who spoke on the Amendment were in favour of it, it would mean the loss of the Bill. I am sure that the House resents any suggestion of that kind. We have a duty to perform, and we are entitled to perform it without being threatened as to what might be the consequences. It might easily have been suggested that to carry out a wholesale amendment of this Bill at this late stage might result in the loss of this Bill. I am glad the Government did not take that view, but brought into being what amounts to a very drastic amendment of the structure of this Bill, and we are most grateful.
Finally, I should like to say a word of congratulation to the Parliamentary draftsman. I think that this is a most remarkable feat. Those of us who try to draft Amendments know the difficulties that confront us, and some of us are certainly in a position to watch with admiration the way in which the difficulties have been overcome in the Amendments now before us. I commend these Amendments, and should like to express my thanks to all concerned for the way in which the legitimate criticisms that were submitted from all sides of the House have been met.
THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE: My Lords, may I add my word of thanks to that of the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, and say how very grateful I am to the noble and learned Viscount for the way in which he has gone out of his way to meet our suggestions? I cannot but feel a small particle of pride that these admirable Amendments have grown from my own humble attempts on the Committee Stage. But I should like to say how deeply grateful I am to the noble and learned Viscount for all his kindness, and how much I, and all my colleagues at Tattersall's, welcome these Amendments.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I hope that the noble and learned Viscount will not get tired of the almost stock speech that I make on these occasions. I should like to add my thanks to those which have already been expressed. It has been a great pleasure to have a co-operative effort on this quite difficult and complex

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matter. I will not go so far as my noble friend and say that the noble and learned Viscount has done more than we dared to hope, because hope always "springs eternal", but it is the case that these Amendments, which have been drafted with quite extraordinary skill, have covered every point made in the debate and, in addition, have included one or two points of which even we did not think. It is, therefore, a matter for considerable thanks and gratitude on our part, and I believe we may modestly say that together we have made some useful improvements to the Bill.
4.11 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I have only three things to say. One is to thank your Lordships for the kind remarks that have been made about myself, and the second is to say how glad I am that the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, mentioned the Parliamentary draftsmen. I do not believe we think sufficiently about them. When one considers the genesis of a Bill, and the translating of the original ideas into a Bill, one realises that their job is difficult enough; but to deal with matters which arise during the course of a Bill, and to produce Amendments to meet the very different views expressed in Parliament, is really a remarkable performance. I am glad that the occasion has been taken to mention them.
The third point—and I hope my noble friend will allow me to say this—is that the other three of us who have taken part in this debate in time past all sat in another place; and I had the privilege of sitting there with the father of the noble Duke, the Duke of Devonshire. It has given me a special pleasure to see the way in which he took his part in this Bill, and I am sure I speak for the whole House when I say that we hope he will extend the range of his activities and often do so again.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
First Schedule [Bookmakers' permits, betting agency permits and betting office licences]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, with your Lordships' permission I will move the remaining Amendments together, as they all deal with the same point. I beg to move.
Amendments moved—
Page 27, line 22, leave out from ("to") to second ("betting") in line 23 and insert ("a bookmaker's permit or betting agency permit or in relation to an application for the grant or renewal of a")
Page 28, line 2, leave out from ("to") to ("a") in line 3.
Page 28, line 4, after ("applicant") insert ("for or holder of the permit")
Page 32, line 17, at end insert ("or renewal")
Page 32, line 21, at end insert ("or
(f) has been the holder of a bookmaker's permit which has been cancelled within the immediately preceding twelve months under paragraph 25C of this Schedule").
Page 33, line 15, leave out from ("any") to ("which") and insert ("cancellation of a permit under the said subsection (1) or under paragraph 25C of this Schedule")
Page 36, line 17, leave out ("and") and insert ("(2)")
Page 36, line 31, at end insert—
("Notification of change in directors during currency of bookmaker's permit
25A. If, where the holder of a bookmaker's permit is a body corporate, any change occurs in the persons who are directors thereof or in accordance with whose directions or instructions the directors thereof are accustomed to act, the holder of the permit shall as soon as reasonably practicable after the occurrence of the change give particulars thereof in writing to the clerk to the appropriate authority and to the appropriate officer of police and if the holder of the permit fails to comply with this paragraph he shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding ten pounds.
Cancellation of bookmaker's permit by appropriate authority
25B. If in the case of any bookmaker's permit an application is made at any time to the clerk to the appropriate authority by any person in the prescribed form and manner requesting that the permit be forfeited and cancelled and accompanied by two copies of a statement of the grounds on which the application is made, the clerk to the authority shall submit the application to any one member of the authority who, after considering the statement accompanying the application—
(a) if he is of opinion—

(i) that further consideration of the matters referred to in that statement is unnecessary or inexpedient before the renewal of the permit falls to be considered; or

(ii) that the authority would be required by virtue of sub-paragraph (3) of paragraph 25C of this Schedule to refuse the application,

shall cause notice in writing to be given to the applicant that the application is refused without prejudice to the raising of the same matters by way of objection in accordance with the provisions of this Schedule to a renewal of the permit;
(b) unless he is of such opinion as aforesaid, shall refer the application to the appropriate authority.
25C.—(1) Where an application for the cancellation of a permit is referred to the appropriate authority under the last foregoing paragraph, the clerk to the authority shall, unless the application has been withdrawn, give to the applicant, to the holder of the permit and to the appropriate officer of police not less than twenty-one days notice in writing of the date, time and place appointed for the consideration of the application by the authority, and shall send to the holder of the permit together with that notice a copy of the applicant's statement of the grounds on which the application is made.
(2) Subject to the next following subparagraph, at any meeting of the appropriate authority to consider the application, the applicant and the holder of the permit shall be entitled to be heard either in person or by counsel or a solicitor; and where the applicant is a person other than the appropriate officer of police, the authority shall also hear any representations made by, or by any person authorised in that behalf by, that officer; and paragraphs 14 and 15 of this Schedule shall apply in relation to the application as they apply in relation to an application for the renewal of a permit, subject to the following modifications of the said paragraph 15, that is to say—

(a) as if the reference therein to the applicant for renewal were a reference to the holder of the permit; and

(b) as if the reference therein to any person who made an objection as mentioned in that paragraph were a reference to the person by whom the application under paragraph 25B of this Schedule was made.

(3) The appropriate authority shall refuse the application if they are satisfied that it is made on grounds which—

(a) have been or ought properly to have been raised previously by way of objection either when the permit was granted or on an occasion when it has been renewed; or

(b) are or have been the subject matter of proceedings for such an offence as is mentioned in subsection (1) of section eight of this Act.

(4) The appropriate authority shall not cancel the permit unless—

(a) satisfactory evidence is produced that the holder is no longer a fit and proper person to hold such a permit; or

(b) the authority are satisfied that the business to which it relates is being managed by, or carried on for the benefit of, a person other than the holder, being a person who would himself be refused the grant of such a permit either under paragraph 16 or under subparagraph (a) of paragraph 17 of this Schedule:

Provided that for the purposes of this subparagraph the authority shall disregard any conviction such as is mentioned in paragraph 19 of this Schedule.
(5) If the appropriate authority decide not to cancel the permit, they shall cause notice
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in writing to be given to the applicant that the application is refused without prejudice to the raising of the same matters by way of objection in accordance with the provisions of this Schedule to a renewal of the permit.
(6) If the appropriate authority decide to forfeit and cancel the permit, the forfeiture and cancellation shall not take effect—

(a) until the expiration of the time within which notice of an appeal under the next following paragraph may be given; nor

(b) if such notice is duly given, until the determination or abandonment of the appeal.

25D.—(1) Where the appropriate authority decide to forfeit and cancel a bookmaker's permit on an application under paragraph 25B of this Schedule, the holder of the permit may appeal against that decision to a court of quarter sessions (or in Scotland the sheriff) having jurisdiction in the authority's area, whose decision on the appeal shall be final.
(2) Paragraphs 22 (except sub-paragraphs (4) and (7) thereof), and 23 (or, as the case may be, sub-paragraph (1) of paragraph 25) of this Schedule shall apply for the purposes of an appeal under this paragraph against the forfeiture and cancellation of a bookmaker's permit as they apply for the purposes of an appeal against the refusal of an application for the renewal of such a permit subject to the following modifications, that is to say,—

(a) as if any reference therein to the applicant for renewal were a reference to the holder of the permit; and

(b) as if any reference therein to a person who opposed the application before the appropriate authority were a reference to the person by whom the application under paragraph 25B of this Schedule was made;

and, in the case of an appeal to the sheriff under this paragraph, the sheriff may make such order as to the expenses of the appeal as he thinks proper.")
Page 37, line 73, after ("shall") insert ("unless renewed or as the case may be, further renewed,")
Page 37, line 14, leave out from ("or") to end of line 15 and insert ("by virtue of its cancellation under subsection (1) of section eight of this Act or under paragraph 25C of this Schedule.")—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendments agreed to.
4.14 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I now come to the next stage of the Bill and rise to move that the Bill do now pass. It has been our practice on these occasions that I formally move the Motion, with the undertaking that I will deal with any points raised in the debate. I hope, therefore, that your Lordships will not think me discourteous if I follow the same procedure now. I beg to move that the Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
VISCOUNT ASTOR: My Lords, as one of those who originated the debates on this Bill, I should like to congratulate Her Majesty's Government sincerely on the courage and skill with which they have tackled what must be a very thorny and controversial subject affecting the lives of millions of people in this country. I feel sure that the whole betting situation will be vastly improved by this Bill which the Government have so skilfully carried through. There are one or two points that I would make. One is that unless the Report of the Peppiatt Committee is implemented we shall not really solve the problem of getting a truly honest turf. Unless the ordinary owner can expect, by and large, to break even on his racing activities, we shall drive him always to betting. To some extent the running of horses for betting means that the public do not get such fair crack of the whip; and it means, also, that the wrong type of horse is produced. The Peppiatt Committee can be criticised for suggesting a 4 ft. plank to cover a 12 ft. gap, but we still hope that the principle will go through, and that there will be produced a sum sufficient to ensure that British racing is conducted on the cleanest possible lines.
Secondly, I hope that Her Majesty's Government will watch the situation with regard to gaming machines with great care. A person who runs a gaming machine can do two things: he can fix the odds against the person who participates, just as he wishes; and, secondly, he can send a boy round with a sack to collect what is in the "bank" as often as he likes—which could mean a large sum being collected by the person operating the machine. These facts have made such machines a great temptation to gangsters and other undesirable elements in the countries which originated them, and I hope, therefore, that they will be watched with the utmost care. Having said that, I would sincerely congratulate Her Majesty's Government on having tackled this thorny problem by this Bill which they have put through so skilfully.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, I should like to associate myself with the last few words of the noble Viscount's speech. It was a difficult problem and it required a good deal of courage to embark upon it. I suppose it is the kind of measure on which a Government em-
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barks in the first year of its life. I do not think that this or any Government would care to deal with the problem in its last year. This is a courageous attempt to drive what is admittedly an evil from the streets; and I very much hope it will have better fortune than the earlier attempt we made to drive another evil from the streets—an attempt which seems to be resulting in a much greater evil.
On the Second Reading I referred to some of the difficulties that were going to arise as a result of forcing bookmakers to carry on their business through offices, and particularly offices which have direct access from the street. As a result of some of my interest in this Bill I have had the opportunity of a good many discussions with bookmakers; and London bookmakers particularly are very fearful of the difficulty of getting offices at all. This is not so much a problem in the Provinces, where many of them already have offices. In London, they are afraid of high rents—in fact, prohibitive rents—and of the difficulty, once they get an office, of getting planning consent for change of user.
I do not know how far these difficulties are going to interfere with the carrying on of the bookmaking business. Some people might say, "So much the better", but, after all, it is a legitimate business and there is a demand for it; and, whether we like it or not, bookmakers are allowed to carry on so long as they are within the law and while people want to patronise them. As the result of the representations that have been made to me, I am somewhat fearful that things are going to be made so difficult for the bookmakers in getting proper premises in which to carry on their business that they will be forced, willy-nilly, to carry on their activities in the streets, contrary to the law. I hope that that will not be the case, but it is a fear to which I gave voice on the Second Reading of the Bill and it has certainly been confirmed by representations that have been made to me since then.
I would take this opportunity of correcting one fear that I had and to which I gave voice on the occasion of one of the Amendments—the fear that in a large factory where different bookmakers might have different agents or runners representing them conflict might arise between two runners in their competition for business. I am assured by all those

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with whom I have had contact that that does not arise; that the bookmakers have "carved up" this factory business so that not more than one bookmaker caters for each factory and, though he may have a number of runners at the factory, there is no danger of any conflict arising between two agents. As they put it, there is honour among, bookmakers, and "dog does not eat dog."
There is one other thing that I thought might be of interest to the House; that is (from the point of view of the bookmakers) the melancholy position that theirs, they fear, is a dying business. They tell me—and all of them confirm one another—that fewer and fewer young people are going in for betting. The competition of other sources of enjoyment is so great that the people who are betting to-day are the old hands, and they are getting hardly any new recruits into this industry. In fact, one of them who has done very well indeed out of bookmaking told me that he refused to let his son go into the business because he thought there was no future in it. That may be a comfort to many of us—I hope it is—because it indicates that the new way of life does not depend upon these exiguous excitements and that people have other means of spending their excess money.
I wish this Bill every success. I hope that it will have the desired effect. If I have voiced some apprehensions, I think they are justified. But I would ask the Government to keep a very close watch on this business. I suggested that we might have periodic reports on the way things were going, and I very much hope that in the reports which the Home Office will make on this subject they will include the progress that is being made in the way of bookmakers carrying on their activities in a lawful way.
4.23 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I do not want to detain your Lordships but I should like, first of all, to thank your Lordships for all the help that you have given to my noble friend Lord Bathurst and myself since we have been dealing with this Bill in your Lordships' House. I observe and take full note of what my noble friend Lord Astor has said about the Peppiatt Report. Your Lordships will remember what both my noble friend Lord Bathurst and I said
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on Second Reading. I will convey to my right honourable friend Mr. Butler the urgency that was expressed in the noble Viscount's speech. I should like also to assure him, with regard to gamine machines, that we shall keep watch in regard to the point that he has raised. I hope the Amendment is a move in the direction he desires, hut, none the less, we shall watch the other problem.
The noble Lord, Lord Silkin, has again put the House in his debt by the care and attention which he has given to this Bill, among so many others, and I shall bear in mind the point that he has raised about the question of offices. I will pass on to my right honourable friend and the police the question of the difficulty that he envisages, because, of course, it is essential, if our plan is going to work, that it should be successful and work in the offices. I will also bear in mind what he says about the periodic reports.
As the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, said, this is a Bill on a subject which is traditionally very difficult for the Houses of Parliament. I want to say only this. I have taken into account and have read very carefully what has been said by the various committees and organs of the Church and others on the point, but I think we all agree on these two points. First, in 1960 the position could not continue that some of the population should be able to bet with ease on the telephone and that cash betting should be driven into the realms of secrecy. Secondly, it cannot be a good thing if the law is, in part, obsolete nonsense. I am not going to say anything further or throw compliments in the matter of a Bill for which I have been responsible. But if it gets rid of those things it will have done something, and I hope that it will be found of benefit to a great many people who desire to keep the law, and also of help to the police force who have had such a difficult task in enforcing an obsolete and outmoded law. I say nothing further, except, once again, to thank all your Lordships for your kindness and help in the passage of the Bill and for the things that you have been good enough to say about my noble friend and myself who were in charge of it in your Lordships' House.
On Question, Bill passed, and returned to the Commons.

STATUTE LAW REVISION BILL [H.L.]
4.27 p.m.
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The LORD AILWYN in the Chair.]
Clauses 1 to 3 agreed to.
First Schedule [Road and Rail Transport Enactments]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I beg to move the Amendment standing in my name. In the course of the preparation of this Bill, whose laudable object is to get rid of dead wood from the Statute Book, a wrong number was attributed to a section—Section 4 was mentioned instead of Section 5. I am now here to put that right, and I hope the Committee will help me.
Amendment moved—
Page 4, line 49, leave out ("four") and insert ("five").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
House resumed.

RADIOACTIVE FALL-OUT AND SCHOOLCHILDREN'S MILK
4.30 p.m.
LORD TAYLOR LORD TAYLOR rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether the consumption of milk among schoolchildren has been adversely affected by publicity given to the effects of radioactive fallout. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to ask Her Majesty's Government the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. We now pass from the complexities of the law to the complexities of nature, which are sometimes even greater, and this is a very good example of them. Every one of your Lordships who has watched the children of this country over the past fifteen or twenty years cannot but have been struck by the amazing improvement in their health and their physique. This is very largely due, or is, at least, in substantial measure due, to the increase in consumption of milk which has taken
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place since before the war. This is partly due to the free and cheap milk schemes for expectant mothers, nursing mothers and young children, and partly to the milk-in-schools scheme. The net effect of it all is that between 1939 and the present time the total consumption of liquid milk in this country has approximately doubled.
When this excellent process was beginning, milk was by no means an entirely safe fluid. It was, in fact, still liable to carry tuberculosis germs; and only with the virtual universal extension of pasteurisation did milk become completely safe. Yet it was a balance of advantages, and it was on that balance that the decision was made to do everything possible to increase the consumption of milk by young children, by expectant mothers and by growing children—and the results brilliantly justified that decision. I was going round the ward of a children's hospital last week, and there were fifteen out of twenty beds vacant. That is a situation largely due to the improved nutrition of the children, in which milk has played a very large part.
It would be a thousand pities, therefore, if there were any decrease in the consumption of milk because people were unjustifiably frightened that the milk would harm their children in some way. People have been asking, as a result of all the publicity which has been given to Strontium 90 fall-out, whether children's milk should be cut. They ask, "Is it really safe to give our children as much milk as they want, and should condensed milk be substituted for ordinary fresh, liquid milk?" In some of the newspapers, Strontium 90 has been referred to as "death dust", and it is natural that people should be anxious of it, particularly in areas where they have heard that the fall-out from Strontium 90 has been very heavy.
In fact, radiation has been with mankind since the beginning of time. In the United Kingdom, four-fifths of the radiation to which we are subjected, and have always been subjected, comes from cosmic rays, and one-fifth comes from diagnostic radiology—that is to say, the taking of X-ray pictures. The amount that comes from diagnostic radiology has, of course, been going steadily up as many new medical processes have

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been introduced; and the figure of one-fifth is substantially higher in the United States. The amount of cosmic radiation to which people are subjected varies in different parts of the country. It is twice the average in Aberdeen, because the Aberdeen granite is comparatively highly radioactive. It is high in Cornwall, and it is high in Leeds, for some mysterious reason. In Stockholm, it is twice as high as our average English figure, again because the main building materials are radioactive. If one goes up a hill to a height of 400 feet, the amount of radiation is substantially increased. I say "substantially", but the increases are actually very small; nevertheless they are appreciable. If one goes down a coal mine, the amount of radiation to which a person is subjected gets less. If we all lived in coal mines, therefore, presumably we should escape radiation altogether, although whether that would be biologically desirable in the long run nobody knows.
Now Strontium 90 is something that is quite new. It is a new element which has appeared as a result of atomic explosions; and the measurement of the amount of radiation produced by this is also something quite new. It makes, as yet, a very small contribution to the total radiation to which human beings are subjected. In 1956, it was about 1 per cent. of the total background radiation; in 1958–59, it was 2 per cent. of the total background radiation to which we are exposed. It is detected in two ways: first, by sampling milk—and it needs a great deal of milk to be examined for us to get hold of any Strontium 90, and is a highly technical and difficult job; and, secondly, by sampling infant bones—the bones of little infants who have died and who may have ingested this milk or absorbed it from their mothers before birth. So small is the amount of Strontium 90 that the biggest bone in the body has to be used—namely, the femur—and it requires, an entire femur to make it possible to detect any Strontium 90.
The amount of radiation given by Strontium 90 is far less than the amount of radiation to which workers in our factories are subjected—for example, those doing X-ray crystal work, X-ray work on castings, and X-ray work on wings of aeroplanes. There, they take all precautions. There is what is called
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a maximum permitted concentration, and that maximum is very seldom reached in industry. The total effect of Strontium 90 is far below the sort of exposures to which people are subjected in industry, and even further below the amount of radiation to which workers in X-ray departments—radiologists, and so on—are subjected. A Strontium unit, by which the stuff is measured, is in fact one-5,000th of the maximum permissible dust for workers in factories. It is one million-millionth of a curie: but it is dangerous, and it is dangerous because it tends to be picked up by the human body and deposited in the bones, and because it has got a very long half-life —namely, 28 years—and, therefore, even though present in very minute quantities, does go on acting for a very long time.
In 1958 we began to get reports coming through of an increase of Strontium 90 in the diet, particularly in the milk of this country and in the bones of newborn children. The increase was higher in places of very heavy rainfall, for obvious reasons. It appeared to be coming from the radioactive fall-out, and it was brought down with the rain. On some of the hill farms, it was as much as four times as high as in the rest of the country. I think I am right in saying, although the noble Viscount will correct me if I am not, that the peak was reached between March and June of last year, almost certainly as a result of the fall-out from the large series of Russian atom tests in 1958, just before the ban on atom bomb testing. There appears to be a six months' time lag between the explosion of an atom bomb and the rise in Strontium 90. I believe I am right in saying—again I hope that the noble Viscount, will give us the latest information—that the figures are now starting to fall.
The important thing is to keep this matter in proportion. The danger has increased but it is still a very small danger, so far as I am able to estimate; but it is enough to make a strong argument for continuing the ban on atomic bombs. The danger of not taking milk, I consider, is far greater than the danger of doing so. It is a pity that there has been a good deal of publicity in the West Country, mainly by a gentleman (whose name happens to be the same as mine, who is also a member of the medical profession and was a member of the Liberal Party—though I gather that that is no

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longer so) who went around making alarming speeches about the effect of Strontium 90 on children, with the result that people in the areas he visited were perturbed about whether they should go on giving their children milk. I think, and I hope the noble Viscount will confirm, that there is virtually no risk in continuing to take milk—indeed, that it would be criminal not to give children milk.
However, there has been one point which has worried me a great deal; and I think it has worried serious medical scientists, and not alarmists—that is, the steady increase over the past 20 or 30 years in the disease of leukæmia, particularly the extraordinary increase which has occurred in certain counties in Wales and in Cumberland. We all know now that leukæmia is a disease which can be produced by radiation. It was produced in a very dramatic way among the victims of the atom bombs in Japan, and the incidence of leukæmia went up steadily as the epicentre, the point at which the bomb went off, was approached. Fully 100 cases are known which are directly attributable to the atom bomb explosions.
We know that leukæmia is associated with industrial radiations. It is more common in doctors than in the general population, and it is most common in radiologists, who are the most radiated doctors. There has been a five-fold increase in 1euk æmia in the last 30 years. Even so, the figures are very small. But a five-fold increase of a fatal disease is a very serious matter, and it-now causes in this country about five deaths per 100,000 of the population every year, mainly in infants and old people. It is one of those diseases which appear to go up with the rise in the standard of living. It is like poliomyelitis in this respect, but it appears to be for different reasons. One of the main reasons is that, as the standard of living goes up, the length of life goes up, and more people are living into the leukæmia age, as it were, and more people are exposed to diagnostic radiology.
If one takes the counties of England and Wales, as was done by Dr. Phillips, medical officer of South Carnarvonshire, in an interesting article in the Lancet, one finds that there has been a 50 per cent. increase in the incidence of leukæmia in
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the four hill counties in Wales and in Cumberland. In fact, what has happened is that these counties, which formerly had a low rate of leukæmia, have now come up to the level of the South of England—that is, they have come up to about 5 or 6 per 100,000 per annum. It is tempting to conclude that there is some relationship between this increase in leukæmia and the increase in Strontium 90 fall-out in these areas. Yet the more I look at the problem, the more I become convinced that this cannot be so, for the quantity of Strontium 90 involved is so utterly minute that it is not enough to produce this effect.
There must be a reason for it. It is very easy in medicine to argue falsely in this sort of way. If I may illustrate it from my own personal experience, I can show how one can go wrong. When I first heard of the increase in leukæmia in this country it occurred to me that it might be due to radiation from television tubes. Millions of people were putting what were, in fact, X-ray tubes into their own drawing rooms, which seemed to me a hazardous thing to do. So I made a "spot" map of television stations in the United States and obtained from the United States Embassy figures of the death rate from leukæmia, by areas and States, and superimposed it on the "spat" map of television stations. They coincided perfectly, and I thought we had proved that leukæmia was due to television. There was, however, one discrepancy: Minnesota showed an incidence ten times higher than any other State. The reason was that the Mayo Clinic was there and was collecting cases on leukæmia from all over the place A further analysis showed how foolish I was. I soon discovered that the incidence of leukæmia was different among coloured people and white people, and the high distribution of television stations was directly proportionate to the number of white people and the higher standard of living. And I was "up a gum tree!" Then I made tests on my own, and other people's, televisions, and I found that there was no appreciable radiation from them and no danger whatsoever. So one might very easily be misled. Indeed, I think the writer in the Lancet is misled in thinking that the increase of leukæmia in Wales and Cumberland had something to do with Strontium 90.
Yet why have the leukæmia rates in rural Wales and Cumberland gone up? I am prepared to hazard a guess. I think the much more likely cause is increased diagnostic radiology—for a very simple reason. In 1925 Mr. Ellis Stuart, at Oxford, showed that if X-rays of the child in the womb are taken, as may very properly be done, there is a slightly increased risk of leukæmia. As a result we have now cut down greatly on this type of examination land X-ray mothers only where it is essential from the medical point of view that this should be done. Since the coming of the National Health Service there has been a tremendous improvement in X-ray services throughout the country. With the Ministry of Health paying for them, the distribution of X-ray sets has gone up. In fact, if you want to buy a secondhand set, you can get one for £5. Recently I bought three, one at £5 and the others nearly as cheap. They are a drug on the market. I think that it is much more likely that increased diagnostic radiology in these backwoods or backward counties is explaining the increase in leukæmia, because they are now corning up to the level of the more forward counties in the South of England. I think that is the explanation, and I do not think it has got anything to do with Strontium 90. I quote that only to show how easy it is to be misled in interpreting geographical statistics, unless one is very stern with oneself.
All I have said is not to suggest that we should be complacent about Strontium 90, but merely that we should see it in proportion. In my view—and I hope that we shall hear from the noble Viscount whether he agrees or not—it is far less important than diagnostic radiology as a source of radiation, and it would be far more important to be extremely stringent in regard to unnecessary X-rays than in the consumption of milk: indeed, it would be a great tragedy if the consumption of milk were to be curtailed unnecessarily. I sincerely hope that the experience of the noble Viscount and his scientific advisers will confirm what I have said and answer in the kind of way that I hope it will. Nevertheless, it is clear that if atomic explosions went on, the stuff could slowly accumulate and could do serious harm. But in deciding what is right in such a matter we have to be good scientists and have to put away our emotional feelings about
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atomic bombs; we even have to put away our emotional feelings about X-ray machines, which are generally looked upon as rather beneficent. X-rays are often insisted on in the courts of law. That, I am afraid, is why a great many unnecessary X-rays are taken by doctors, and I think we shall have to revise our views there. Finally, I return to the subject of milk and ask whether the noble Viscount will give us an up-to-date picture of the situation with regard to Strontium 90 in milk; and I hope it will be reassuring rather than alarming.
4.52 p.m.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL AND MINISTER FOR SCIENCE (VISCOUNT HAILSHAM): My Lords, before I formally answer the Question on the Order Paper which the noble Lord has put down, I should like to make one or two comments of my own. My first words I should wish to be of sincere gratitude to the noble Lord for raising this subject and for doing so in such an illuminating and helpful way. I agree with, I think, everything he said, although I am not in a position to give an explanation of the rise of leukæmia in the particular counties which he mentioned. I had asked the question myself but got no very conclusive answer. I did receive the comment, from those who are wiser than I in this matter, that the absolute figures concerned are so small that the increase, although the percentage rate seems large, could really be without final significance. But I am not specially armed on this occasion to deal with this question, and this I say only because the same subject had happened to interest me.
I have been trying for some time to secure a calm and deliberate Parliamentary occasion to discuss these matters, and therefore I am doubly grateful to the noble Lord. I have tried without much success, primarily, I think, for two reasons. The subject of fall-out had become, until the happy and I hope permanent cessation of tests of nuclear weapons, emotionally connected with the warmly-felt opinions about weapons of war involving nuclear explosions. I think that serious-minded people who wished to discuss this matter dispassionately, and to enlighten the public, have been to some extent reluctant to embark on what often developed into an emotional and political discussion. Also, of course, it

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is extremely difficult for someone like myself, without a strict scientific training, to express about such matters opinions which will both mean something to the ordinary man and woman and will also be true, without qualification, when examined by the far stricter standards of the scientist. A chance in a million might in ordinary language accurately be described as nothing at all; but the scientist would not so regard it, and in the context of a world population of 3,000 million he would clearly be right. The result has been—much to my dismay —that, as the noble Lord rightly said, the field for two or three years has been largely left to people without any real right to speak with authority on these matters, and who have in fact spoken (and I must say this) without any due sense of responsibility to their fellow men.
I absolutely agree with the noble Lord what a disastrous thing it would be, and how criminal it would be, if anyone paid the slightest attention to warnings that milk was not an absolutely essential item of diet for children. I speak under advice of my Department in this matter, but I speak also as the father of young children—and I only add, because I think strictly I should, that as a matter of fact I have an interest in this matter as a farmer, and therefore I should disclose the fact that I am, through my cows, a producer of milk; but I hope I have not allowed this circumstance to influence my judgment in the matter in the least. Milk is an essential item of diet and, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, has said, there is absolutely no reason why the parents of this country should feel the slightest anxiety about giving it to their children. I entirely agree with the noble Lord that one of the main reasons, perhaps, for the remarkable improvement in children's health in recent years has been the access of children to reasonable supplies of fresh liquid milk.
I should like to take the opportunity of declaring what has been, at any rate for three years while I have been more or less responsible for some part of this, the policy of the Government in this matter. Our policy is to give all the reliable information we can upon this topic, and we think that by far the most important thing we can do is to enlighten
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and instruct public opinion about it. We have published everything that we have had available to us; we have suppresed absolutely nothing; and we have not sought to influence the scientists in any way in the advice which they have given and which we have published. I emphasise this, because part of the misfortune to which both the noble Lord and I have referred, of leaving the field to rather irresponsible comment, has been that some of these people have actually gone so far as to suggest that reports coming from the Medical Research Council's panel in this matter have in some way been influenced by the Government. If there were any one member of the Government who could have influenced this, it would have been I; and I can categorically assure the House that my one anxiety in this matter has been to produce as much reliable information for the benefit of the country as possible, and to secure that nothing whatever was done except to give it the fullest publicity in the form in which the scientists have produced it themselves.
We have carried out this policy, first by making and publishing the results of a monitoring service which is carried out mainly under the responsibility of the Agricultural Research Council, but with the assistance of experts from the Medical Research Council. I think I can say that this monitoring service is generally accepted in the world as being something which is probably better than any other nation has available, except, perhaps, the United States—indeed, I fancy even better than the United States. That has been the first thing we have done; and about twice a year the reports are published and are available to the public, although they are in technical form. One is more or less due now. It will in fact be published, as I shall shortly be saying, somewhere about September.
Secondly, we have taken and published the advice of a panel of experts, convened by the Medical Research Council, under the chairmanship of its Secretary, which has again commented upon the nature and extent of the hazards of ionising radiations from time to time. Speaking from memory, I think their last Report was in 1956, though there has certainly been some further work since then, and another Report is due again. I hope that it will be published about the same

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time as the next monitoring service report in September. The panel of experts consists of, I think, all the really authoritative experts on this subject in the country. Their reports have always been unanimous and I need hardly tell your Lordships that they are completely uninfluenced by any considerations of policy whatever, except to provide the scientific truth about a matter of importance to the community. Although it is, from my point of view, completely irrelevant, I am informed that the experts involved include scientists of quite different political opinions who are simply interested in the scientific aspects of the subject. Thirdly, of course, we participated, particularly through Dr. Pochin, in the United Nations Inquiry in 1958, which yielded an authoritative report upon the whole subject of fall-out as it affects the whole of the planet.
May I next deal with one or two specific issues? My task has been made much easier by the fact that the noble Lord has given such a lucid and admirable account of the matter. I think that in a sense it is a pity the course which discussion has taken has tended to select Strontium 90 as the only possible hazard. All ionising radiations are potentially harmful. Strontium 90 has attracted attention for three reasons: first, its long half-life, to which the noble Lord gave attention; secondly, the fact, which he also explained, that strontium has a chemical affinity to calcium, and therefore tends to be picked up and stored in the mechanism of one's body in the bone structure and therefore is concentrated in one place; and, thirdly, that Strontium 90 is not a substance known in nature, although natural Strontium is, and, therefore, any Strontium 90 which exists in the world is the result directly of the invention of the atomic bomb and other nuclear warlike devices.
But, of course, all radiation is potentially harmful. Of the various isotopes which are produced by fall-out, however, it is thought that whereas Strontium 90, by concentrating in the hones, could cause bone cancer or leukæmia, it could not, for instance, cause any genetic effects as compared with some of the other isotopes or possibly X-rays. The reason for this is that the radiations are of a type that have a very short length—possibly only one millimetre—and Strontium 90 does not, in practice,
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occur in the human body in the neighbourhood of the gonads and therefore it is thought quite impossible that it would cause a genetic effect.
It is, of course, picked up in rainfall and can be ingested into the body, either in drinking water or on vegetables or grain, and, of course, in milk where it has been passed through the cow who has got it from the same sources. It is measured, for the purposes of this question, in what are called Strontium units. As the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, explained, these are very tiny amounts—one micro-microcurie per gramme of calcium—that is to say, one millionth part of a millionth part of the radiation contained in a grain of radium for every grain of calcium in the bones. Sometimes when people use rather alarmist figures about the number of Strontium units which may exist on a Brussels sprout, I think they rather tend to forget both how very small those units may be, and also how very little of it will ever remain in the bones of anyone ingesting the Brussels sprout.
The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is, broadly speaking, correct in his estimate of the effect of stopping tests. This will become apparent as and when the monitoring reports are published. The amounts involved are so small, and the tests conducted so varied, that they are nearly always about a year in arrears. The next report will tend to show the increase in fall-out due, in the main, to the Russian tests at the end of 1958 leading to a very rapidly increased fallout which reached its peak in March, 1959. Thereafter, and in the latter part of 1959, the reports will show (I cannot give the figures but, as I say, they will be published in September) a very rapid falling-off. That falling-off will, of course, continue unless the unhappy event occurs of someone letting off an-other of these things in the atmosphere when, of course, the figures will marginally increase again.
The danger measured by fall-out—perhaps I should remind the House of what probably some noble Lords will already know—was described within very wide limits by the United Nations Report of 1958. The danger of any harm resulting from fall-out by the tests which have taken place so far is very small indeed. That does not mean to say that it is not

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a subject which ought to be taken extremely seriously. If the tests were continued indefinitely, the danger would increase, and if increased over fifty years it would still be very small indeed in relation to other forms of radiation and other forms of damage which could be avoided. But I do not think that that is the right way to look at it, and it is not the way in which the Government look at it. The Government wish to see an end of these tests, when the amount of fall-out will drop very quickly indeed. If there were an actual war in which these weapons were used, I think it would be impossible to estimate what damage would be done. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I think some of us would not be here to worry about it, because other effects would be even more damaging. But it would be a matter of serious concern to those who did remain.
The formal Answer, which I will now give, to the noble Lord's Question, is as follows. The noble Lord asked me whether the consumption of milk amongst schoolchildren has been adversely affected by publicity given to the effects of radioactive fall-out. I am happy to say that there is no evidence that this is the case. My right honourable friends, the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland, have received no representations from any local education authorities that the publicity given to the effects of radioactive fall-out has caused any decrease in the amount of milk drunk by children at school. The returns received by the Ministry of Education and the Scottish Education Department for the years 1956 to 1959 show that there has been some slight fluctuation in the number of children taking milk. Any decrease is attributable to the increased numbers of children now in secondary schools, where the amount of milk drunk is normally lower than in the primary schools.
There is, of course, a very great deal which I could say about this topic. I should like to say once more that, so far as I am concerned, the rational and consistent discussion of this subject is something which I greatly welcome; and I repeat that I very much thank the noble Lord for raising it and raising it so well this afternoon. If there are any other questions the House desires to ask of me I will do my best to answer them.
5.13 p.m.
LORD SAYE AND SELF: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, referred to a gentleman of his own name, I think in Devonshire, who discouraged the drinking of milk, and Lord Taylor suggested that he was a Liberal. I think I can assure the House that he was not voicing any official Liberal policy in such an action.
Apart from that, I should like to ask the noble Viscount opposite a question. The subject of radioactivity is a question which very much concerns civil defence, though possibly indirectly. I would suggest that the Civil Defence Service might be assisted themselves, and also that the confidence of the public in the knowledge and action of Civil Defence throughout the country would be vastly increased, if they were used for disseminating information on such a subject as this. Apart from the "high politics" which the two noble Lords have been discussing this afternoon, it is a subject which is very near to the common man, and if the information could be put over in a common way through Civil Defence, who are common people, I think it would be a great help. While on the subject, should I be in order, in saying that Civil Defence gets left out on many occasions? We had a discussion not long ago on fires in Scotland and it was never suggested for one moment that fire-fighting in Scotland should be combined in any sort of way with the Civil Defence organisation. I was disappointed that that was not the case. I urge that Civil Defence should be brought in in any sort of way it can be brought in, because at present activity is very lacking throughout the country.
VISCOUNT HAILSHAM: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord for his contribution. Anything that anybody can do to put forward sound information on this subject would be greatly welcomed. I certainly take note of the suggestion that the Civil Defence should be used, and I will draw it to the attention of my right honourable friend. I am also grateful to the noble Lord for his assurance with regard to the policy of his Party. I certainly did not intend myself to impute anything to them, although it was a misfortune that some of the remarks which were made, which were

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open to considerable criticism, misled a lot of innocent people, probably some in every Party.

SLAVERY IN AFRICA AND ARABIA
5.15 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON LORD SHACKLETON rose to ask her Majesty's Government what information they have on the continued existence of slavery, particularly in Africa and Arabia; what steps they propose to take to ensure the implementation of international conventions designed to bring this inhuman and degrading practice to an end, if necessary by the establishment of a special organisation within the United Nations, and whether they will raise this urgent problem at the July meeting of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The noble Lord said: My Lords, we have just been discussing one of the new scourges of humanity, and I rise to ask the Question standing in my name in order to draw attention to one of the most ancient scourges that have afflicted mankind. It was only last year that the bicentenary of the birth of William Wilberforce was commemorated, and your Lordships are well aware that his Parliamentary life was mainly devoted to the abolition of slavery and that his work has been carried on by many able people since. It is now the general impression among people in this country that slavery no longer exists, and the object of my Question is not only to draw attention to the amount of slavery that there is in the world but to ask the Government what information they have from their sources upon this subject, and, in particular, to ask what steps they propose to take by way of international action or by other means to put an end to this degrading business.
There is no need, I think, to go into the history of slavery. I think it is universally accepted that, however well a slave may be treated, none the less it is in every way a repugnant basis of life for mankind. And of course European nations have no reason to be mealy-mouthed on this subject, or to be proud of the part they have played. We know that some of the great civilisations in classical times were built on slavery and that many European nations have played their part in the slave trade. But we
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do not need to waste time on the past. Our problem is to consider what there is in the way of slavery in the world to-day and what ought to be done to end it.
One of the difficulties is to get exact information, to collect from the countries where this slavery is practised, either openly or in a clandestine way, information on precisely what is going on. The chief centre of slavery in the world is still the Arabian Peninsula, and in particular Saudi-Arabia, where it is estimated—and I must stress that it is only an estimate, and may be a very rough one—that there may be as many as half a million slaves to-day. My remarks will be mainly concerned with the slave trade as it relates tone Arabian Peninsula. It is the one region where the old chattel slavery still exists and is recognised as a legal status.
The countries of Arabia have theocratic government, and in them the law of the land is the Koran, which is supplemented by decrees made by the rulers. Slave owners and defenders of slavery—and this is important, because people are inclined to think that we should allow people to pursue their own historic customs—have argued that slavery is authorised by the Koran and by the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, but the weight of evidence, I am told, is against this. Mohammed tolerated slavery in the backward community in which he lived, but at the same time he condemned it and intended that it should be progressively suppressed. Islamic writers of authority have stated in no uncertain terms that if the teachings of Mohammed on slavery had been applied in all Moslem countries, slavery would have ceased to exist, not only, as it has, in some of them, but in all. It is still practised in not merely Arabia but also the Yemen, Muscat, Oman and the small sheikdoms and sultanates in the Aden Protectorate. There is an abundance of evidence from unofficial sources, from travellers and residents in Saudi-Arabia and those countries, that slavery exists there, and may, indeed, be increasing.
In 1936 the late King Ibn Saud of Saudi-Arabia made a decree regulating the conditions of slaves. This decree largely restated the teachings of the Koran, requiring masters to be kind to their slaves. It also gave slaves certain

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rights to buy their freedom and, above all, it required slave owners to register their slaves with the Government. But while the principal aim was to help slaves throughout their servitude, as well as to provide some prospect of freedom, it also authorised, as I have said, the licensing of slave traders. That decree is still law, and there is plenty of evidence that the law is fully taken advantage of. This decree makes clear that it is part of the accepted pattern of life in those countries.
I should like to quote some of the further evidence that exists. Some of it is, I admit, old evidence, although collected in the last few years, and some of it may be already familiar to your Lordships. One of our difficulties, of course, is to get official, up-to-date information. There is evidence supplied not only by ministers. There was one which, I know, has already been quoted in this House. A French Protestant minister actually went to investigate rumours of slavery in French Africa, and he reported in 1955 what he had found. In his report there is a dispatch written by the French Ambassador in Saudi-Arabia. He stated that slave traders in Saudi-Arabia were sending African emissaries to Africa to recruit slaves. They went and posed as Moslem missionaries and offered Africans a free pilgrimage to Mecca, which they said was being paid for by rich Moslems who had sinned and sought atonement in this way. Many Africans in the past few years have fallen into this trap. On arrival in Saudi-Arabia they have been arrested for entering without a visa, and have been imprisoned and handed over to slave traders. The French Ambassador estimated the number who suffered that fate at a few hundred a year. The Government of Nigeria has since taken steps to try to limit this by licensing travel agencies, particularly those who deal with the Arabian countries.
There is, indeed, plenty of evidence, also coming from the same source, of African Moslems going on pilgrimages and taking several servants with them whom they sell on arrival, using them as living traveller's cheques. It is astonishing that faithful Moslems who believe in the teachings of their Prophet, can sit back and allow, if not connive at, the
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holy places of Islam being used to lure innocent Africans into slavery. There are numerous examples, too, some of them from official sources, of the actual practice of slavery in particular areas. We have known, for instance, of the name of the chief slave broker in Riyadh. His name was, at any rate a few years ago, Abdulla Ibn Marwan. We have the names of other slave dealers. There have been examples which have been brought from other countries of this practice. For instance, in Iraq, a certain slave dealer, Mohammad Husain, was captured and put on trial. He was found to have 50 kidnapped under-age girls ready to tranship to Riyadh. He was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. In another place there have been examples of girls who have been kidnapped, and sometimes their relations have come out after them, trying to bring them back.
If anybody were to suggest that these slaves were always well treated, I would draw attention to a case, again well-founded, of twelve Baluchi slaves, some of whom were the personal property of the King of Saudi-Arabia, who tried to escape. They were discovered, tracked down, and three were beheaded in the desert by the search party; others were brought back to Riyadh for public execution, where they were duly beheaded by a negro slave whose name was Al Hilali, in the square in front of the palace, to provide a lesson to other would-be escapees.
There are other travellers whose names will be known to your Lordships. Wilfrid Thesiger, whose book Arabian Sands has been so widely read, admittedly writing on a period about ten years ago, said:
"It seemed that the enormous wealth which was pouring into Saudi-Arabia from the American oil company had greatly increased both the demand for slaves and the price paid for them."
He had evidence because he met a caravan taking slaves actually along the road. James Morris, who was, I think, at one time a Times correspondent, is another well-known writer who has talked about slavery as a modern institution.
There are other areas in the world where slavery is practised. A Danish ethnologist has described the practice of slavery among the Tuaregs of the Sahara,

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and my noble friend Lord Maugham, who is shortly to speak, has some much more up-to-date and direct personal experience of this area. There is evidence collected by the Anti-Slavery Society through Commander Fox-Pitt, who went to West Africa and himself found plenty of evidence of this practice.
Finally, there has been some quite horrifying evidence of slavery in South America, in particular in Peru. It has been described in a book written by an American called Leonard Clark. If anyone should question it as a traveller's tale, I may say that a prominent Minister in Peru has written paying testimony to the reliability of the evidence, and promising that the Peruvian Government will take strong action
"to correct the shameful and inhuman slave practices which Clark found existed."
There has been slavery in China, although there is information that the new Chinese Government is taking strong steps to wipe it out. But, as I have said, one of our problems has been to get really up-to-date official information. There is a lot of evidence, but one needs much more precise evidence if action is to be taken.
I should like now to turn to the legal and international position with regard to slavery. The first really effective international action was taken in the Brussels Slavery Convention in 1890. This was effective because it had machinery written into it for supervising its application. It is possible that this Convention may still be in force, but it would probably be difficult to resuscitate because some of the signatories, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, no longer exist. After the First World War the Slavery Convention of 1926 was signed under the auspices of the League of Nations. This contained no machinery for supervision. It was not until after the efforts, largely of British initiative, of men like the noble Viscount, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, Charles Roden Buxton and others, that a special Committee was set up, which was successful to a considerable degree in not only collecting evidence but gradually reducing the slave traffic.
I emphasise the phrase "slave traffic". It is a question not only of the existence
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of slavery in countries where there are already slaves, but of a continuing traffic, going on from different parts of Africa. After the last war a new Convention was set up on the advice of a committee of experts. This was signed in 1956. It lacks any machinery for supervising its application. This is what I wish to draw to the attention of the Government, of the Minister and of the noble Marquess, who I am sure is well aware of this fact. Under the Convention reports are called for, but so far only one Government have supplied a report—that is, the British Government—and the Convention is in danger of becoming a dead letter.
It has been argued that it is the duty of the officials of the United Nations to take action to enforce Conventions, but in the opinion, of many people that is not so. They are under no obligation to act unless they are directed to do so. What the Slavery Conventions need now is a Committee to examine information on slavery and to submit conclusions and recommendations to the Economic and Social Council. There are two possible forms of supervisory machinery. One is a special Committee, like the old Committee of the League of Nations. Another is to appoint a special consultant, a kind of Special Commissioner, who would collect information and advise the Economic and Social Council, which is, of course, the body responsible for the Slavery Conventions. The cost of this would be comparatively small.
My Lords, I should like to ask what Her Majesty's Government are going to do about this matter. In another place, in an earlier debate, the right honourable and learned gentleman the Foreign Secretary said [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 590, col. 1313]:
"I do not think the machinery is satisfactory."
This was said when he was questioned on the absence of permanent supervisory machinery; and I should like again to ask the question which was asked in another place: whether Her Majesty's Government are relying entirely on chance information and representations made by the Anti-Slavery Society. These reports come in and need to be investigated. Only in the last few days the Economic and Social Council have been meeting in Geneva, and I regret to say that it was left to

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representatives of voluntary bodies like the Society of Friends and the Anti-Slavery Society to raise the matter. I admit that some kind words were said by the British representative, but it was not on British initiative that any action was taken. The initiative came from the Danish delegate who moved a motion, on July 11, calling on all parties at least to supply the information they are supposed to supply under the Convention.
I feel it is particularly distressing that this country, which in the past has taken a lead in this matter, is failing to do anything very much about it at the moment. I would ask Her Majesty's Government to discuss this question and to make definite proposals, not only at the United Nations but particularly among the new Commonwealth nations, because they will have a particularly important part to play. For as the white man withdraws from Africa—and this is true of French Africa, and, indeed, of Nigeria and Ghana—there is a risk that some of the slave trading that is going on will tend to increase. I am quite sure that the rulers of these new countries, the leaders in Nigeria and Ghana, would be perfectly willing to co-operate, and we (and when I say "we" I mean the world) need their co-operation if slavery is to be stamped out. Furthermore, there is a danger that if the British, and white men generally, press too hard on this matter they will be accused by the Russians and others of using it as an excuse for some colonialist policy. That is why I would urge Her Majesty's Government to make their approach on a very broad front.
It will be argued by some that slaves are better off than the free men of the country in which they live. And I do not for one moment deny that many slaves are exceedingly well treated and looked after, and are doing very well. This has always been part of the history of slavery. There have always been slaves who have risen to great positions, but the fact remains that this is not true of them all. Many of them find that they cannot get their freedom, and some of them are cruelly treated. The children of many of them are automatically born slaves, and young babies are still bought and sold as if they were cattle; and there is cruelty practised on some of them.
This is not one of the world's greatest problems, and just because it is no longer so it is in danger of falling out of the public eye. There is the possibility that slavery may linger on indefinitely. It is only through international action that it can be brought to an end, and I hope that we shall hear from Her Majesty's Government to-day, whatever are the difficulties in the way of preserving good relations with some of these smaller Arab Rulers, that they will not shrink from expressing, in a very firm way, British opinion upon this. If they find it difficult to do much about it in territories where we exercise influence, I hope that at least they will speak out at the United Nations. It would be very sad if, for fear of offending some of the rulers of oil-bearing countries, we dared not take a lead in pressing for the freedom of the individual which this country has played so notable a part in doing in the past. I hope, therefore, that Her Maesty's Government will not trim their sails on this matter and that we shall get a forthright statement in reply to the Question I now ask.
5.35 p.m.
VISCOUNT MAUGHAM: My Lords, I must beg that indulgence which is bestowed by your Lordships on those addressing you for the first time. Recently I read an article which seemed to me relevant to the Question of my noble friend Lord Shackleton. It said:
"Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages. A peace will equally leave the warrior and relater of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie."
The magazine was the Idler, dated November 11, 1758, and the author—as I expect your Lordships will have guessed—was Dr. Johnson. Times have changed since then, and I am glad to say that we no longer have anything to fear from the soldiers in our streets or, come to that, from the scribblers in our garrets. And I am all the more glad to say this because I was once a soldier and I am now most definitely a scribbler.
But the relevance of the quotation is this: in war and in cold war, truth is the first casualty, because both sides use propaganda. And propaganda is a

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boomerang which recoils upon the person who uses it. A Government puts out a distorted version of the truth and ends by accepting its own lies, and believing in them. The relevance of this to our present problem is this. Her Majesty's Government in general, and the Foreign Office in particular, have managed to convince themselves that slavery does not exist; and therefore, in the end, they have managed even to persuade tile public that it is practically non-existent.
Why do the Foreign Office want to believe that slavery does not exist? Your Lordships have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, that Saudi-Arabia is the greatest slave-buying area in the world; and there are over half a million slaves there to-day. The main oil company operating in Saudi-Arabia is the Arabian-American Oil Company —"Aramco"—and if it were known that children are enslaved in Saudi-Arabia this might be taken as a criticism of Aranico's general moral influence over the country. Moreover, Aramco wields considerable influence in Washington; and the Foreign Office do not want to embarrass the Government of Britain's largest ally.
A friend of mine was attached to the Trucial Oman levies who in the autumn of 1955 captured the Buraimi Oasis from the Saudi-Arabian forces. In one of the outlying villages in that uncertain frontier between Oman and Saudi-Arabia, he discovered children in fetters. There they were, in a corner of the marketplace, and there were shackles on their ankles. This story haunted me, and so I approached the Anti-Slavery Society in London; I met more officers from the Trucial Oman levies; I consulted travellers; and all the sources confirmed what we have already been told, that Saudi-Arabia is the main and largest market. And as the wealth has increased so, of course, the demand for slaves has risen, because a man is known by the number of slaves he has: it is a form of snobbery out there—like having a Cadillac. Whereas formerly an able-bodied man slave cost £50, he now costs £150. Whereas formerly an attractive girl cost £150, she now costs anything between £400 and £700.
There are two main slave routes into Saudi-Arabia. The first comes from
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West Africa. It goes from the High Volta, through the Niger Provinces and the region of Timbuktu, across Africa to the Port of Suakin, and across the Red Sea, by dhow to Lith, a port south of Djedda. The other goes from Iraq and Persia and Baluchistan across the Gulf and then, by caravans of camels, across to Riyadh. The children taken on this route are generally children bought from poor parents in these countries, but quite often they have been kidnapped. What happens to these slaves after they have reached the slave markets? Arabists have told us time and time again that, in fact, the lot of a slave is really not all that bad; that, after all, he is valuable property, and so it is worth while looking after him and feeding and clothing him. Certainly when I crossed the frontier into Saudi-Arabia with Sir John Glubb in 1943 to visit the Emir Abdul Azziz el Sidari, at Kaf, I saw no sign of ill-treatment of the slaves there.
But, my Lords, conditions in Arabia have been changing and, as the noble Lord has said, the new wealth has undermined many of the ancient and respectable traditions. Western goods, Cadillacs and canned foods, refrigerators and radios, and Western ideas (which also come in cans, in the form of films) have undermined the old sanction of Koranic law, and sanctions of morality have crumbled. Vice is unrestrained and the means to gratify unusual lusts can easily be procured with money. There are now sheikhs who can obtain sexual satisfaction only with very young children. Slaves are often horribly abused for pleasure or mutilated as a punishment, and the castration of young boys is practised. The operation is performed on boys between the ages of ten and fourteen, and the amputation is done radically, both the penis and the scrotum being cut away.
My Lords, the children in shackles in the Buraimi Oasis were destined for Riyadh. The boys might be castrated and the girls bought by any merchant who fancied them. One of the British representatives there, in the Buraimi Oasis, noticed caravans and lorries coming into a little village called Hamasso at night, and when he tried to visit the houses he was denied admittance. So he began to watch the departure of Saudi aeroplanes. I should say that the planes

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were all Dakotas and, with the exception of one pilot, all the air crews were American. Shortly before the take-off a lorry would drive on to the airstrip and the children would be literally pushed and herded into the plane. My friend (I am sorry to have to keep saying "my friend" but he does not want his name used) then spoke to one of the American pilots and asked him into his house for a drink. He said to him, "Do you realise that you are carrying children into captivity?" And the man answered, "When I took on this job I was told to keep my eyes shut and my ears shut as to what was going on around here. And that is the way it is going to be. Another seven years of flying for King Saud and I'll have earned enough money to retire for life."
This information, in point of fact, I happen to know, was reported to the Foreign Office. It was never used at the time of the Buraimi frontier dispute, nor since. Why? Because the Foreign Office do not wish to embarrass a power-full Ally. Nor, I may say, is it only the Foreign Office who do not want to embarrass a powerful Ally. When I tried to interest various editors in this matter, some of these steely-eyed despots were alarmed at the matter which they thought might be revealed by my inquiries. The very steel of their eyes grew tarnished at the prospect. However, at last I found an editor who was prepared to back me. I then found that I was given no visas to enter any of the countries on the Trucial Coast. But since I could not get into the Coast and could not get into Saudi-Arabia, I decided to examine the alternative route. And last year I travelled in a Land-Rover from Gambia, through Senegal and Mauritania, into what was then the French Sudan and to the legendary city of Timbuktu, where I lived for a month making various inquiries. I then moved out into the Sahara. And there I bought a slave from his Tuareg master, like one buys a piece of meat. I paid for him 25,000 A.O.F. francs, which is the equivalent of £37 10s. 0d. His name was Ibrahim. He was twenty years old. I gave him his freedom and he now works as a free man in Timbuktu. My Lords, I bought this man and photographed the money changing hands with the master and took the number of the
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notes and so forth, entirely in order to come back with the actual proof that slavery exists in the Sahara.
The Tuareg are nomadic tribesmen, fair skinned, who have a slave caste known as the Bela. These Bela, men, women and children, belong to their masters, body and soul. I have lived in these Tuareg camps, and I have seen these slave girls and slave women working from dawn until dusk. I should explain that among the Tuareg women fatness is considered a sign of great beauty, and so the Tuareg women are not allowed to do any work, even if they want to. So there they lay, rather like sealions in the zoo after feeding time, watching their slaves from behind the folds of their indigo veils, and doing nothing. Moreover, the Tuareg caste of nobles refer to and think of themselves as nobles; and nobles do no work—nobles in the Sahara, I mean to say! No Tuareg noble would think of handling a spade, erecting a tent or carrying a gourd of water. And so they have these great herds of slaves, exactly as they have always had great herds of sheep; and in the great wastes of the Sahara they have been able to preserve this institution of slavery some 65 years after the French occupation put an end to slavery.
I have lived in these camps and seen these little skinny boys, with bellies horribly distended from malnutrition, going out in the morning, before dawn, with the herds; and I have known that, until they came back in the evening, they would be in the desert without anything Ito eat or drink. And when they got back, after the Tuareg nobles had eaten, and after their wives had had their ration of milk, if there was anything left they would get it. I have seen the marks of cruelty on their bodies. If they are disobedient, or if they lose an animal by neglect, they are tied to a tree and lashed until they lose consciousness—and sometimes they do not recover and are just left to die.
I have met, and know well, a little girl—Timulud is her name—who is sixteen years old. At the age of eleven, she was raped by her master. She has already had two children. The first was still-born, and the second was left behind when they moved camp because it was sick; and they told her to leave it in the

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desert. Long before these girls reach maturity, they are used by their masters; and if, as a result of rape, a child is born, that child is born a slave unless the master happens to wish, by some quirk of his own, to acknowledge it; but that happens very seldom. So when I gave Ibrahim his freedom, it meant not only that he could escape from the persecution of his master, and not only, as your Lordships have heard the noble Lord say, that his master could not take him to Mecca with him on a pilgrimage (and I have met a sheikh who went to Mecca with six children and returned with none because he had sold them all, like a human traveller's cheque) but also that he could marry the girl he loved and that the children of that union would be born free.
My Lords, slavery exists throughout West Africa, concealed behind a legal code that asserts it has been abolished, like a cancer the doctors refuse to diagnose. French and British authorities are trying hard, and have tried hard, to stamp out slavery in the areas that are under their control. But as these African countries, one by one, gain their independence they are going to be forced to deal with the problems themselves. Now I believe that in West Africa, certainly, the problem is largely, or certainly partly, one of education—that is to say, the Tuareg noble has been brought up to believe that the Bela is his slave, and the Bela has been brought up to believe that the Tuareg is his master; to such an extent that a Bela slave who has left the camp but is still working in Timbuktu, when he has made enough money, will come back and buy his freedom from his master, even though he knows that, from the point of view of the law, he is a free man. So it is a question of education. But can these newly independent countries, such as Mauretania, Mali or Nigeria, afford this mass education? They have neither the money nor the people to do it. One might think that the answer was that the former tutelary Power should provide the experts. That, I think, would be disastrous; because, unfortunately, the tides of nationalism have tinged the peoples of Africa with a deep suspicion of the colonialist Powers. A group of English educational experts would therefore be immediately suspect in Nigeria, and a group of French experts—people
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well equipped to deal with the psychological problem of the Tuareg and their Bela—would be very suspect in Mali.
My Lords, what is the solution? I think it can only be, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Shackleton, through the United Nations. I should like to stress what he has said: that international Conventions are useless unless they have the machinery for supervising their application. An international Convention is a mere piece of paper if no agency exists for translating its terms into action. I believe that there should be a committee of experts to advise the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations on the decisions they should take about slavery each year. The members of this committee—no more than nine or ten—should be of different nationalities, and preferably not of the nationality of the former tutelary Power. They should be chosen for their knowledge of the problems concerned, and they should be there for an indefinite period to ensure continuity. They would be only advisory: the final decisions would still rest with the Economic and Social Council.
Lastly, I believe that every one of the experts and technicians and advisers needed by African countries should be sent to them by the United Nations. These people should be international not only in outlook but in fact—white or black, red, yellow or brown—and they should owe allegiance directly to the United Nations. I think they should go to the Africans as friends, not as patrons. Because, in the final analysis, to the Africans as well as to the Arabs, policies are less important than personalities; and, deep down, political equality is less important than social equality and friendship.
5.57 p.m.
LORD BIRDWOOD: My Lords, we have had quite a time to wait for a maiden speech from the noble Viscount, Lord Maugham, but I think our patience has been rewarded by what might be considered as a very notable contribution—notable, perhaps, because we have discovered one who takes the trouble to go out and see things for himself. In considering a great human problem such as slavery, the number of people in this country who can claim personal experience could be counted on the

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fingers of one hand; and all the more, then, are we lucky to have had Lord Maugham's eloquence and sincerity to support that personal experience and personal contact with conditions. In the midst of so many grave international situations, the chances to discuss this persistent scourge are few—because, as it seems, the problem is always with us. I find it rather a curious reflection on our interpretation of values to note that this afternoon a very important matter such as the road operations in the Perivale area of the Western Avenue was considered by a full House, whereas the evidence we have just heard was noted by a comparatively scarce House.
We live to-day with a studied campaign of vilification against Western Powers, accompanied as it is by a ceaseless barrage on the theme of colonialism; and a debate such as the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, has initiated tends, in my view, to restore our sense of balance and proportion in international affairs. For that reason it is extremely valuable. It helps to remind this House—and, through this House, the public outside that may be interested —that some of those whom we have heard most effective and most noisy in the campaign to which I have referred are themselves responsible for conditions so barbaric as should, in a world which should be governed by justice, challenge the whole question of their fitness for international status and nationhood—a question which the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, posed this afternoon. We have heard something about the technique in Saudi-Arabia. Last year, in the United Nations, some of us had to endure tedious hours of exaggerated oratory from the distinguished representative of Saudi-Arabia, and a constant arraignment of the Western Powers for their alleged crimes, political and humanitarian. Even more pointed did I find the circumstances which enabled a Power such as the Yemen to pontificate on the rights of the child. In October last year, the Third Committee spent several days trying to discover exactly when the rights of a child began. It is a topsy-turvy sort of world when representatives of a country which publicly displays its manacled prisoners chained together and where by no stretch of the imagination do adult men and
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women receive any rights whatsoever, are able to be taken seriously when they give their opinion on whether the rights of a child begin before or after birth.
We have to make a clear distinction between countries where slavery flourishes by consent, where authority chooses to look the other way, and where it is recognised by statutory arrangement, and other countries where slavery still persists, such as in Nigeria, but where the Administration are fully conscious of their duty in the matter and are doing their best to get on top of the problem. The latter deserve international sympathy and co-operation. The former deserve nothing better than organised international indignation. Even so, that indignation could yield to sympathy if we could be sure that the crime was recognised and that the country concerned was trying to set its house in order.
In referring to organised international indignation, I am throwing the whole weight of anything I can say in support of the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, for the developing of effective international machinery to deal with this crime. Only in this way can this running sore in the body of international society he healed. We have had our attention drawn to the need to include certain manifestations of slavery which hitherto have not been regarded as slavery within the terms of the 1926 Convention, and as a result we had the Supplementary Convention of September, 1956, which recognised practices similar to slavery as deserving legitimate inquiry. It is within this context that I think it appropriate merely to note that the present Slavery Convention was drafted by a commission of ten which included the Soviet Union.
I know that this is not the right time to spell out the long and tragic story of slave conditions behind the Iron Curtain. There will be other occasions for that. But, on the other hand, I think it would be quite unintelligent that we should neglect those conditions entirely that we should neglect the fact that the Power which actually contributed to the drafting of the Convention has been responsible for a vast network of slave camps and has been responsible for mass deportations from Hungary, the three liquidated Baltic States and Ruthenia. If anybody doubts the matter, they can

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study a publication of a perfectly respectable international organisation, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which has gone into the whole business. Where physical slavery has played itself out, so to speak, there mental slavery has taken over. The methods of operation may be those of mass production in contrast to private enterprise, as obtains in the Middle East, but the results are equally devastating. I repeat: if there is to be an international conscience in this matter, it is impossible that those conditions should be passed over—certainly not by any international machinery that is set up.
It is on the assumption that we have an international conscience in this matter that one asks whether the machine can be strengthened so as to make it more effective. In the last report of the Anti-Slavery Society, last month, the Director insisted (I think the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, referred to this) that while the Convention looks well enough on paper, it is meaningless in its implementation. One sentence from the report, I think, is sufficient to bring home this point:
"None of the States concerned, which are under an obligation to furnish the United Nations with information under Article 7 of the Slavery Convention of 1956, have done so and it is nobody's business to remind them of their obligation."
This, I suggest, indicates future conditions. The Director's solution is the appointment of either a small expert committee of three to five members—the noble Viscount, Lord Maugham, mentioned ten—or a single expert. The function would be to sit at the elbow of the Economic and Social Council, receive reports and information, interpret them, advise generally and operate as an expert pressure group in the international sense. I find this extremely sensible, but I want to suggest an extension of its function.
To drive home my point I shall have to make a diversion for a moment. Your Lordships will recall that under the trusteeship system those responsible for trustee territories have to receive every so often, about once every three years, a mission from the United Nations, which reports to the Trusteeship Council. In this way, we ourselves have received United Nations visitors in Togoland, the Cameroons and Tanganyika, and I think that on the whole we have managed to
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satisfy them. Surely' it is equally rational that a similar system of inspection should be introduced by the Economic and Social Council in attempting to get on top of this problem of slavery. Why should the administrative achievement of a district officer in Tanganyika be a matter for international concern and inquiry while barbaric practices committed by Africans in Timbuktu are exempt?
I rather suspect that the answer one might receive in putting forward this kind of proposal would be that if the representatives of the United Kingdom tabled a resolution in the Third Committee, they would not receive in terms of votes sufficient support to pass the resolution. I shall always be extremely unsympathetic to that kind of suggestion. If we agree that the machinery needs strengthening, surely it is our duty to put up measures which we believe would be effective for the purpose. The fact that the measures may not be accepted in no way exonerates us from our duty of putting them forward. One wonders how much would ever be achieved if everybody started counting heads before they put forward one sane and just proposal. The only man who dislikes the police court is the man who stands his trial. The only man who dislikes the customs office is the smuggler.
It may be of some interest and it might serve an international purpose, in my view, to know exactly who would support and who would resist the proposal for a small international team of experts charged with the duty of inspection on the spot where slavery is concerned. I should have thought that the modern generation of a land which gave birth to a Wilberforce and a Lugard would expect Her Majesty's Government to put pressure on the international organisation and exert positive leadership in supporting a measure which could go a long way to end slavery for all time.
6.10 p.m.
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, I want to say a few words in support of this suggestion put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton. Until I came here to-day my sole knowledge of what was going on in the slave traffic derived from what I have read in the Reports of the Anti-Slavery Society. But now we have had an extraordinarily vivid story

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told by the noble Viscount, Lord Maugham—and I should like to join in congratulating him upon a remarkable maiden speech containing a great deal of information on this matter which he has given to your Lordships—which confirms what one had read and what one thought, and shows how necessary it is for some such action as that suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, to be taken.
There are really horrifying stories of what goes on in the Arabian countries. Whether news of these conditions has been kept from us for commercial and economic reasons I do not know, but now we have been told what they are. They are shocking and frightening. One has heard of the tale of children being used as personal traveller's cheques by these wealthy sheikhs going on their pilgrimages; but now that it is confirmed by other noble Lords one sees that there is a great deal of truth behind these stories. What is even more frightening is that one realises that this traffic involves countries with which we are intimately connected. I know it is not their fault and they do their best to put down the traffic when it occurs, but that it should occur there at all shows how widespread it all is.
It was in December, 1949, when your Lordships were discussing a Bill to make a new planning of Parliament Square and there was a great amount of discussion about the Buxton Memorial Fountain which stood at the corner of George Street. We debated this fountain for some four or five hours because it was the one memorial put up in London to the anti-slavery movement. A great deal was then said by noble Lords about the great work Great Britain had done in the past to bring about the abolition of slavery in the world. I feel that your Lordships have given a very good follow-up from that debate to the debate that we are now having, and this shows that we still retain our great interest in the abolition of this appalling traffic.
It has been said by many people—but by nobody here, I am thankful to say—that the lot of the slave is not a bad one and he is far more comfortably taken care of than he would be if he were free, living in his own country. The same has been said sometimes about these
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countries that are now emerging from a state of benevolent paternalism under other countries. But it just is not true. People would far rather be free, even though not so well fed, so well housed or so well taken care of. Therefore I want to give all the support I can to the noble Lord who has put down this Question, and I trust that we shall get a satisfactory reply from the noble Marquess.
6.15 p.m.
LORD FARINGDON: My Lords, before I say one or two words on this Question, I take great pleasure in felicitating my noble friend Lord Maugham on a truly admirable and impressive maiden speech, both in form and in content: indeed, I would pay him the highest compliment in saying that it was the kind of speech that one would expect to hear from the bearer of his name. I rise only to say a few words and to draw attention to a problem which is a domestic one. Most of the instances which have been quoted to us this afternoon have concerned territories which are directly beyond our control, but there is one part within the frontiers of the Commonwealth where slavery, at any rate, until quite recently, did exist. I refer to the deplorable traffic in slaves up and down the coast river in Eastern Nigeria. I hope that when the noble Marquess comes to reply he may be able to tell me that that trade no longer exists, but only a few years ago I was assured that the trade in boys who were taken up the river and sold to farmers in French territory, and in girls who were taken down the river and sold to Fernando Po, was very lively and causing great anxiety to the administrators in the area. I was told that the principal opponent was a woman, who I believe is no longer in the territory. This is an example which is very close to us and one for which we are directly responsible, and I hope that when he comes to reply the noble Marquess will be able to assure me that it is already a thing of the past.
6.17 p.m.
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE): My Lords, I am sure we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, for having put down this Question. I think it is most important that this horrible subject should be

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ventilated. We have listened to extremely well-informed speeches. I should like to add my word of congratulation to the noble Viscount, Lord Maugham, on a remarkably well-informed and thought-out maiden speech. I would, however, at the outset of my remarks join issue with the noble Viscount when he says that he has the impression that the Foreign Office do not believe what is true—that was what I took him to be saying. Let me at once assure the noble Viscount that here he fell into error. We wish naturally to be the masters of the true facts but, as I am sure he will be the first to appreciate, they are not easily come by; and we are, of course, grateful to the noble Viscount for the trouble to which he has gone to obtain factual information on this very distressing subject.
As the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, who put down the Question said, we in this country, ever since the time of Wilberforce, have been in the lead in our efforts to obtain freedom for the individual. I can assure the noble Viscount that we feel as strongly now as ever we did. It was, as I know the noble Lord is fully aware, due to us that the 1956 Supplementary Slavery Convention was adopted, and there are 35 parties to it now. Her Majesty's Government, of course, consider, as I am sure do all noble Lords, that slavery in any form, whether or not the slave may be deemed to be more comfortable than he would perhaps be if he were free, is a degrading and terrible thing. But we have to bear in mind—and I was glad to hear this come out in the course of the remarks made by various noble Lords who have spoken—that it is largely a question of education that is going to be required so that the international conscience, to which the noble Lord, Lord Birdwood, referred, will be felt by all concerned.
In his original Question the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, asked what information was available to Her Majesty's Government on this question of the continued existence of slavery. As I have already said to the noble Viscount, it is difficult to get accurate official information. As was pointed out, where there is profit there will be risks taken; and as you have the sale of narcotics and noxious drugs and so on, so there exists—and we do not deny this—also slavery. If there is sufficient profit in
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it, alas! this terrible trade may continue covertly, however hard we all may try to uncover it.
Nevertheless, I think there are certain reasons for a degree of optimism. As your Lordships know, there have been reports of increasing numbers of prosecutions for slavery, for instance in the Nigerian courts. I do not think that that necessarily means that slavery itself is on the increase. I think it would probably be true to say that these increasing prosecutions have been brought about by a change of heart and a change of attitude. I think that the authorities have been more successful in their efforts because the public at large is more ready to report cases of slavery. So, in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Faringdon (though I do not pretend for a moment that the circumstances to which he referred in Eastern Nigeria no longer exist), I would say that there is a better climate of opinion, and that there is every likelihood that this terrible situation to which be referred, and of which I have some personal knowledge, having lived in French Equatorial Africa for some time, will be gradually improved. But I would not pretend for a moment that I believe it has entirely disappeared.
Under the Convention, one of the obligations of the signatories is that the parties should undertake to communicate to the Secretary General of the United Nations copies of any laws, regulations or administrative measures enacted or put into effect to implement the provisions of the Convention, and to give information of what is going on. As the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, reminded us, it is a regrettable fact but, alas! true, that only the United Kingdom has fulfilled this obligation. We do not believe that this instrument is perfect. I think that the observations made by the various speakers to-day should be seriously considered. I perfectly well appreciate that a Convention which, as it were, has no "teeth" in it, may risk being ineffective. But we have to consider that it is quite possible we should not have achieved this Supplementary Convention of 1956 at all if the establishment of a supervisory organisation had been insisted upon, because of the risk, as it might have seemed, of intervention in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State—the old argument with which we are all so familiar. But,

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we have to take life as it is, and it is quite possible that had these suggestions which have been made to-day been insisted upon in 1956, we might not have achieved a Convention at all.
I should like to say this to the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, on what occurred on July 12 in Geneva in the Social Committee. Our representative had instructions to raise this question of slavery at the meeting of the Economic and Social Council, and it is perfectly correct that in fact the question was raised first by Denmark. But I do not think the noble Lord should take us too much to task for that. It happened that Denmark spoke first. The representative of the United Kingdom spoke strongly in support, and was, in fact, the only other speaker. So the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, should not chide us too much over not having taken the initiative. The instructions were given, and it so happened that Denmark rose to speak first.
I am not going to commit Her Majesty's Government from this Despatch Box this evening to any dramatic change in our policy, but I can assure your Lordships that what has been said here will be carefully noted. I am quite certain that if the Secretary General of the United Nations should report that he considers it necessary that there should be consultants, some sort of special committee, to advise him on matters arising out of the implementation of the 1956 Convention and, in particular, out of reports that have been furnished by the signatory States, Her Majesty's Government would give such a proposal serious consideration. I cannot go further than that this evening.
I should like to thank noble Lords who have spoken, and I should like to repeat my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton. I do not suppose for one moment that he will be satisfied with what I have said, but I can assure him that careful note is being taken. I believe he knows full well that what has been achieved already has taken time. What is still left to be done will also take time. But there is no question of an ostrich-like approach by Her Majesty's Government to this problem. We do not wish to conceal from ourselves the facts, and certainly we shall continue in the same way as ever to do
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everything we can to ensure the freedom of the individual which, after all, is one of the basic principles of our ideals.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, while I have no right of reply, may I ask the noble Marquess a supplementary question? As he said, he did not expect me to be satisfied, although we are always charmed by his replies. In view of the really brilliant speech of my noble friend Lord Maugham, and the evidence which has been put forward, and in view of the noble Marquess's own statement, that we should take life as we find it, would he not consider stimulating the Secretary General of the United Nations, and indeed finding out whether he regards himself as empowered to ask for the setting up of such a committee without a further Motion? I do not want to make a speech. Again I pay tribute to what was done in 1956. What we are asking is what further steps the Government might take, and whether they could take those through the Secretary General.
THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE: My Lords, the noble Lord is probably right in saying that he was breaking the rules, but never mind. I am unable to give a straight reply to that question, but I repeat what I have said already: that I have taken very careful note of what the noble Lord has said. I can go no further.

GLOUCESTER AND SHARPNESS CANAL (WATER) BILL
Brought from the Commons; read la, and referred to the Examiners.
ESSEX COUNTY COUNCIL (FULLBRIDGE, MALDON) BILL [H.L.]
  PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF ENGLAND BILL [H.L.]
  Returned from the Commons, agreed to with Amendments: the said Amendments considered and agreed to.
  TYNE TUNNEL BILL
  Reported, with Amendments.
  LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL (MONEY) BILL
  Reported, without amendment.
  CROYDON CORPORATION BILL
  Reported, with Amendments.

  NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE CORPORATION BILL
  Reported from the Select Committee, with Amendments.
  House adjourned at half-past six o'clock.