Lords Sitting of 18 November 1965

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Southwark

INFLAMMABLE NIGHTDRESSES
3.5 p.m.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: 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 are in a position to make a statement concerning the effect that The Children's Nightdresses Regulations 1964 have had on the relevant accident figures and whether it is proposed to extend these Regulations to nightdresses for the elderly.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD STONHAM): My Lords, the Children's Nightdresses Regulations came into operation on October 1, 1964. During the following six months, four girls under the age of fifteen died as a result of their nightwear catching alight. This compared with ten during the same period in the preceding year. Particulars of non-fatal accidents are not available. The reduction in the number of these tragic deaths is encouraging, but I cannot say with certainty how far it has been due to the Regulations. The possibility of extending the scope of the Regulations to other children's garments, to nightwear for the elderly and to material sold in the piece is being considered by a Working Party which my right honourable and learned friend has set up for this purpose.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that Answer. May I ask him whether he will arrange that the Home Office Working Party will discuss the problem of flammability and nightdresses for the elderly as a first priority, because I understand that it is low on their list at the
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moment? Secondly, so as to expedite this inquiry, will he arrange that their discussions shall be limited to nightdresses for the elderly and not clothing in general?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot give that assurance. Nor can I confirm what my noble friend said about the question of nightdresses for the elderly being low on the list. It is certainly a matter which the Working Party is considering, and on which we hope to have its views as quickly as possible.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: May I ask my noble friend whether he is aware that his answer is not really satisfactory? I fully realise that he will have to check whether my information is correct. If it happens that it is correct, would not it be good idea if he, as Minister at the Home Office, would ask this Working Party to upgrade this matter to one of first priority rather than leave it, as I suggest it is at the moment, a low one?
LORD STONHAM: As Minister with direct responsibility for this matter, I will certainly look into what my noble friend has said. The Working Party has already met three times, and is working hard on this subject and related ones. We hope to hear from it quite soon. I ask my noble friend to realise that this is not the only priority, important as it is. A few days ago a small child was burned to death because it was wearing a nightdress made up from material by the mother. This also is another matter which we regard as having a high priority.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: I am sorry to rise for a third time, but my noble friend has now gone on to a different tack. May I ask whether he would agree that, while everybody wishes to help in this matter, it surely is not practical to suggest that all materials sold in shops should be non-flammable, or alternatively, that anyone can control the material used by people who make up garments at home?
LORD STONHAM: I must remind my noble friend that she started off by asking me to confine the work of the Working Party to safeguards for nightwear for elderly people—
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: No, I am sorry. On a point of order, my Lord. I asked my noble friend to upgrade it, not to confine it.
LORD STONHAM: Then I misunderstood my noble friend. I would merely point out that there are other matters which some people regard as extremely urgent and important. With regard to the last part of her question, I visited Courtaulds at Coventry a few weeks ago, and they do not share the view expressed by my noble friend that there is no hope of making arrangements for supplying materials of low flammability. This matter is now the subject of consideration by them and by the Working Party, and we hope for favourable results.

CLOSE SEASON FOR PARTRIDGE SHOOTING
3.8 p.m.
LORD DERWENT: 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 on what grounds they have rejected the representations made to them that the close season for the shooting of partridges should be extended.]
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, in 1954 the Gamekeepers' Association of the United Kingdom proposed that, in order to arrest a decline in the partridge population, the close season for shooting, which is now from February 1 to August 31, should be extended to include the month of January and the first fortnight in September. In April last the British Field Sports Society urged that the proposed extension should be limited to the month of January. It did not, however, appear to Her Majesty's Government that the proposal commanded support among all the interests involved or that voluntary restrictions on shooting would not suffice to achieve the desired object. Legislation would be required to alter the close season, and I cannot hold out any hope of Government legislation for this purpose.
LORD DERWENT: The noble Lord mentioned "interested parties". Is he aware that the Field Sports Association,
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the Country Landowners' Association and the Gamekeepers' Association are all in favour of shortening the shooting season for partridges? Then at the end of his reply the noble Lord said that this would require legislation. May I ask him, if a Private Member's Bill were introduced, what attitude the Home Office would take towards it? Would they help with the Bill?
LORD STONHAM: I am aware, of course, that the bodies mentioned by the noble Lord are in favour of extending the close season. I have reason to believe that the partridges also are in favour of this. On the other hand, the Wild Fowlers' Association of Great Britain and Ireland indicated strong reservations, and the Nature Conservancy reserves its position. This is, therefore, a very controversial matter. With regard to legislation, I cannot commit the Government in advance, but it is likely that the Government would adopt a neutral attitude to this matter, if a Private Member's Bill were introduced. Obviously, in the present congested state of the legislative programme we could not give priority to this subject.
LORD DERWENT: My Lords, may I ask how many partridges are shot by wildfowlers?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, the noble Lord may ask, but without notice of the question I cannot reply.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: My Lords, arising out of the original Question and the replies by the Minister, are Her Majesty's Government aware that this proposed curtailment of the shooting season for partridges is not approved by the Shooting Committee of the British Field Sports Association and by sportsmen generally; and, secondly, that the lamentable reduction in the number of partridges throughout the country cannot be attributed to a long shooting season, but to a succession of bad breeding years and the use of toxic chemicals?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, what the noble Earl has said confirms me in my view that this is a very controversial matter. In regard to the second part of his question, I entirely agree that the shortage of partridges may be due not so much to over-shooting as to changes in farming methods, the increase of arable

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land, fewer hedgerows and, as the noble Earl said, the increased use of pesticides.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, the Minister referred to the partridge population. We also hear from time to time of the pig population. Would it be possible for Her Majesty's Government to give a complete list of the animals they consider people?
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, will my noble friend advise the Government to resist this clamour from the Party opposite for stricter and stricter controls?

BUSES IN CENTRAL LONDON
LORD INGLEWOOD: 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 can give any information on the prospects of increasing the number of buses running in Central London.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT (LORD LINDGREN): My Lords, I am informed by the London Transport Board that, while their schedules should provide a sufficient number of buses in Central London to meet the demand, traffic congestion and staff shortages do interfere with the regularity of services. Since the noble Lord's previous Question on this subject, the Greater London Council, at the Minister's invitation, set up a Working Party with the Metropolitan Police and the London Transport Board to consider ways in which further traffic management measures could help to improve the Board's bus services. Their report has been endorsed by the Greater London Council.
LORD INGLEWOOD: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply. While I appreciate that traffic makes the keeping of timetables very difficult, will the noble Lord look again into this matter to see that the existing services really meet demand? One would think that if a public transport service in the centre of a great city were really to meet the needs of that city, buses should run more frequently than they do in Central London to-day.
LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH: My Lords, if this Committee has reported, would the noble Lord give us the benefit of the suggestions they have made for curing this problem, which, he has informed the House, the Greater London Council have endorsed?
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, if I may, with due respect to the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, deal with the questions in reverse, I would say that the report to the Greater London Council was publicly discussed in the Council and there were Press reports, but I will try to get a copy of the report for the noble Lord. The report is in two sections. First of all, it gives short-term methods—control of parking, one-way streets, no right turns, clearways, et cetera. I am convinced, and so is the Minister, that the only long-term solution will depend on the restriction of traffic on roads where buses operate, but that is a very difficult problem and it is on this that the Working Party are at work, in conjunction with the Ministry.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: My Lords, are the Government aware that today, between 12 and 1, there was practically a complete cessation of traffic everywhere eastwards of Park Lane and a complete and utter jam? And will they take steps to try to improve the distribution and flow of traffic in Central London before they consider adding more buses to the number which already cause so much congestion?
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, we are approaching Christmas, and whatever else Christmas does, it adds to traffic problems in London. But it is the increase in the motor car population—if I can use the word again—that causes the problem. If we are going to get the free flow of traffic which is essential for public transport, I am convinced that private cars will have to be restricted over many routes.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that there was something like twelve buses, nose to tail, up Park Lane to-day, blocking all other traffic coming into or out of the side streets?
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, no doubt the noble Earl would also have noticed that there were about a hundred cars with one person in each.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, may I ask the Government what consideration is being given to the provision of traffic lanes exclusively reserved for buses and taxis, as in Paris, where they have proved a success? And if Her Majesty's Government are favourably considering the adoption of such a suggestion, would not the logical outcome of such a decision be that the police should be empowered to have on-the-spot fining of anyone contravening such regulations?
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, in regard to the Paris experiments, I would say that this was part of what I meant by traffic restraint. Part of the plan would be to keep free lanes for bus traffic. In regard to the imposition of fines on the spot, the question ought to be directed more to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor than to me.
LORD HAWKE: My Lords, will the noble Lord call the attention of the London Transport Board to the fact that their No. 11 buses, in spite of all the talk, still run in all too infrequent convoys?
LORD LINDGREN: Yes, my Lords. But may I take this opportunity of paying a compliment to the London bus driver? He works under extremely difficult operating conditions, in addition to which his conditions of service are very difficult indeed—early mornings, late nights, split turns—and in these traffic conditions he does an extremely good job courteously and to the consideration of other traffic.
LORD HAWKE: My Lords, with all respect, this particular point has nothing to do with the drivers. It concerns the inspectors, whose job it is to regulate the running of the buses.
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, the obvious method of traffic control is the turn-round. If you turn round at Aldwych a bus which is going to Hackney Wick, then between Aldwych and Hackney Wick there will be a bus short.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, as it is not possible for me to put a question to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, may I ask the noble Lord whether his Department would stress to the Home Office the advantage of having on-the-spot fines? Otherwise, if the
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Government do adopt the system in use in Paris these regulations would be contravened if fines could not be imposed immediately when motorists and other road users contravened such regulations.
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, that would involve changing the British attitude towards the imposition of a penalty for a wrong-doing. But I will certainly call the attention of the Home Office to it, and we could discuss it in relation to the Bill which is to be brought forward either towards the end of this year or early next year.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, does the noble Lord recognise that no question from this side has in any way criticised the conduct of bus drivers, who we agree have a difficult task to perform? I noted the noble Lord's remarks about bus drivers, but there has certainly been no criticism of their conduct from this side. At the same time, could the noble Lord give an assurance that greater steps will be taken, if possible, to ensure that these convoys, which do cause great irritation, are broken up into smaller fragments?
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Viscount, and I am more than sorry if I appeared to imply that the questions from the other side were critical of the bus driver. But I was given an opportunity to pay a compliment to the bus driver, and questions in regard to services naturally reflect to an extent on those who operate them. If a bus is late, the fellow one usually swears at is the conductor or the driver. We will certainly consider all the points that have been raised and do our best to implement some of them.
LORD SALTOUN: My Lords, may I ask whether it is not the case that all questions in this House are asked of Her Majesty's Government and it is entirely a matter of indifference whether they are answered by a noble Lord on the Government Front Bench or by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, provided that we get the right answer?
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE EARL OF LONG FORD): My Lords, the noble Lord is an outstanding authority on the Rules and conventions of the House and I entirely agree with what he has just said.

RHODESIA: MONITORING OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
3.24 p.m.
LORD COLERAINE: 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, when the Prime Minister telephoned Mr. Ian Smith on the morning of 11th November, Mr. Smith had been informed that the call was being monitored.]
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: No, my Lords. It was self-evident that an exceptional telephone call of the kind which took place in the very special circumstances of the morning of November 11 would be listened to in order that an accurate record should be available.
LORD COLERAINE: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl whether it is not self-evident from the transcript, whatever reservations the Prime Minister may have had, and not self-evident from the candour, some might think the damaging candour, of Mr. Smith's reply, that he had no idea that whatever he was saying was going to be taken down and used against him? May I ask the noble Earl this further question? Does he know of any other Government, except, of course, the Russian, which would publish something that is clearly a confidential exchange, without the permission of the other party to the exchange?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, of course I cannot say for certain whether the telephone call was listened to at Mr. Smith's end. We assumed that it was being listened to, and there is evidence to bear out that it was in subsequent statements by Mr. Smith. That answers the first part. About the second question the noble Lord put, I am sorry to say that I find it remarkably insulting to the present Government to imply that we should stoop to conduct which no other country in the world but Russia would stoop to. The answer is that it is to be regarded as a natural thing to do in the circumstances.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My My Lords, are we to understand that, not only before, but after this conversation,
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Mr. Smith was not told of the monitoring, and that he was not asked to check any conversation which was afterwards to be published? That would seem to be a very unusual procedure for any Government.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, as the noble Marquess has intervened, perhaps I might call attention to something that he said in the debate on Monday. He said:
"We have had two accounts of those discussions, one from Mr. Wilson and one from Mr. Smith; and, as so often on occasions like this, they differ widely."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 270 (No. 4), col. 269; 15/11/65.]
He later said:
"I therefore cannot personally accept sans phrase, the Prime Minister's account of what emerged from the discussions."—[Col. 269.]
if anybody was going to raise that kind of point, that he could not accept the Prime Minister's account, it seems to me particularly fortunate that a check was taken.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, I was referring to a statement made by Mr. Smith in his broadcast. I do not know what the House thinks, but to me this is a very unusual procedure. I have never heard of it happening before in our history on an important matter.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, of course the situation here was very unusual. No doubt there would not have been publication of this kind in the ordinary way, if U.D.I. had not followed. But here we were dealing with a rebellion, which happens very seldom, and this exceptional step was necessary. Since Mr. Smith has come into it—and I have no desire to make further criticism of him at the moment—I would say that he did not hesitate to give an account of his discussions with the Governor shortly after they had taken place.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, while recognising the desirability of a record being kept of conversations between Prime Ministers—and this is always done in one form or another—is not the real question here whether the account was published with Mr. Smith's consent or without his consent? Could the noble Earl say whether in the course of the conversation, or afterwards, Mr. Smith was asked to agree to the record being published, or whether any approach was made to him?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, the answer is that, to the best of my belief, he was not asked for his agreement. By that time he had become a rebel, and a new situation had been created.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: No.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: That is the position: a new situation had been created, and therefore the ordinary procedure was not followed. I do not suppose for one moment that if the noble Viscount's Government had been in power they would have followed it.
LORD GLENDEVON: My Lords, would it not be better to accept the position that, even regarding somebody who had put himself out of court (if you like to say it like that) as Mr. Smith had, at a crisis or at any other time, for those in the sort of position he was in, talking to the Prime Minister of this country, it must be possible to have confidential telephone conversations without their being published unless they agree to it?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I must return to the point I made to the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury. On Monday the noble Marquess said that we could not be sure if Mr. Wilson's account was correct or incorrect. If that point was to be made, then it was invaluable to have this record. I assure the noble Lord that it was entirely normal that this conversation should be listened to. The only question—and the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, raised this—was whether publication would be normal; and the answer is that it would not be normal without the permission of the other party, and it would not have occurred on this occasion unless there had been a U.D.I. This kind of thing has frequently occurred in the past.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, are we, as Parliamentarians and sophisticated people, really being asked to believe that a Prime Minister in these circumstances is so naive that he does not anticipate in the first case that the conversation is being recorded, and also—again, in these circumstances—that the conversation, if necessary, will be given publicity? I really feel that this is under-
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estimating our intelligence as Parliamentarians.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: I agree entirely with the noble Baroness. No one, surely, would object to the Prime Minister giving his own account of this conversation, and if this account is to be given, is it not much better to have a record in addition?
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Earl does not wish to misrepresent me, but I did not say that I doubted the truth of what the Prime Minister said. I said he did not tell the whole truth. My point was that there was another element in this situation, and that was the great mistrust which the Rhodesians had of British Governments in general. I never suggested that the Prime Minister had himself—the noble Earl may not agree—said what was incorrect.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: I think the noble Marquess has distorted my words. As he will find in Hansard, I did not accuse him of any such thing. I did say that there was this great difficulty. Here one had two men giving their own accounts, and one could not be sure which was right. As so often happens on occasions like this, he said that the accounts differed widely.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: My Lords, without in any way approving the action of Mr. Smith and his Government, which I regret, are we to understand that in future, when Her Majesty's present Government hold a confidential conversation with members of another Government, they will have to bear in mind that the line may be tapped and the conversation recorded?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, all Governments use their discretion in this matter.
LORD COLERAINE: My Lords, arising out of the question put by the noble Baroness, and the reply of the noble Earl, may I ask him how he sees the possibility of diplomatic negotiations when confidential exchanges are published by one side within a very few hours of their taking place? Does he not also realise that one day Her Majesty's Government will have to treat with Rhodesia? How can he expect those on the other side of

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the table to have any confidence in Her Majesty's Government?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I am rather shocked at the way the noble Lord talked about the suspicions held in Rhodesia about this Government and, for that matter, the Governments of their own colleagues recently. Personally, I would rather trust the word of any British Government of the last ten years than the words of some gentleman we have been criticising in recent days.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD GARDINER): My Lords, as I was there, perhaps it might assist the House if I said that, during the discussions with the representatives of the Rhodesian Cabinet (and I think your Lordships will find this in the record), when we were trying to agree with them on the publication of the record of the discussions, it was made plain to them that of course if there was a U.D.I. we should regard ourselves free to publish anything we liked.
LORD COLERAINE: My Lords, arising out of what the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has said, is it not the case that those documents certainly contain, in various places, a declaration that such-and-such a discussion would have to be published in the event of a U.D.I.? I would ask the noble Earl, or the noble and learned Lord, whether, in their judgment, reading those documents, any reference to publication could conceivably cover this telephone conversation?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I should say that it was entirely in keeping with the general approach that this telephone conversation should be published. I am sorry to repeat myself, because the noble Lord and I do not seem to understand one another as well as usual this afternoon. I cannot believe that the noble Lord would seriously suggest that the Prime Minister should not give an account of that telephone conversation. May I rub that in? When the negotiations hung in the balance, most people agreed that he was right to conduct the telephone conversation. It was surely right, beyond all question, to give his account of it, and surely right also, if the argument carries me as far as that, to confirm that by means of a document of this sort.
LORD COLERAINE: Would it not have been perfectly possible for the Prime Minister, at the beginning of that telephone conversation, to adopt the same line that he adopted in Rhodesia, as the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, pointed out, to say to Mr. Smith: "Look here, I want to talk to you, but I had better let you know that if we break down I am going to publish this conversation, as I am going to publish the other documents"? Would the noble Earl not agree with me, reading the transcript, that it was quite evident that Mr. Smith could have had no idea that what he was saying was going to be published?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I do not agree with that. I am bound to say frankly to the noble Lord that a good many of us—I do not know how many in this House, but I am certainly one of them—resent the tone of his remarks about the Prime Minister.
LORD GLENDEVON: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl a question about the future, because it is important? I know as well as the noble Earl the difficulties in which the Government have been over this crisis—of course I do. There may be a time, sooner or later, when somebody important in Rhodesia is going to want to talk to the Prime Minister by telephone. Are we to understand that he is not going to be certain whether the Prime Minister of the day, whoever he may be, is not going to publish that conversation?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I am afraid that I regard that as a somewhat slighting comment. All Ministers who have to take part in these long-distance calls know what is likely to happen.
LORD COLYTON: My Lords, as these questions have gone rather wide of the original Question, may I ask this supplementary? Why was it that Mr. Johnston, the British High Commissioner, was given strict instructions, when he conveyed the last oral message from Mr. Wilson to the Rhodesian Government at 7.30 p.m. on November 10, to leave nothing in writing at all, in spite of the fact that he was repeatedly pressed to do so?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, the noble Lord said that the questions had gone very wide and, therefore, he was entitled to go wider. I am afraid that I do not agree with him.

RHODESIA: PURPORTED DISMISSAL OF THE GOVERNOR
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, may I ask Her Majesty's Government the Question of which I have given Private Notice: namely, Whether they will make a Statement about the purported dismissal of Her Majesty's Governor in Rhodesia by the Smith régime in Salisbury?
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, my noble friend the Leader of the House will be answering that Question in a few moments, for reasons which the noble and learned Viscount will understand.
May I say, also, that my noble friend Lord Snow will be making a statement on the Inner London Education Authority.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL ORDER 1965
3.38 p.m.
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF TECHNOLOGY (LORD SNOW): My Lords, I beg to move that the Draft Social Science Research Council Order 1965, laid before the House on October 27 last, be approved. It now appears to fall to me to lull the House. The terms of reference of the Committee on Social Science under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Heyworth, were to review the research at present being done in the field of social studies and to advise whether changes were needed in the arrangements for support and co-ordination. The Committee advised that such changes were needed, and put forward as their chief recommendation the establishment of a Social Science Research Council. The Government's acceptance of this recommendation in principle was announced in both Houses: of Parliament on June 2. On August 5, the House of Commons was informed that Dr. Michael Young had accepted an invitation to become Chairman of a Social Science Research Council, and on November 2 the
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names of the fourteen members were announced; and noble Lords will no doubt have seen them.
It will be recalled that, while subsection (1)(c) of Section 1 of the Science and Technology Act 1965 provides for the establishment of new Research Councils, subsection (4) of that section requires that no recommendation shall be made to Her Majesty to make an Order in Council declaring a body to be a Research Council for the purposes of the Act unless a draft of the Order has first been laid before Parliament and approved by a Resolution of each House. Specific references were made during the debate on the Second Reading of the Science and Technology Bill (Hansard, December 11, 1964, cols. 1980–1981) to the possible application of this section to a Social Science Research Council. On October 29, Her Majesty was pleased to order that the Social Science Research Council be incorporated by Royal Charter. The approval of the House is now sought for this draft Order, which specifies the objects of the Council and declares it to be a Research Council for the purposes of the Science and Technology Act.
There is a rather long history to all this. In 1946 a Committee under the chairmanship of Sir John Clapham considered whether additional provision was needed for research into sociological and economic questions, and decided that at the moment there was not a case for a Social Science Research Council. They argued that the chief need was more provision for routine research. I think it is fair to say that since that time we have lagged markedly behind the United States of America in the field of social studies.
However, that Report led to some effort on the part of the Government and the University Grants Committee to foster growth in this field. Over the period 1947 to 1952, £1·2 million, or slightly more, was allocated to universities specifically for the social sciences. This gave an impetus, particularly to the teaching of the subject, which has had far-reaching effects. Most universities in this country now offer social sciences, and the proportion of undergraduates entering social science faculties has risen steadily from 11 per cent. in 1959–1960 to 14 per cent. in 1964–65. Postgraduate students

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have increased at least as fast as this. Of course it is part of the function of university teaching staff to carry out research and, in addition, some have developed special centres to co-ordinate interdisciplinary research in the social sciences. The Heyworth Committee found that many of these centres were well-established and that the provision for research was more stable and wider in scope than when the Clapham Committee reported.
There have been corresponding developments outside the university field. The number of research institutions outside universities concerned with various social studies has increased since 1945 from 7 to 18. Industry and commerce have played a large part in financing some of these institutions, and are employing more and more social science graduates; and central and local government departments and agencies have been showing much awareness of the significance of the social sciences.
The Heyworth Committee estimated that the total expenditure on research in these subjects for 1964–65 was running at about £6½ million. Judged in the light of these developments, the Hey-worth Committee decided that the social sciences were ready to move to a new level of performance, and that there was a need for resources to support not only applied research but also research which held special promise for future development. For this the appropriate co-ordinating body is clearly a Research Council.
The Committee has recommended that the Council should consist of an independent Chairman appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science, and that the majority of the members should be social scientists, but that some members should possess practical experience in industry, and the Central Government should be represented on the Council and on these Committees by assessors. This is perfectly in line with the form of the established Research Councils. The objects of the Council should be to provide support for research in the social sciences, to keep under review the state of research in those sciences, to advise the Government on the needs of social science research, and so on—in other words all the normal func-
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tions of a Research Council except direct research itself. So the Government have concluded that the broad field involved calls for a somewhat larger membership than the Heyworth Committee actually recommended: that is, the Chairman plus fourteen, rather than the Chairman plus ten or twelve.
They accept in general the proposed functions and powers of the Council. These are embodied essentially in Article 2(1) of the Charter, and in the Schedule to this Draft Order, which is drawn up in terms similar to those which appear in the Charters of other Research Councils. More so than in the case of other Research Councils, the Social Science Research Council will be breaking new ground, and its first task will be to decide in detail its own programme of activities and its methods of working. No doubt it will concentrate initially on the support of research now being carried out in the universities and elsewhere, and on providing a focal point for the co-ordination and dissemination of information. The Council will not for the time being set up research units of its own.
One of the Council's problems will be to define its own sphere of operations. The term "social science" covers a number of disciplines and fields. Economics is one of the major ones, sociology is another, social psychology, social anthropology and political science. These will be the main immediate concern of the Council. But the field upon which these studies impinge is wider, and it will be the task of the Council to co-ordinate its work with that of other bodies, including the existing Research Councils. The Council will be assuming some of the functions hitherto carried out by the Human Sciences Committee of the Science Research Council and the Department of Education and Science in regard to post-graduate student awards. The precise demarcation of responsibilities will obviously be a matter for examination by all the bodies concerned when the Social Science Research Council becomes operative.
These arrangements will include the appointment of assessors from Government Departments, as I said before, as well as the representation of the Council on inter-departmental Committees concerned with research in the social sciences

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undertaken or commissioned by Government Departments. Of this there is quite a deal, and this kind of inter-weaving is common practice in the relations of existing Research Councils and Government Departments. The precise arrangements will be for discussion and agreement with the Council in each case.
The Government wish to reiterate their gratitude to Lord Heyworth and his Committee for a penetrating and comprehensive contribution to knowledge in this vital and comparatively new field. I personally should like to say how important I believe both their recommendations and the future work suggested will inevitably be. I commend this Order to the House in the conviction, which I share with the Heyworth Committee, that investment here will in the course of time—and not too long a time—be more than repaid by the improvement in the efficiency of the national economy and also in the quality of our national life. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Social Science Research Council Order 1965, laid before the House on October 27 last, be approved.—(Lord Snow.)
3.49 p.m.
THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH: My Lords, we are most grateful to the noble Lord for giving us this detailed statement explaining this particular Order. He has answered many of the questions which I was going to put to him. We are particularly grateful to him because it was we, on this side of the House, who appointed the Heyworth Committee, and we are glad that its recommendations are to be implemented. I would repeat what we said in this House in June of this year, when we expressed our gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Heyworth, and his colleagues for their work.
I wish to ask the noble Lord whether he could expand a little on the objects of the Council as given in the schedule, which are very brief indeed and do not perhaps give a clear idea of the wide scope of this work. I think he has given us a good description of the work in which the Council will be involved. There were always people who felt that the social sciences were already covered in the other Research Councils and in the universities, and some thought that this was sufficient; but I think a good case has been made out for co-ordination,
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which is, after all, the object of this Council. As the noble Lord said, it is not going to have any new units of its own, which I think is good. I also think it is good that Her Majesty's Government are to be represented on the Council, and perhaps this accounts to some extent for the larger membership of it. All I can say is that we wish Dr. Young and all his colleagues well in their work, and I hope we shall be able to have some sort of debate on it, perhaps at a later date.
There is one point I want to ask the noble Lord. Under the Summary of Principal Conclusions and Recommendations of the Heyworth Report, No. V, it is stated that expenditure of the Council may be of the order of £600,000 during the first year and £1,100,000 during the second, and that it would rise in the fourth year to £2¼ million. It says that not all this is new expenditure. I do not know whether the noble Lord is now able to give more of a breakdown of these fairly considerable sums. If not, I leave it to him to communicate with me. We welcome this Order.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Snow said he was going to lull us with his speech. He did not lull me; he got me hopping mad. I am sorry to be so emotional after his quiet remarks, but I had read the Schedule to this excellent Order and was greatly encouraged. I thought it was first class, setting out things I had been hoping for for years. Then he gets up and says it is not doing anything, not going to have any bearing on direct research, it is going to be a co-ordinating body. If that is it, we have been "had" again. Some of us have been fighting for a Social Science Research Council for twenty years. My noble friend Lady Wootton of Abinger and I, since we have been in this House, which is not twenty years, have certainly fought hard for a Social Science Research Council and we think this is a great day; we think this is "it", when we have won at last—at least, we did until my noble friend Lord Snow started talking. I am sure he feels as passionately as I do about social science, because this is one of the ways we can move mankind forward; it is one of the great hopes for mankind.
The noble Lord, Lord Adrian made a wonderful statement about the value of social research as the most important

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kind of scientific development now. The noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, said it was about the most important thing for the future of mankind. I have believed this for years. And social research is frightfully hard to do, because we are researching about our own behaviour, finding out how and why we behave, and nobody likes knowing the truth about himself. It is very difficult stuff, and this is why the official creation of a Social Science Research Council, to stand alongside our great Medical Research Council, is, or ought to be, and I hope still is, an event of historic importance. When your Lordships were discussing the Science and Technology Bill and the Heyworth Report I was chained, gagged and confined down on the Front Bench. I did not like it a bit. Not that I was in any disagreement.
THE EARL OF SWINTON: My Lords, may I ask the Leader of the House if this is a marathon between the noble Lord, Lord Snow, and his noble friend behind to see who can occupy most time in what was supposed to be a Statement and question?
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (LORD CHAMPION): My Lords, this is the moving of an Order. It has been moved, will now be discussed and eventually my noble friend Lord Snow will reply.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, had it been a question, I certainly should have shut up long ago. It is, in fact, a very important Order, making a great step forward in the history of our little Island. I remember the last time I addressed your Lordships on this subject, six years ago. My old friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth poured cold water on me from a great height. He was a very conservative Socialist in some respects, and certainly social research was not one of the things he really liked. I am pleased and proud that a Labour Government should have created the Social Science Research Council in so short a time and, if I may say so, should have put Dr. Michael Young in charge of it, because I cannot help feeling that if the noble Lord, Lord Snow, thinks it is going to pursue the pedestrian course that he has described in Dr. Michael Young he will have a great surprise. Dr. Young is not that
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sort of person; nor, for that matter, is the noble Lord, Lord James of Rusholme, who is on the Council.
There is a very important part of this Order in the Schedule which is paragraph (b): "to provide and operate services for common use" in social research. The Government already have a service for common use in social research, the Government's Social Survey. I spent a large part of the war helping to create this Survey, and it had a chequered career; it was nearly wound up three times. But it is, in fact, an extremely useful piece of social research machinery, and I do not believe any other country in the world has the benefit of being able to do social research whenever the Government require it. I see the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, nods agreement. It works as a common service for any Department needing social survey investigations, and it is located in the C.O.I.—quite the wrong place; it is for historic reasons it is there. The proper place is under the Social Science Research Council, where it will be available not only for Departmental investigations but also non-Departmental studies which the Council may consider worth while in the public interest; and it will thus bear the same relation to the Social Science Research Council as the National Institute for Medical Research bears to the Medical Research Council. I hope as soon as the Social Science Research Council has settled down Her Majesty's Government will give consideration to putting the Social Survey under its control.
I hope the Social Science Research Council is going to act courageously, that it is not going to funk investigating topical and difficult subjects, and that it is not going to churn out dull reports but is going to be vigorous and energetic and tackle things that matter, because unless it does it will not be any good. I think my right honourable friend the, Minister for Science and Education has chosen well in choosing Dr. Michael Young to be its Chairman; I believe he has chosen the man for the job.
LORD HASTINGS: My Lords, may I take the opportunity of congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, on his voluntary translation from the Front Bench to the Back Bench?
On Question, Motion agreed to.

INNER LONDON EDUCATION AUTHORITY
3.58 p.m.
LORD SNOW: My Lords, I think this might be a convenient moment for me to make a Statement. In fact, I thought of interrupting myself fifteen minutes ago and setting up some sort of a modest record; but sterner counsels prevailed. This Statement is similar to that which has just been made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Educacation and Science on the Inner London Education Authority. It is as follows:
"The London Government Act transferred to this Authority responsibility for education and the Youth Employment Service in the Inner London area on a provisional basis. The Act imposed upon my right honourable friend, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, an obligation to carry out a review of the arrangements relating to education and to lay a report before Parliament not later than 31st March, 1970. A corresponding obligation in relation to the Youth Employment Service was imposed on my right honourable friend the Minister of Labour.
"The Government have been examining these arrangements. The Education Service and the Youth Employment Service of the I.L.E.A. are soundly organised and efficiently administered. The Government are convinced that any disruption or fragmentation of these services would be bound to lead to a lowering of standards. It appears essential, in the interests of sound local government, to preserve the long-established unified service of educational administration in the London area, and hence to confirm the position of the I.L.E.A.
"The Government have therefore decided to introduce legislation giving permanent effect to those provisions of the London Government Act 1963 which transfer to the I.L.E.A. the responsibility for Education and the Youth Employment Service in London. The legislation will repeal those provisions of the Act which require my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science and my right honourable friend the Minister of Labour to carry out a review of the
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arrangements made by the Act and to report on them to Parliament. The Government wish to make their intention clear now, in advance of legislation, because there is evidence of a growing feeling of insecurity among teachers and other staff employed by the Authority. Any review would take a long time to complete, and would inevitably have an unsettling effect. This uncertainty about the future must be removed, and the Authority itself must be given confidence to embark on long-term plans without the threat of further upheaval."
THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH: My Lords, I am again most grateful to the noble Lord for having made this Statement. I think that the measures that are proposed make good administrative sense; but I hope that, none the less, the wishes and interests of those in the boroughs will always be taken into account and that we shall keep some form of consultation with the parents. I think that is good. All in all, I think it makes sense. I hope the Minister is aware that many people, who agree that the balance of advantages lies with the need for a local education authority within the London area, would none the less not wish to rule out the possibility of the London boroughs participating directly in the Inner London Education Service—for example, over the appointment of school managers. We welcome this Statement. The only other question I should like to ask is whether it is proposed to introduce relevant legislation in another place or in this House during this Session?
LORD HENLEY: My Lords, we on the Liberal Benches welcome this Statement. I do not know whether the noble Lord opposite is aware, as I rather think is the case, that my honourable friends in another place moved Amendments along these lines last year, and that the Amendments were resisted both by the Conservative Party and by the Labour Party. Nevertheless, we welcome the introduction now of the proposal.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that the noble Lord who has just spoken appears to be at least a year wrong in his observations?

CENSUS OF DISTRIBUTION (1967) (RESTRICTION ON DISCLOSURE) ORDER 1965
4.3 p.m.
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, BOARD OF TRADE (LORD RHODES): My Lords, I beg to move that the draft of the Census of Distribution (1967) (Restriction on Disclosure) Order 1965, a copy of which was laid before this House on July 22, be approved. This Order relates to the census of distribution which is to be taken by the Board of Trade in 1967 in respect of trade done in 1966. It is concerned with one limited aspect of that census—the non-disclosure of information about particular undertakings. Under the Statistics of Trade Act disclosure of particulars about individual undertakings is generally prohibited, but there are exceptions. The President of the Board of Trade may direct information to be passed to other Government Departments for the purpose of exercising their functions and information may also be disclosed for the purpose of proceedings for offences under the Statistics of Trade Act.
The Act empowers the Board of Trade to impose further restrictions on the disclosure of information about particular undertakings, and the present Order is submitted as a proposed exercise of those powers. In effect, it prohibits the disclosure of information obtained from individual undertakings to other Government Departments except with the written permission of the firm concerned. It does this by prohibiting all disclosure of information about particular undertakings except for the immediate purpose of census returns and for the purpose of prosecuting offences under the Act; for example, the furnishing of false returns. In this way, everyone can be sure that the information he gives will be treated in the strictest confidence. The Order is on the same lines as the Orders made in connection with all three previous censuses. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Census of Distribution (1967) (Restriction on Disclosure) Order 1965, laid before the House on July 22 last, be approved.—(Lord Rhodes.)
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord for
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the statement he has made, and to say that we on this side welcome it.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

CONTROL OF OFFICE DEVELOPMENT (DESIGNATION OF AREAS) ORDER 1965
4.7 p.m.
LORD RHODES: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion that appears in my name on the Order Paper, to approve this Order. The Order, which came into operation on August 14, introduced the control of office development in the Birmingham conurbation with effect from that date. The Order is not retrospective. Office developments for which planning applications had been made, or for which planning permissions had been granted, before August 14 do not require an office development permit, though some of these may be caught by the new building control. The effect of the Order is that applications for planning permission made on or after August 14 for office developments in excess of the exemption limit of 3,000 feet have to be accompanied by an office development permit to be effective.
I need hardly remind the House that the introduction of the office control in the Birmingham conurbation was one of the measures announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in another place last July. These measures were designed to reduce the general pressure of demand on the economy and to restrain less essential work in both the public and private sectors. The aim of these measures was to ensure that we should get the balance of payments right next year. In the private sector the introduction of building control was announced, and as soon as the Control of Office and Industrial Development Bill became law the industrial development certificate control was tightened in the Midlands and other congested areas. These new controls will help to achieve in the long term a better distribution of employment between the areas which are underemployed and those which are over-congested.
At the time of the Chancellor's announcement of these new measures, the Bill had not received the Royal Assent. This was received on August 5,

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the last Sitting Day before the Summer Recess. The Order was accordingly made as soon as possible after that date, and it came into operation on August 14, the day after it was laid before Parliament. During the passage of the Bill we were glad to accept the Opposition's proposal that an order designating a new area for purposes of the office control should be subject to approval by Affirmative Resolution of both Houses, but we made it clear that an Order of this kind must come into immediate operation, in order to prevent any forestalling of the control in any interval between its announcement and its operation.
The House will recall that our first objective in introducing the new control of office development was to call a halt to the growth of office employment and to relieve congestion in and around London. But when the new control was first announced we made it clear that we should take powers to control office development in other areas if this became necessary. The situation in London had been allowed to get out of hand and we certainly did not want this to happen again in the case of other conurbations with similar problems of congestion which might have to be tackled in the interest of a better regional balance of employment and a better use of labour and other resources. This is the situation in the Birmingham conurbation. All the problems with which we are presented in and around London are now apparent, though perhaps in a less acute form.
The conurbation is the focus of the West Midlands region; its population of 2·4 million represents half the population of the whole region and its continued growth is a threat to the region's economic balance. For purposes of controlling office employment we cannot distinguish between the City of Birmingham area and the towns around it. Indeed, the whole conurbation must be regarded as a source of new jobs for places elsewhere which need new employment, including the overspill towns. The growth in service occupations in the West Midlands region as a whole has been faster than in any other region, and this has been particularly concentrated in the conurbation. Over the past ten years employment in the conurbation has increased at a rate equivalent to an additional 10,000 jobs every year. There is a serious shortage of
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all kinds of labour, including office workers, and there are not enough qualified and trainee office workers to fill the vacancies.
Against this background we must look with some concern at the growth in office space in recent years. Between 1951 and 1963 office space increased by nearly 3 million sq. ft., after allowing for demolitions of about 1 million sq. ft. The total amount of office space now in the pipeline is 3·1 million sq. ft. and represents a potential additional labour demand of more than 20,000 people, more than two and a half times the present number of unemployed and this new office space is concentrated in Birmingham and Solihull.
This situation has created serious transport and housing problems. Transport in the conurbation in general, and particularly in the City of Birmingham, is severely strained. At least another 340,000 houses will be needed by 1981 to catch up with the backlog. Despite redevelopment in the City and on its fringes, these new houses will overflow into the overspill towns. In this situation we cannot afford to allow the growth of office employment to go uncontrolled in Birmingham itself and in the rest of the conurbation. Industrial development is, of course, already controlled, and industry must make its contribution to the provision of jobs in the overspill towns and places needing employment elsewhere. The stage has been reached when office employment should also contribute its share. We had all these problems in mind in deciding to lose no time in introducing the office control throughout the conurbation.
In the initial stages the Board of Trade will subject all applications for permits to a tough scrutiny. We shall apply the same criteria as we are applying to applications for permits in the London metropolitan region. These are as follows.
"Applicants will have to satisfy the Board that the proposed activity cannot be carried on elsewhere, that there is no reasonable alternative accommodation, and also, unless the project is so small as not to add materially to congestion or to the demand for labour, that the activity is in the public interest."
In applying these criteria we shall naturally have regard to the need to maintain the prosperity and export

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record of Birmingham and its surrounding area, the need to bring existing offices up to modern standards and the need to ensure that industry has the offices it requires to be efficient. But in assessing all these factors we shall be particularly concerned, in operating this control, with the distribution of employment and the need to bring about a better balance not only within the West Midlands region itself, but also between this and other regions. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Control of Office Development (Designation of Areas) Order 1965, be approved.—(Lord Rhodes.)

RHODESIA: PURPORTED DISMISSAL OF THE GOVERNOR
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, may I now ask for an Answer to the Private Notice Question which I asked some time ago?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will answer it now. I apologise for the delay in making it. It is in reply to a Private Notice Question elsewhere by Mr. Jeremy Thorpe, which runs—
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, with great respect to the noble Earl, I have put a Private Notice Question to the noble Earl and I should like it answered. I am not speaking on behalf of any member of the Liberal Party—I would not claim to do that. That is why I was hoping that at some stage the noble Earl would explain why it was necessary to wait so long, not for a repetition of a Statement made in another place but to answer a Private Notice Question in this House. It may be the case, and I hope it is, that the Government speak with the same voice in both Houses, and that I may get the same Answer as has been given by the Prime Minister in another place. I suggest—and perhaps we need not pursue it now—that it is a matter for consultation between the usual channels, to see whether it is necessary in future to have such a long delay in answering in this House a Private Notice Question which may elicit from Her Majesty's Government an Answer in precisely the same
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form as one which it is proposed to be made in another place.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear!
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I stand rebuked, and I am sure that the rather laborious sarcasm of the noble Viscount—
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Order!
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: As I say, my Lords, I stand rebuked by the rather laborious sarcasm of the noble Viscount. I cannot do more than stand rebuked. As a matter of fact, I was trying to be helpful to the House by explaining what the Question was, because I thought that otherwise the House might not quite understand what the Statement was about. But the noble Viscount caught me out in a verbal infelicity, and I offer him, and the House, my apologies. I was only trying to tell the House what the Statement was about. With the leave of the House, I am making a Statement in the same terms as those being used by the Prime Minister elsewhere. I hope that that fits in with the wishes of the noble Viscount.
The Prime Minister is making this Statement elsewhere, in reply to a Question by Mr. Jeremy Thorpe which runs as follows:
"To ask the Prime Minister whether he will make a Statement about the purported dismissal of Her Majesty's Governor in Rhodesia by the Smith régime in Salisbury."
The Statement of the Prime Minister, which I hope I may be allowed to reproduce in his own words, runs as follows:
"The House will have seen with regret and noted with contempt the action the illegal régime have taken in purporting to replace the Governor by Mr. Dupont. I repeat that the Governor holds his office during Her Majesty's pleasure and can be removed only on Her Majesty's instructions. As I warned earlier in the week, this is an act of treason.
"Honourable Members will have noticed that in carrying through this illegal procedure the persons concerned appear to have been unable to

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secure the services of the Chief Justice or any other judge and had to use a justice of the peace. The House, too, will have noticed the contemptible action of the illegal authorities in the form of the pressure put on the Governor, Lady Gibbs, and their loyal staff.
"I would conclude only with this. Honourable Members who know Sir Humphrey Gibbs and who have had an opportunity of forming some impression of Mr. Dupont will, in making the inevitable contrast, be able to measure the extent to which Rhodesia has been degraded and her people abused by the events of the past seven days."
My Lords, that concludes the Statement of the Prime Minister.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl for answering the Question in the same terms as the Prime Minister has answered in another place, and, in fact, repeating the Prime Minister's Answer. I am sorry that the noble Earl thought I was being sarcastic or, indeed, laboriously sarcastic. That was not my intention. My intention was to ask him to consider through the usual channels this delay, which is getting longer and longer. We were not, in fact, asking for a Statement be repeated here, but for an Answer to a Private Notice Question. Surely, it is not necessary, when an Answer to a Question has been carefully prepared, as this has, that we should have to wait in this House until twenty minutes past four to receive the Answer. That is all I am putting to the noble Earl. I do not press him to answer to-day, but I think that it is a matter for consideration between the usual channels. I am not being sarcastic about that; I am being entirely serious.
May I turn to the Answer which the noble Earl has given? I do not propose to comment on the language used by the Prime Minister, but I am glad that he has drawn attention to this farce, this façade of appointment of a so-called Governor in succession to His Excellency the Governor of Rhodesia; and to the fact that no part in that farce was played by a member of the Bench of Rhodesia, and that, apparently, it was necessary to secure the services of some justice
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of the peace for some form of what would appear to be illegal oath-taking.
Might I ask the noble Earl this question? Is it the case, as the Daily Telegraph to-day reports, that as Mr. Smith was assuring a Press conference yesterday that he would not do anything to inconvenience or embarrass the Governor the Governor's cars were, in fact, being driven away, and his official staff and servants were being ordered to leave Government House, in addition to the Governor's telephone having been cut off, upon the instructions of Mr. Smith? Can the noble Earl confirm that? Because if it is true it would seem difficult to reconcile that with the statement that Mr. Smith is reported to have made in relation to his attitude towards His Excellency the Governor.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I would begin by apologising to the noble and learned Viscount. He has known me long enough to know that my reference to laborious sarcasm was not intended really seriously. But I would also apologise to the House for the delay. I think, as a matter of fact, that there was some slight slip-up. There is usually a very good machinery for informing us. As soon as the notice came through, I was here ready to make the Statement, but we did not receive the message. There is no secret about that. It has happened in the past, may I say, when the noble and learned Viscount sat on this side and we sat opposite. But, at any rate, I think that an apology is owing to the House and I would tender it, certainly, for the lateness of the Statement.
I am grateful to the noble and learned Viscount for what he has just said. I do not have an official confirmation of the report in the Daily Telegraph, but I would personally suppose it to be correct. I have always found the Daily Telegraph remarkably accurate in matters of this kind, and I have seen the same kind of thing in other papers.
LORD ALPORT: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl whether he will find whatever means are available to him to convey to the Governor and his household the warm admiration of Members of this House at their staunchness and loyalty in what is perhaps the most difficult situation into which a British Governor has been placed.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear!
LORD ALPORT: Will the noble Earl also say that we look forward with expectation to the time when, as a result of the Governor's leadership and loyalty, Rhodesia will be able to put an end to the present régime and return hopefully and successfully to allegiance to the Crown?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I will certainly make sure that on behalf of the Government and, I hope, the House I convey the messages suggested by the noble Lord. May I say, with respect, that I do not think there is any noble Lord in this House who is more worthy to initiate those messages than the noble Lord, Lord Alport.
LORD CITRINE: My Lords, would the noble Earl tell us whether the Government have any official information that the cutting-off of the Governor's telephone in Rhodesia was associated with messages which were supposed to be passing by telephone between Her Majesty's Government and the Governor? Could he also tell us whether Mr. Smith's associates were tapping those messages?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I am afraid that I have no information on the matters raised by the noble Lord, Lord Citrine.
LORD WADE: My Lords, would the noble Earl agree that it is most important that we should get all possible support to the Governor and to other representatives of the Queen? At the same time—and I hope this is not going too wide—would he agree that, while imposing sanctions, it is most important that we should give a clear assurance of security for the future to all those who remain loyal to the Crown?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I certainly agree with the first point made by the noble Lord. I think the second point was covered in a way of which he would approve by the Prime Minister in his broadcast.

CONTROL OF OFFICE DEVELOPMENT (DESIGNATION OF AREAS) ORDER 1965
4.27 p.m.
Debate resumed.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rhodes, for having dealt so fully with the Order before us. Your Lordships will be aware that your Special Orders Committee expressed the view that this Order could not be passed by the House without special attention, and we are grateful to the noble Lord for having given so much special attention to it in the statement that he has made to us.
May I ask the noble Lord one or two questions, and perhaps say this first of all? In a situation where, as I understand from the statement in another place, the offices now being built will provide nearly a quarter more office places than at present exist in the area, and when at the same time there is a manpower shortage, it would be difficult to oppose an order extending the Act to this area. Indeed, I would have thought that it was not even necessary to include this in the statement that was made on July 27, because in the circumstances which the noble Lord has stated to the House, the extension of this area under the Act could have stood on its own. The noble Lord has said that there will, of course, be no retrospection in this regard, and I should like to ask him this question. Clearly, there will be a movement from sub-standard offices elsewhere into the office premises now being built, so that the offices in the sights so to speak, are not likely to be clear gain if as I expect those sub-standard offices will not be reoccupied. May I ask the noble Lord whether or not where sub-standard offices are evacuated so as to improve office accommodation, they will be permitted to be re-occupied?
Secondly, may I take it that the Order can be altered at any time? If it should be found that the area in which the control is required is less than the rather wide area at present affected, which I think amounts to about 240 square miles, will an amending Order be laid restricting the area to a smaller one? Thirdly, on the question of areas, I understand that the Boundary Commission's

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reorganisation proposals have been laid before the House, and if passed will come into effect on April 1. Will that mean any change in the Order, and if it does—if a fresh Order will have to be laid—will there be a change in the total area which is covered by the Order, or will the area be substantially the same? I should be grateful if the noble Lord would answer those questions.
LORD RHODES: My Lords, with regard to retrospection, the Order does not apply retrospectively to office development in excess of the exemption limit for which planning application was made, or for which permission was given, before the 14th. I think that is quite clear and definite. With regard to the noble Lord's question about the Boundary Commission and its findings, may I say that there is very little difference in area expected between this part of the West Midlands Region as a whole, the one we are talking about, and the Birmingham conurbation, but it will be necessary, in the event of any change at all being made, to make another Order.
With regard to sub-standard offices, I do not think it is possible for us to prevent re-occupation of old offices after the occupants have moved into new offices. I cannot give the noble Lord a better answer on that, I am afraid, but we shall try to see that the old offices are not kept as offices and that the bad conditions are not perpetuated. To the noble Lord's question, "Can an Order be made at any time? "the answer is: yes, it can—and I hope he will accept that. We are grateful to the noble Lord for having commended this Order, for which there is a very urgent need.
VISCOUNT GAGE: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord could say whether authorities contemplating schemes of comprehensive redevelopment will be able to discover, by application to the local office of the Board of Trade, whether or not an office content can be inserted in a scheme of comprehensive redevelopment? I had some assurances on this point when I raised it in regard to the first district Order, and I believe I was assured that it would be possible for authorities contemplating these schemes to have some guidance in this matter. I can only say that, so far as my experience goes, it has as yet been
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extremely difficult to get any guidance from the Board of Trade.
LORD RHODES: My Lords, in answer to the noble Viscount I would say that his question is not really applicable to this particular Order, but I remember his great interest in this matter when we were discussing the Bill, before it became an Act, in the House, and if there is any fresh information about it I will see that he gets a letter to let him know.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, may I make one small point? I do not want to accept thanks to which I am not really entitled. I was careful to say that we would not oppose this Order, but I did not exactly commend it. I said that, in the context of the Act (about which, as noble Lords opposite know, we had reservations), we would not oppose this Order. May I make one further point clear? I take it that, as this Order can be altered at any time, it will not necessarily follow that this Order will run for the whole period of the Act. Is that so?
LORD RHODES: That is so, yes.
LORD DRUMALBYN: I am grateful to the noble Lord for that.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

CORPORATION OF THE TRINITY HOUSE OF LEITH ORDER CONFIRMATION BILL
Brought from the Commons; read la, and (pursuant to the Private Legislation (Scotland) Act 1936) deemed to have been read 2a, and reported from the Committee.

DISARMAMENT
4.35 p.m.
LORD HENDERSON LORD HENDERSON rose to call attention to the problems concerning Disarmament; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I rise, somewhat belatedly, to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I believe that it will meet with general approval. There cannot, I think, be anyone in this House who is not convinced of the importance of disarmament. The events of this century have shown what the will to war, coupled with the means,

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can bring about; and, as the weapons have become more powerful and the consequences of using them more awful, so, I think your Lordships will all agree, the need to restrict them and to restrain those who would use them has become more urgent.
I say this to remind us all that disarmament is not fundamentally a process of negotiations and bargaining, for there is always a danger that in conducting them one may lose sight of the end to which they are directed, and of its importance. Disarmament is the search for peace, for a world where war can never again take place; and a first step to this end must be to halt, and then to reverse, the dangerous and costly arms race. It is reasonable, I think, to accept the calculation that at least 10 per cent. of the world's annual output of wealth is spent on defence. Can any of us doubt that the world would be transformed if that 10 per cent., or the bulk of it, were available to be used for the more constructive purposes?
I recall a statement in the Labour Party's 1964 Manifesto. It said that the Labour Party had
"put forward constructive proposals to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, to establish nuclear free zones in Africa, Latin America and Central Europe and to achieve controlled reductions in manpower and arms".
However, before I come to these three topics, I should like to raise the question of general and complete disarmament. As we know, all nations are committed to it. For more than three years the Eighteen-Nations Disarmament Committee at Geneva has had before it the three-stage draft plans for general disarmament put forward both by the United States and by Soviet Russia. Efforts to build up agreement have not produced significant results so far, and I think I am right in saying that very little time was devoted to consideration of general disarmament at the last session of the Committee between July and September of this year.
There seems to be a growing feeling that progress in this direction is bound to be slow. From what I can gather, the opinion at Geneva has hardened that an early or significant break-through is not to be expected.
This is a cause of widespread disappointment. I realise, however, that,
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with present world tensions and disorders, discussions of the subject must at times seem unreal. But I should like reassurance that in the pursuit of partial, more concrete, measures, the goal of general and complete disarmament has not been and will not be lost sight of. I hope that the Government and the Minister for Disarmament, who is in charge of this debate, intend to persevere in this direction.
In this connection, I should like to ask: What is the Government's attitude towards the convening of a World Disarmament Conference? One of the problems of disarmament negotiations at Geneva has been that France would not, and China could not, be represented. Clearly, the absence of two of the five nuclear Powers from the discussions at Geneva makes the chance of agreement there more remote. In the case of China, the same objection can be raised against the disarmament debates at the United Nations, although the presence of such countries as Albania means that China's voice is not entirely unheard. But this can never be a satisfactory way of seeking agreement. I should like to ask the Minister: Do Her Majesty's Government still support the idea of a World Disarmament Conference? And is it likely that, as a result of discussions which I think are taking place at the United Nations to-day, China, which was refused admission to the United Nations yesterday, will be invited?
My Lords, the issue which has been the principal talking point at Geneva in the First Committee at the United Nations and in the Press is that of a non-proliferation treaty. The importance of such a treaty has been stressed time and again. The Prime Minister has called it "the most urgent problem facing us in the field of disarmament." The greater the number of nations which have control over nuclear weapons, the greater the chance that they will be used. It is not fanciful to suggest that if the precarious peace since 1945 has been the result of the possession by both sides of vast nuclear capabilities, it has also been the result of the responsibility which the principal controllers of the stockpiles have exercised. But there are countries in the world whose sense of responsibility might not be adequate if put to the test. Could any of us sleep more soundly if Egypt and Israel,

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India and Pakistan, or Indonesia and Malaysia, were equipped with nuclear weapons?
Secondly, the number of countries which will soon have the ability to produce nuclear weapons is increasing. Previously, the increase was from three nuclear Powers to four, and then from four to five; but the next increase may be not from five to six but from five to ten. I believe it is true—indeed, I am sure—that pressures in some of the non-nuclear States to acquire nuclear weapons are increasing, and that if a single State were to give way to these pressures it would then he too late to prevent gradual world-wide dissemination. That makes the signing of a non-proliferation treaty all the more urgent.
Here I must confess that I am puzzled by a remark made by the Prime Minister in another place on July 27 last when he said:
"… the Government have taken the initiative at Geneva—or will he doing so—in tabling proposals to stop the spread of nuclear weapons."—[OFFICIAL REPORT (Commons), Vol. 717 (No. 162), col. 224; 27/7/65.]
This meant, I thought, that a British draft treaty would be put forward; but no such draft has ever been produced. Nor, so far as I can discover, did the United Kingdom co-sponsor the American draft treaty. The Russian opposition to the American draft treaty is well known: that it would leave the way open for the Federal Republic of Germany to gain control of nuclear weapons. They have said this many times and in many places, and Mr. Gromyko said it again in his covering memorandum to the Soviet Union's own draft treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Another typical example was Mr. Federenko's speech in the First Committee of the Twentieth General Assembly on October 18. He said:
"No agreement has been reached on this problem…because the representatives of some leading powers in NATO are seeking, under the guise of an international agreement on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, to make their dissemination legal in fact."
Here, my Lords, two questions suggest themselves. The first is: Why was the United Kingdom able neither to submit the text of a draft treaty nor to co-sponsor the American version? and the second: What can be done to resolve genuine
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Russian doubts? It is also relevant to ask whether the Minister is convinced that the Russian doubts are genuine—that they are genuinely afraid that the Federal German Republic will gain independent control of nuclear weapons—or whether they are merely trying to embarrass the Western Allies.
I myself believe that Soviet Russia and her allies are genuinely concerned lest the Federal German Republic is enabled to acquire national control of nuclear power, if not now, later on. I think it would be a mistake to regard their attitude as purely one of political calculation. The fact is that Western efforts over two years have failed to persuade the Russians that the M.L.F. will not lead to dissemination. And there has been no sign of getting them to modify their attitude of opposition which seems also to apply equally to the A.N.F.
The West cannot leave the issue at stalemate. It is necessary to remove the present obstacles to agreement. It was interesting, therefore, to read the suggestion of the Foreign Secretary, when he was in Washington, that before NATO committed itself too resolutely to a nuclear policy, it should find out more clearly the Soviet Union's views on non-proliferation. The Foreign Secretary was reported as saying—and this was in The Times of October 10—that:
"Britain was still preferring the creation of an A.N.F., but in view of Soviet objections, it would be reasonable for the NATO Allies to see whether they could get a non-proliferation agreement without sacrificing policies considered absolutely essential to the health of the alliance."
It has been suggested that the remarks of the Foreign Secretary in the United States of America were moving towards concessions to the Russians; that the West must choose between M.L.F.—A.N.F.—Special Committee-type development in NATO and a non-proliferation treaty, but that they could not reasonably expect both. It would be unprofitable for me to speculate on the significance of these utterances. The Foreign Secretary is meeting the Federal German Foreign Minister to-morrow, and next month he goes to Moscow. No doubt the Minister for Disarmament will be taking part in both sets of talks, for it is, I think, a safe bet that the question of getting agreement on a non-proliferation treaty will be high on the

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agenda in both cases. All I would say is that I hope that their discussions will help to remove the present obstacles and bring nearer the adoption of an agreed treaty.
I am also concerned that the concentration of discussion on European security arrangements has diverted attention from the fact that the most important results of a non-proliferation treaty will be in areas outside Europe. Clearly there will be much greater danger if the Middle and Far Eastern countries acquire nuclear weapons. It is, of course, the non-nuclear countries which, in one sense, have the most to lose by signing such a treaty. They will be giving up something substantial, they will be making sacrifices, whereas the nuclear Powers will be renouncing something they had no intention of doing anyway. For this reason I hope that attention will be paid to their demand that the nuclear Powers should begin to reduce their weapon stockpiles; that a non-proliferation treaty should not be a means of establishing an "exclusive" nuclear club. It was, I believe, a useful move that Italy should have suggested a short-term moratorium by the non-nuclear Powers on the acquiring of nuclear weapons, to give the nuclear States time to make progress in their field.
Finally, on the subject of non-proliferation I should like the Minister to clarify the Resolution passed by the First Committee, calling on the 18-Nation Disarmament Committee to negotiate a treaty
"… devoid of any loopholes which might permit nuclear or non-nuclear Powers to proliferate, directly or indirectly, nuclear weapons, in any form."
Both the United States and the Soviet Union voted for this Resolution, but clearly they understood the words, "any loophole" very differently. Does this mean that the next session of the 18-Nation Disarmament Committee which the Resolution urges will see the same arguments brought out time and again, and all over again? Or is it likely that a closer identity of view will be established in the meantime before the next meeting of the Committee?
My Lords, there is also the question of the Test Ban Treaty. When the Moscow Treaty was signed in 1963, we all thought
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that the extension of it to cover underground tests would not be long delayed. On June 15 of this year the Disarmament Commission especially recommended that the 18-Nation Disarmament Committee should consider, as a matter of priority, the question of extending the scope of the partial Test Ban Treaty to cover underground tests. But such development seems as far away as ever. The problem, of course, is still that of inspection. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have submitted memoranda to the 18-Nation Disarmament Committee outlining recent progress in the West on the detection and localising of underground events by means of new seismographic techniques. I would ask, to what extent do these techniques make it possible to identify a larger proportion of such events as earthquakes and so reduce the number of "unidentified" events which may or may not be nuclear tests?
Is there still no other method than on-site inspections for positively identifying such tests? I have noted the helpful suggestions made by non-aligned members of the Committee. First, that tests above a certain seismic magnitude—4·75 was the figure quoted by the Egyptian delegate—could be outlawed without the need to insist on the right of inspection, because seismological detection techniques have now improved to the point where it can be determined whether or no an explosion above the determined figure is an earthquake or a nuclear test. Second, the Swedish representative raised the possibility of forming a nuclear detection club. Its purpose would be to develop international co-operation for the detection of nuclear explosions. Could this not also be helpful in perhaps reducing the level of seismic magnitude which would need inspection, or reducing the number of inspections considered necessary to ensure that no party to the Treaty was acting in bad faith?
Much as we must all deplore the Russian attitude in refusing to allow inspections to take place, or joint scientific talks to convince the West of their assertion that inspection is unnecessary, it must not prevent us from persisting in the search for ways to satisfy both parties: for the Russians, no inspections; for the West, no insecurity. The Prime Minister has said in another place that the Government are examining the possibility of collective

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assurances to non-nuclear States against nuclear threats and blackmail in order to provide an alternative to the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The American Ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Goldberg, has also mentioned that the United States is prepared to offer such guarantees.
The emergence of China as a nuclear Power has, of course, made this an immensely more important problem for our friends in Asia. It would also resolve some of the doubts the non-nuclear States might feel about signing a non-proliferation treaty. I realise that there may be difficulties. It is not easy for a non-nuclear State to accept such an assurance from either the Western or the Eastern Powers without appearing to align itself in one or other camp. Nevertheless, it is a matter to be looked into, and I hope that the Minister will say what developments have taken place in this field.
Finally, I would also ask the Minister whether he can tell us what steps are envisaged in the "freeze" and reduction of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles by the nuclear Powers. This is, in some ways, the most important step, since it would represent a step towards disarmament rather than a prevention of further armament. Once again the interests of the non-nuclear States are greatly concerned, and I am sure that they will keep a close watch to see what the nuclear Powers are prepared to do. I realise that there are other important matters to which I have not referred. The items I have mentioned are among what might be termed "collateral" measures, agreement on which would contribute greatly to building up international confidence. I believe that, in the present world conditions, work in a limited and specified field will enable greater concentration of effort with a better chance of getting results.
I should like to repeat what I said at the beginning of my speech, that disarmament is so necessary and its fruits so beneficial that I hope that Her Majesty's Government will continue to work for it as urgently as ever, and that the Minister for Disarmament will seize every opportunity for practical initiatives. I beg to move for Papers.
5.0 p.m.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, it is always a pleasure to hear the noble Lord, Lord Henderson. We all miss his amiable presence from the Front Bench on his side of the House, and we are very much delighted to hear him again, speaking with his usual modesty, patience and deep sincerity on a subject which is so close to his heart. This subject is indeed of tremendous moment to the welfare and perhaps to the survival of mankind, but I think that our debate this afternoon will be a short one, because we have discussed the matter exhaustively on several occasions during the last twelve months, and perhaps the main object of the noble Lord in putting down this Motion was to enable the Minister of Disarmament, the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, to tell us something about what has been happening at Geneva during the last three months.
The last time the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, spoke in your Lordships' House, he had to leave in the middle of the debate for a long train journey to Geneva. He took with him the good wishes of all your Lordships, not only for the comfort and safety of his journey, but also for his success when he arrived in Geneva. Of course, to wish success to a man going to a disarmament conference at Geneva is rather like wishing success to a man going to fight a battle with a hydra, which grows three new heads whenever you cut off one. However persistent and however valiant you are, success is unlikely to be either speedy or sensational, and I do not think that any of us, least of all the noble Lord, expected that it would be.
I think we all understand the chief obstacles to disarmament, the reasons why this apparently fatuous round of abortive conferences has been going on for the last twenty years or more without any real result, except the Test Ban Treaty. And I think it is necessary to the success of our work that we should understand the obstacles. In my judgment, the main obstacle is and has been (I hope to an even greater extent than it is now), Communist power politics, the belief prevailing among the great Communist Powers of the world that they can dominate the world by a display, if not by an exercise, of force, counting on the certainty that the free nations will not

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start a war and that the social institutions of the free nations will collapse and the Communists will achieve domination, if they keep on pushing everywhere in the world, backed up by a growing strength of nuclear force and conventional force at the same time.
The last five speechs of the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, have lately been published as a White Paper. I have read them with great pleasure and with great agreement, but there is one passage with which I do not agree. That is the reason why I think I ought to quote it. In his third speech, on August 19, speaking of what he called The Clausewitzian view of military power, which he rightly said ought to have no place in the age of nuclear missiles, the noble Lord went on to say:
"As I have already acknowledged in New York, the idea that nuclear weapons are status symbols or tickets of admission for some powerful and exclusive cabal is largely the fault of the existing nuclear Powers, my country among them."
I do not agree with that. I think that it is incorrect historically. If the United States, for example, had regarded the hydrogen bomb as a status symbol or ticket of admission to some exclusive cabal, they would have started manufacturing, hydrogen bombs many years earlier. At the end of the war they were the only country in the world which had the atomic bomb, and they did their utmost to get an agreement to enable them to get rid of it, but, owing entirely to Russian opposition, they could not do so. Under President Truman's Administration, they deliberately refrained from preparations to produce the far more destructive hydrogen bomb until they received unquestionable information that Russia was not only manufacturing atomic bombs (which had been known for a long time) but had gone so far in their preparations to make the hydrogen bomb, too, that it seemed probable that the Russians might have it in usable quantities before America, if nothing was done. It was only then that President Truman, at the beginning of 1950, took the decision that America must prepare to make a hydrogen bomb, too. The only reason why he did that was because we had learned from bitter experience that the only way in which we could
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ever end the cold war and bring about disarmament was to convince the Russians that aggression and power politics would not pay and would not succeed.
Conviction has taken a very long time. I think it would be fair to say that until 1962 every singe disarmament conference was for the Russians a Russian propaganda exercise, and nothing more. I think that after the Cuban affair, in the autumn of 1962, the Russians at last began to change their outlook. It was soon after that that Mr. Khrushchev, who was then Prime Minister of Russia, instead of telling us how likely it was that those who disagreed with him would all be blown to smithereens, began saying that war was not necessarily inevitable and that it might even be wrong. A year later, we had at least one concrete agreement, in the shape of the Test Ban Treaty, which was signed in Moscow in August, 1963. The Russian language and attitude and expressions of policy on the subject of disarmament have been not quite so uncompromising and have shown a greater desire for peaceful co-existence and agreement than they did before.
The late Government put forward, on many occasions, practical proposals for disarmament, and I think the present Government agree with the principles which have always governed disarmament proposals—first, disarmament must be carried out in balanced stages; secondly, any agreement must contain provision for verification, for inspection to see that the people who signed it were not cheating and, thirdly, disarmament must eventually be followed by the formation of an international police force.
I think that the necessity of all these conditions is fairly obvious. We must have a balanced reduction of armaments by stages, so that nobody will be left with an overwhelming superiority at any one moment. We must have verification. I think that the need for that, if there was any need to prove it, was shown by the Cuba incident. Only a month or two before the crisis, the Russian Foreign Secretary had categorically assured the American Government that there were no Russian nuclear installations of any kind in Cuba. I do not think you will ever get confidence in the reality of disarmament unless all the great Powers

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are willing to agree to adequate inspection and verification. As for the International Force, that is a more distant objective. But we must always have it in mind, because clearly the ultimate success of disarmament cannot endure unless there is some police force, and the policing of the world cannot be left to any one country.
While all of us in the West were trying to get agreement on these lines, and as the objective still receded as fast as we could pursue it, other countries besides Russia, America and Britain began to produce and develop nuclear weapons—first, France, and then China. Nearly two years ago, the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Saffron Walden, who was then Foreign Secretary, put forward at the Geneva Disarmament Conference which was then in session proposals for a non-dissemination treaty. Her Majesty's present Ministers are taking the same course, and, indeed, it has been the principal subject of discussion at Geneva for the last three months, ever since the Geneva Conference was reconvened rather unexpectedly by the sudden and welcome decision of the Russians that it should start again after having been in recess, the Russians refusing to come for a very long time.
I will not stand more than a minute or two between your Lordships and Lord Chalfont's account of what has been happening about our hopes for a non-dissemination agreement at Geneva. There must clearly be an agreement between those countries who possess nuclear weapons not to give them to anybody else, and an agreement among all countries who are willing to join the agreement, and who have not got nuclear weapons, that they will not seek them. But what does the noble Lord think our attitude is likely to be (this is a general question, but it must be thought of now) towards any countries who will not come into the agreement? What are you going to do, for instance, if China will not agree either to disarm or to undertake not to give nuclear weapons to her satellites or to any other country who might be her ally? Are you to confine yourself to protestations?—in which case it is not likely that our own dissemination agreement would last very long. Or are you
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to bring persuasion or pressure, or even some kind of coercion eventually, on other countries who will not come in?—because you can never get these things on a permanent basis until there is some system of enforcing international law.
That, as I say, is a general question. The particular difficulty which seems to have been encountered at Geneva about non-dissemination is the obstinate Russian belief, or at least professed belief, that either the Multilateral Force or the proposed Atlantic Nuclear Force are a means of disseminating nuclear weapons to people who have not got them, and particularly to the Germans—although, as I understand them, both these proposals would actually restrict the possibility of nuclear war by, as the phrase is, putting more fingers on the safety-catch and not on the trigger. This, I think, has been clearly impressed on the Conference by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, but the Russians have refused to appreciate or, so far as one can see, even to listen to his argument.
I should like, since I have quoted one passage from one of the noble Lord's speeches without agreeing with it, to quote what he said about this, on which I wholeheartedly agree with him. In his speech in September he said:
"We want, sincerely and deeply, to prevent the spread of all nuclear weapons not only in Europe but anywhere in the world, and we are prepared to discuss the form and content of an agreement…that will satisfy the Soviet Union of our good faith. But I should be failing in my duty to this Conference if I did not make it clear that, so far as my Government is concerned, the security of NATO and its members is not up for bargaining, here or anywhere else".
Then, after a quotation from Abraham Lincoln, the noble Lord said:
"However desperately we in the West may want and work for disarmament agreements, there are certain principles we will not compromise."
I was very glad to read that.
I should like to conclude by asking the noble Lord—and I am sure he will be able to do it—to reconcile this statement of his with the Press interview given by the Foreign Secretary on October 8 in New York. I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, mentioned this particular interview, although he mentioned some other statements the Foreign Secretary made. What he indicated at

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this interview was that we might be prepared to consider abandoning M.L.F. and A.N.F., or both, in order to get a non-dissemination agreement with Russia. Well, my Lords, as neither of these proposed forces, M.L.F. or A.N.F., has come into being, and as they are both very much in the blueprint stage, at first sight one would think it a very small price to pay for a real non-dissemination agreement. But the point is that if you were to abandon them, it might well have serious effects on the unity of NATO, if NATO thought you were going behind their backs and making an agreement with the Russians.
I thought, when I read the Foreign Secretary's interview, that there were two problems which might arise from it: one a comparatively trivial domestic problem, which was that A.N.F. is the method of getting the Labour Party "off the hook" on the question of the British nuclear deterrent, and if you are going to throw that away, what will the Labour Party do? Will they admit that we must have an independent nuclear deterrent, or not? However, that is trivial compared with the international problem, of what effect this might have on NATO. I think the Foreign Secretary's interview and the suggestion which he made about the possibility of doing this has caused a good deal of concern, both among our NATO Allies, and perhaps also in the United States.
I am quite sure that the Foreign Secretary would be the first person to agree that there are some concessions which could defeat their own object, and that if you made a concession which would mean the disruption of NATO, the result would be that you would not get your dissemination agreement. You would lose both ways. You would lose NATO and your dissemination agreement, because the Communists, when they saw NATO breaking up, would immediately decide that it was not worth making an agreement of this kind, and would revert to their former belief that they can obtain their objectives by power politics and without making these agreements. Therefore, I would ask the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, to deal with this point of the Foreign Secretary's, and to explain exactly what the Foreign Secretary meant. We all agree that we ought to seek to
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make any concession which can be made without doing harm of this kind, in order to persuade the Russians to make the non-dissemination agreement—and Russian agreement is essential if ever we are to get disarmament. But, at the same time, we must make it plain—and I hope that the noble Lord will make it plain—that we cannot disrupt NATO or take any action which might lead to the weakening of NATO, because the strength of NATO is an essential foundation for all our hopes, both in disarmament and of world peace.
5.21 p.m.
LORD GLADWYN: My Lords, I must first of all apologise to the House. Our schedule has been rather upset, and in any case I have to rush off soon as I have an unbreakable engagement, and I fear I shall not be able to come back to hear the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, wind up. I also rise with considerable reluctance to intervene in this debate, in the first place because I am not an expert myself on disarmament, though I have, I suppose, been associated with it in some way for a very long time; I have, as it were, lived with it. Furthermore, I think one always has a certain sense of despondency, if not in our weaker moments even a sense of futility, when we consider this tremendous subject, which has now after all been discussed, not for the last twenty years, if I may venture to correct the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, but probably for the last forty years.
Ever since I went into the Service in 1924, I remember, as I say, living to some extent with this appalling problem. I remember very well the first great conference on disarmament presided over so magnificently by the father of the noble Lord who introduced this subject, Mr. Arthur Henderson. I remember attending myself the conference in 1932 in Geneva, in which Mr. Anthony Eden, as he then was, took a prominent part. Even then one began to be filled with a certain sense of futility when one had many committees sitting to decide whether a tank was an offensive or a defensive weapon. It was quite evident that there was, I am afraid, no real political will to push the thing through. I remember, for instance, after the war, when we were considering whether we should refer to this great matter in the

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Charter of the United Nations, the Russians, for some extraordinary reason, seemed rather reluctant to do so. So I asked Mr. Gromyko, in front of other people, "Why is it you object to even mentioning the word 'disarmament' in the Charter?", for he would only go so far as to talk about the regulation of armaments. After a long pause he said, "It is a slogan". As a matter of fact, I am told that it was Lenin who first said that it was a slogan—I do not know when, but probably in 1918. So that was not very encouraging to start up our discussions, when you could not even get the Russians willingly to admit that even the word should appear in the Charter, although they eventually did.
Then we got on to the discussions of the whole problem, and all this has now ended up, so far as actual disarmament is concerned, in the great plan, which has not yet been agreed, for general and complete disarmament. Here I can only echo what the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, said. It is evident that you must have three major conditions for anything of the sort. First of all, you must have complete verification. Here I urge your Lordships, if you are really interested in the subject, to read an excellent work published about six months ago by my ex-colleague and friend Sir Michael Wright, who was for three years associated with this enormous problem in Geneva, and elsewhere, called Disarm and Verify. It emerges from that work most clearly that these conditions which he maintains should be accepted, and thinks can be accepted, because he is an optimist, are appallingly difficult when you come to consider them. Verification would require an army of highly-trained international officials all over the world, particularly from all the great Powers. Apart from the expense of recruitment it would be difficult to see how they could operate.
Now it is clear that it is impossible—things have gone too far—to verify the exact stocks of fissile material. Even the experts, I gather, acknowledge now that you cannot, with the best will in the world, however many experts you have, be absolutely certain that there is no more fissile material in Russia or the United States beyond what has been declared by the Government that it possesses. As only 10 per cent. of the existing colossal
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stocks would probably be enough to wreck the world, it seems difficult to imagine that you are going to make successful progress in the field of verification, and that is essential.
The second condition is that at every stage of this vast plan you must have a balance. You must never pass from one stage to the other until it is absolutely certain that nobody is going to steal a march on the other person and thus affect a complete balance of forces. Your Lordships can see how difficult that would be to arrange. Finally—and this might be the most difficult thing of all—before you can even move out of stage one, you have to have agreement on the prior constitution of a sort of peace army, a United Nations peace force. A United Nations peace force can operate—we all know this—only if there is an authority, in fact it must be world authority, on which it can depend. So before you can even start, or get very far with this great plan, you must have a world authority, and, of course, it stands to reason that until you get that authority you will not have real disarmament. But it is a good thing to plan and this work has not been done in vain. The great plan, partially agreed, stands there as a kind of monument.
It is quite clear that you cannot get on with it, and never would be able to get on with it, until there is a reduction of tension in the world, and until at any rate some progress has been made towards solving the major political problems. At the moment, when there is a war raging in Vietnam, and a potential war elsewhere, it is inconceivable that you can make much progress with this great plan for complete and general world disarmament. It is logically possible, but not at the present time. First of all—and this is not impossible—we must create a sort of climate of peace, as is said, right round the Northern Hemisphere, which I think is not inconceivable in the next few years; and then we might well have time to get this matter out of its pigeonhole and get on with it—but not before.
What we have been able to do up to now, seeing that disarmament up to now has been impossible, is to make progress with what is called, broadly speaking, the regulation of armaments. In the regulation of armaments, of course, there

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has been one triumph, and that is the Test Ban Treaty. Why did that Treaty ever come about? What was the real reason for that? I suggest that it was the constitution or the completion, if you like, of the famous balance of terror. When there is a situation such as we have now—it may be the precarious balance of terror, but anyhow it exists—its first fruit is to produce agreement between the two great super-Powers of the world not to poison further the atmosphere by letting off these devices when there is no need for either of them to let off any more. I think that fairly shortly, with a bit of luck, this ban will be extended to underground tests, and I think that so far as the Soviet Union and America are concerned there will be no more tests; and that is an excellent thing and one of the bases of the climate of peace which has gradually been established—inevitably by the force of things, by the balance of terror—by the Americans and the Russians themselves. That is excellent, and we can only hope that other people perhaps will sign it. As one or two countries explode a bomb, later on even China might support it. Why not?
Then we get on to the other great outstanding question and the real regulation of armaments which is clearly the question of proliferation. On proliferation, there are optimists who say—I do not think I am one of them—that just as the balance of terror is the only thing which produces peace, so it may be that if further countries get a small or not very large nuclear potential they will be even more cautious than they were before. There is a considerable reason, for instance, to suppose that since the explosion of their nuclear devices the Chinese have been far more cautious as regards the Vietnamese war. They now realise that if they go too far, the first thing that will probably happen is that the Americans will send conventional bombers to Lanchow and do away with their means of producing the atom bomb. Therefore they have become much more amenable to the frame of mind which may well lead to some kind of peace emerging in the Far East. All these things are paradoxical but there is some truth in them.
There is a danger, of course, given the situation between India and Pakistan, that India might become a nuclear
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Power and an obvious danger in the Middle East of Egypt's using a bomb for her own purposes. Of course, we all know that it would not matter in the least if Sweden or Switzerland had the bomb. In this field generally there is a certain danger, but it is not overwhelming. What is disturbing is this apparent Russian conviction that the Atlantic Nuclear Force, or indeed the M.L.F., will be an appalling example of proliferation, in the sense that it will inevitably "give the German Generals the nuclear bomb", as they will have it. I think one of the main things which the Foreign Secretary and the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, can do is to disabuse the minds of the Russians of this appalling misconception, and even, I should think, a nightmare, because the creation of an Atlantic Nuclear Force, if it was ever possible, would result in not more but less proliferation. Inevitably it would mean that the British and French nuclear forces would be more or less amalgamated. What would be done with them, nobody knows. But there would be one authority rather than two, which, on the face of it, would be less proliferation. Furthermore, the association of the Germans, not in the way of making these horrible things, but in some form of control over this new force, should make Germany more cautious, rather than more aggressive, towards the Russians. The Germans do not want to be blown up, and I cannot see why the Russians should think that the Atlantic Nuclear Force would really be such an enormous menace to them.
We had an Atlantic Treaty Association meeting in Rome which I thought was very successful, and one of the recommendations there was something which bore a marked resemblance to that brainchild of the Labour Administration. I rather hope that they will not abandon this brain-child, because it has much potential good in it, and I commend this particular resolution to the noble Lord in case he has not seen it. It was agreed to by a powerful French and a powerful German delegation, to say nothing of British, Italian and other representatives.
I have talked too long and I know noble Lords will wish to hear other views on this matter, so I will conclude by saying that we on these Benches are particularly glad that a brilliant man of the calibre of the noble Lord, Lord

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Chalfont, has the task of doing this essential preparatory work, for such I think it is, for something which will come into operation if and when the political circumstances permit. After all, nobody could be better qualified, for, as we all know, he was brought up in the best Liberal traditions and therefore he has clearly the right instincts in this crucial matter of disarmament. We were indeed sorry to lose him, but we tend to regard him less as a deserter than as a sort of infiltrator into the Socialist camp. In any case, we wish him all possible luck in these disheartening negotiations with which he is so suitably associated.
5.35 p.m.
LORD SOPER: My Lords, I also must begin by craving the indulgence of this House. I, too, have been trapped by the time schedule and have to keep a date at Great St. Mary's, Cambridge, later on in the evening; therefore I must ask the noble Lord if he will excuse me if I also have to go immediately after I have spoken. I am the more sorry because I should have been most anxious to hear what my noble friend Lord Chalfont had to say in reply to many of the questions which have already been asked. He has been good enough to indicate that he understands that I have to go, and I am sure he will understand also that I approach this problem of disarmament from the pacifist angle and as one rooted in the pacifist principle.
I am not discouraged from venturing to say my piece on this theme because of the wide drawing of the actual terms of this debate. We are invited to call attention to problems concerning disarmament, and no one can complain that hitherto none of these problems has been ventilated. In fact, they have been widely and wisely thought of, and no doubt enlightening answers will be given when my noble friend, rises to answer. But in the gracious Speech this Government committed themselves to the promotion of disarmament, and therefore I will take courage and try to say something of what seems to me, at least, to lie within the pacifist position, not as something which can be immediately translated into governmental action, but as a principle which can be of service to the Government and the community in their search for peace and in their programme of disarmament.
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Let me briefly say what the position that I hold adds up to. I believe it is never right for a professing Christian to indulge in war in any circumstances; therefore, so far as I am a free agent, in no circumstances do I feel able to contribute to it. Most of my noble ecclesiastical friends, who are at least here in spirit, I am sure, would agree as a general proposition that war is evil; but they do not agree, as the majority of Church people do not agree, that there are no circumstances in which it is permissible, and they hang on to the proposition that in certain circumstances a just war is not only permissible but is in fact the lesser of two evils. There is a consequence for the pacifist which immediately flows from his total rejection, in so far as he is a free agent, of participation in war, and it is simply that he therefore cannot tolerate as morally permissible the instruments of war, and therefore he attaches the same moral obloquy to the methods by which a war can be prepared as he does to the actual exercise of war itself.
It is in this particular frame that I would make a pertinent comment, not as an arrogant pacifist seeking to convert this House to pacifism, but as one who has laboured long enough in the Pacifist cause to realise how multitudinous are its difficulties and how lacking in humility are some of its protagonists; and I believe it is in this field that a contribution can be made. It is that if a pacifist feels compelled by his faith to reject—as by my faith I feel compelled to reject—the instrumentality of war, he cannot sit back thereafter and say, "I have done my bit; now let others do theirs". He has to contribute positively what he believes to be the moral alternative to that grievous exhibition of violence which so many sincere people feel they are compelled to make.
It is in this field that I would turn to the whole question of disarmament and propose, as a general statement of what is to be believed, that disarmament is not the flower and fruit of the process of peace-making; it is the ground and tillage of that peace-making. I believe there is a rose that is called "Peace". The disarmament programme is not (shall we say?) the bloom and blossom of that rose; it is the cultivation of that rose. We have already heard a good deal in this debate of the problems that confront

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us in a world where there is suspicion and hatred and a good deal of rather naive thinking about philosophies to which we do not attach our own thinking. It is therefore, I would humbly suggest to your Lordships, a question not so much of saying, "Let us wait for the circumstances which will be propitious and then we can disarm". The very nature of these propitious circumstances depends on the initiation whereby we undertake certain processes of disarmament, not because the world is ready to receive them, not because our enemies are trustworthy, not because everybody is good and kind and gentle, but because only by the prosecution of such a programme can such an end be envisaged.
I quite agree—who can deny it?—that there is widespread suspicion. How much of that suspicion, however, is quite definitely associated with the possession of armaments, and not only with the prosecution of wars? It was Sir Winston Churchill who, very sapiently, said that lying in wartime is an indispensable ally. We all know that in war truth is the first casualty. I think we have to learn that before a war starts nobody tells the truth about the armaments he possesses, and the very possession of armaments occludes the processes of honesty and straightforwardness. I am no Communist, though I find a good many of the contentions against Communists naïve and uninformed—and I would remind the noble Earl that it was Mr. Khrushchev who alone, of all the world's statesmen, has proposed total disarmament by a process of stages; and, furthermore, the bringing down to certain quite appreciably lower levels the armed forces of the Soviet Union has been one very constructive and obvious plan of making evident to the world, as he said, the good intentions of the Soviet Union. I will not delay the House to talk about the relative merits. I have never attached total depravity to the Communists, although they have their usual dose of Original Sin. What I am concerned to say is that only by the exercise of a positive attitude of risks taken in disarmament is it likely that we shall change the dubious atmosphere in which so many people feel that it is impossible to undertake any disarmament at all.
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I will delay the House no longer than to point this particular lesson, if it is a lesson, in one particular field. If unilateral action is required in general terms to promote the ends of disarmament and peace, how much more imperative is that action in the light of the nuclear threat? I find myself almost totally opposed to those who take comfort from the events of the Cuba crisis. The chilling thought to me is that, whereas Mr. Khrushchev was deterred by the nuclear threat, Mr. Kennedy was not. And when people comfort me, or seek to comfort me, by saying, "Here is evidence of the mortal danger which threatens the world, the mortal danger which is postponed and held in check by the dreadful consequences which will attach to either side if they go to war in a nuclear age", I find myself utterly bewildered, because so far as the evidence goes to show—and recently that evidence has been made quite clear in the Sunday newspapers—America was not deterred; America was prepared to take the very risk that the possession of nuclear arms is said to prevent. I shudder to think what will happen the next time such a crisis happens, when the man involved will not be Mr. Khrushchev, who was wiser than his fellows.
Then, only yesterday, as the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, pointed out, China has once again been refused admission to the United Nations. I will not delay your Lordships to talk about that, except to say that in my view it is wrong to assume that the Chinese attitude to the possibility of war, and nuclear war, is a compound of malevolence and treachery. It is no more malevolent or treacherous than the attitude of certain millenarian people and Egyptologists who prophesy the end of the world and all kinds of horrors at Armageddon before that end comes. I know that some of them were quite furious with the noble and gallant Viscount, Lord Montgomery of Alamein, when he won the battle of Alamein and therefore prevented what they thought was to be Armageddon further down in Egypt. They are not animated by any sense of acute malevolence or vituperative violence, any more than the Chinese are.
What really happens is this. If you are utterly persuaded that the logic of history leads to certain military consequences, then you will set your sails in

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that direction and lay your plans. It is impossible to argue such people out of these totalitarian fantasies, but it is possible by presentation of ineluctable facts to present to them evidence which they cannot finally reject. Therefore, although it may sound idealistic, it would still seem to me to be a preferable risk in the world of nuclear threat that this country should unilaterally get rid of its nuclear possibilities and threats as a demonstration which even all the propaganda of Peking could not finally avoid.
I have one other point to make. I was immensely impressed by, and consistently felt the coerciveness of the argument of, my noble friend Lord Snow, that if proliferation of nuclear weapons continues, then, whether by accident or design, sooner or later, the calculations of probability are so high that it is relatively certain, it is statistically certain, that they will go off, or one of them will go off. That I believe to be a nightmare which is not very far from the logical thinking of anybody who takes the trouble to look carefully into this prospect, and who sees that unless a break is made in this vicious circle we are no happier and no more safe because just at the moment our headlines may be preoccupied with other matters.
I know that what I have said in defence of a pacifist position and in the interests of unilateral action is not a policy that can be undertaken at this moment. I witness to it. Moreover, my Lords, alongside the various efforts which I have no doubt are being made, and the various disclosures of better efforts that are in train or in the pipeline, which your Lordships will have an opportunity of hearing about a little later on when my noble friend Lord Chalfont replies, I would respectfully add what I am sure is in the mind and intention of the Government, the plea that to make an adventure in peacemaking will be a colossal risk. But I wonder whether it will be anything like the risk if we continue to wait for multilateral disarmament in a world which can only be made ready for it when somebody takes the risk of a personal, national, individual act of disarmament itself. That is a wish and a hope. It is more for me; it is a faith, and I should have been unfair and dishonest with myself if I did not communi-
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cate it to you. I hope very much when Lord Chalfont speaks to your Lordships he will be able to say that, in the interests of peace, this Government, to which such high hopes are attached, will in fact be taking a lead which is both adventurous and dangerous, but a lead which alone can bring a new spirit into the world.
5.47 p.m.
LORD CACCIA: My Lords, may I add my modest welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, for introducing this Motion? In his speech he asked a number of pointed and precise questions. Like Lord Henderson, I hope that the noble Lord, the Minister for Disarmament, will in due course, be able to deal with them in his reply, and I should not delay that by anything I could say if it were not that I wish to add one general question. But before coming to that, perhaps your Lordships will allow me to make some general reflections on the state of the human condition and about disarmament in general, particularly after what the noble Lord, Lord Soper has recently said to us.
The human condition has reached a peculiarly dangerous and paradoxical state in its development by staging the nuclear explosion and the population explosion at one and the same time. One part of its efforts are going towards the process of doubling its numbers, at a rate now calculated at twice every 35 years, and another part of its energies are being devoted to developing and producing weapons of mass destruction of such power that it is becoming possible that their all-out use would eliminate the human race from the face of the earth. It would therefore seem that a debate on this subject in your Lordships' House is timely now, and will be timely from time to time in the future. The rub, of course, is that despite all the paper and all the plans, and all the words expended on disarmament, there have been, at least in my working life as a diplomatist from 1929 onwards, all too few occasions when any results could be reasonably hoped for.
Meanwhile, some essential "rules of the road" have emerged; and, if I may say so respectfully, I have no doubt that the Minister of State has been observing them, and will continue to observe them, handsomely, and a lot else besides. The first of these is never to give up trying;

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the possible gain is so great for humanity as a whole, and for this country in particular, in avoiding unnecessary and unproductive expenditure on arms. There is plenty else to be done with the money, provided that national security is not endangered. On that Adam Smith may have said the first and the last word: "Defence is greater than opulence".
The second, and deriving from that, is to avoid confusion between what is desirable and what is attainable, and that, in particular at this time, is to know with whom we are negotiating, the Soviet Union. Having spent over four years doing just this, week in and week out in the Allied Commission in Austria (and for a large part of that time the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, was the Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, under whose encouragement and direction we worked), I hope your Lordships will allow me to repeat what has often been said before about Soviet methods. It is that the Russians are not lightly or normally to be persuaded, by eloquence, or convenience, or by reasoned arguments. They prefer to rely on what Stalin used to call the proper basis of international policy, "the calculation of forces". In my experience, this basic concept has not changed much since Stalin died. I regret this, but it means that gestures and concessions, and unilateral acts done by way of example, have no validity, and that the Soviet Union merely puts them in her pocket and ascribes them to weakness, moral or financial. I think it is vital not to misunderstand the character of the Soviet Government and its approach to international policy and to believe otherwise.
The third general rule is that proper account must be taken of the fact that we have allies and are not in this alone. One of them, in particular, the United States of America, has an even greater stake in the security of the Free World than we have, and is now spending and risking more than we are in blood and treasure. This need not paralyse us. The example of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is a case in point, and, as the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, will remember, President Kennedy was most generous in his acknowledgement of the part which the British Government at that time had played in making such a Treaty possible.
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But it should persuade us to retain a certain sense of proportion.
The plain fact is that we, by ourselves, cannot offer the Russians any sufficient inducement to persuade them to make a worthwhile concession. We do not command a sufficient percentage of the stock. Once again, this should not depress us unduly. The same applies in great measure to the United States. It will still be of importance to the Soviet Union to know whether the Americans can deliver their friends.
As all these elementary guide lines are no doubt in the mind of the Minister—I say again that I would scarcely have intervened, and wasted your Lordships' time by such glimpses of the obvious, if I had not wanted to put a question of a general character lying behind the questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, and later by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. I should myself say that it is "the 64-dollar question." It is this: is there any indication that the Russians may now want to do business on any ground which might be acceptable to us and our major allies? I ask this out of a searing experience of the Austrian State Treaty.
Some years after it had been concluded, I met a Russian diplomatist (for his own safety perhaps he had better remain anonymous) who said to me over a drink: "Perhaps at this stage you will not mind my referring again to the discussions we had over many years and many hundreds of meetings on that Treaty. So far as we were concerned, it fell into two separate phases. During the entire first phase we had just one word of instruction from our Government. That word was, 'No.'" He then said, "We saw—I hope you will not mind my putting it this way—with interest, sometimes amusement, occasionally embarrassment, the way in which you would come back, and back, and back with new arguments why we should conclude this State Treaty. Our one word of instruction stood, and we had the difficult task of thinking up reasons why, on each occasion, we should not, after all, accept the arguments that were being put to us, no matter with what cogency. It was not until the second stage was reached, which was after the departure of Stalin, that a new view was taken in Moscow, one

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which included the thought that a conventional type war in Europe was most unlikely, and that therefore it was a matter of relative unimportance whether Russian troops were 100 miles forward in one place or a few miles back in another in the area of Austria. From that moment onwards the word was 'Yes' on certain conditions."
So, my Lords, I think it is a valid question to ask: is there now some real indication that the Russians may be ready to do business on terms that we and our allies can contemplate? Of course, normally the Russians do not give many such indications, if they were a Power operating in the Western manner it would be possible to say to them, quite openly, or at least informally: is there any possibility of doing business or not? If you were told that, for political reasons of various kinds, it was not, that would be that. But, of course, in the Russian case it is not a question that one can ask. No Russian would be likely to give an answer, for fear of what might happen to him should he say anything at all revealing; and in any case he would be most unlikely to know, unless he were one of the few—and there are very few—near the centre of power.
All the same, there are sometimes signs and portents of a change. There was such over the, nuclear test ban arrangement. If it is not an embarrassing matter to the Minister, perhaps I may ask whether he has any reason to hope for some result now, or should we conclude that he is soldiering on, since in this matter of disarmament we must never give up—and I am quite sure that he, above all, would never be ready to give up. If I may make the question more precise on one special point: is there any hope that this might be in the field of non-proliferation or non-dissemination of nuclear weapons, and that there may be some solution which will not damage NATO still more than it has already been weakened by the attitude of one of our major allies?
6.0 p.m.
LORD HAIRE or WHITEABBEY: My Lords, I do not have the experience of the noble Lord, Lord Caccia, but I should like to join with him in offering congratulations to my noble friend Lord Henderson upon the excellent lead he gave this afternoon. His is a noble name, noble in more senses than one,
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particularly in the many chapters on disarmament. I wonder what his father, who was the "father" of disarmament in my young days after World World I, would be saying to-day, two-thirds of the way through the century, if lie heard that his son was carrying on his good work. It is interesting that in the field of disarmament the names that stand out during the century are those of Arthur Henderson and Philip Noel-Baker, who in recent years has been awarded the Nobel Prize; and, in no Party sense, I would mention that these are former Labour Ministers.
To-day, we are, in a sense, really carrying on the debate on the gracious Speech, a speech in which the Government undertake to promote disarmament". The Government have already given ample evidence within the last year, since they came to office, of their interest in disarmament and thus have in fact created a new Ministry of Disarmament, over which my noble friend Lord Chalfont is Minister. We welcome him here to-day from his arduous duties elsewhere to give us a reply this evening. In world affairs at present he holds a very privileged position and a key in which, if I may say so, he has already distinguished himself. There is a long way to go with disarmament, and he is really only doing his job when he is not here.
Disarmament, in my view, can take place only within the context of the United Nations. The 51 peace-loving nations, who met at the Golden Gate in San Francisco some twenty years ago, pledged themselves to keep the peace—to live in peace—and practise tolerance, they said. The 51 have now grown to 115, so, in a reverse way, we can say that the threats to peace to-day are all, or almost all, contained within the United Nations. Of the Great Powers only China remains outside. And who can say what the threat to peace from China is so long as she is frustrated in her efforts to join? So long as she is in an aggressive mood, she can almost, without saying a word, delay progress to disarmament and upset the balance without which we cannot move steadily to full nuclear disarmament. I, like other noble Lords who have taken part in the debate this afternoon, very much regret that even yesterday it was not found possible at the United Nations to admit China to the Club.

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My Lords, in spite of those early protestations of peace-loving in the United Nations, the Organisation is still far from achieving its goal, especially the goal of disarmament. Disarmament requires a world climate of confidence in the peacemakers; whereas to-day, as we all know, there is but mistrust and suspicion throughout the world.
We know that in the last twenty years the United Nations has had to face many problems. It has been, and still is being, torn by the pressure of power politics. It has been hampered, to put it mildly, for many years by the cold war. It has been frustrated by conflicts of interest, and unbridgeable differences such as we are experiencing to-day in Rhodesia—and who can say what these may bring? The racialism of the Smith Government and the colour conflict there are blatant evidence of hate and discrimination. So how can we expect the new nations of Africa to lend a hand in aid of disarmament? Indeed, only the other day my noble friend Lord Shepherd, speaking from the Front Bench, very effectively said that one of the greatest dangers to peace, and especially in the present situation, is the fearful possibility of a colour conflict. While this fear lasts, disarmament is impeded and only the Great Powers can set an example.
My noble friend Lord Henderson has to-day ably and lucidly outlined what are the immediate problems and what little has been achieved. The partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is about the only highlight of the story. It followed years of frustration, years of abortive discussion: talks of inspection, of verification, of so-called balanced disarmament—and, now, non-proliferation agreements. So often to the ordinary layman it seems talk and nothing else. Yet think of the prize of even partial success for us here. We spend £2,000 million a year on defence. If, by even partial disarmament, we could reduce that burden, think how peace might flourish in our midst. Think of the houses, the schools, the hospitals, the factories, the roads we could build with the money saved. Whatever frustrations my noble friend the Minister has to suffer from the endless, boring, and sometimes stifling discussions, he knows that, in the end, every minute will be worth it, if by his efforts he
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can reduce our present crippling bill for armaments.
For many people, however, the goal of disarmament is too far away to be realistic. They look for more limited objectives, and, as my noble friend Lord Henderson said this afternoon, we must seek to make progress in a limited field. It is here that I would attempt to make one small contribution. I have been very much impressed by the success, or partial success, which has attended the United Nations' peace-keeping efforts. This may seem to be an odd way to pursue disarmament. Only when there is an effective deterrent, in the shape of an International Peace Force, will nations realise the uselessness of building up large stockpiles of costly armaments. Yet it is in these efforts towards peace-keeping that the United Nations has largely come unstuck.
The unwillingness of certain nations to become involved in peace-keeping operations is very apparent. The unwillingness of certain other larger nations—indeed, members of the Security Council—to contribute towards peace-keeping operations of which they do not approve has brought the United Nations to the brink of bankruptcy and created a crisis in the Organisation. The debt for peace-keeping has recently been as high as 143 million dollars or, shall we say, £50 million. The refusal of the U.S.S.R., France and certain Eastern European countries to pay their peace-keeping contributions has caused a rapid deterioration in the United Nations' financial position. But once again may I say that our Government showed their good faith.
In spite of our adverse economic conditions—and with a change of policy since we had previously insisted on knowing first how much the Russians would contribute—the Government have made a handsome gesture within recent months with a pledge of some 10 million dollars, or £3 million, towards the peace-keeping deficit. This might have given a lead to the United States, but so far there has been no change in her policy. Of course, the United States already contributes generously to the funds of the United Nations. She pays 32·7 per cent. of the peace-keeping budget, while at the same time paying 32 per cent. of the regular budget. Britain pays 7·2 per cent. of the peace-keeping costs. The U.S.S.R. was

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assessed at 14·9 per cent. and France at just over 6 per cent. So our Government's additional contribution of £3 million was a most welcome and generous offer, especially as at the beginning of the 19th Session of the United Nations there were 62 nations in arrears of contributions.
Peace-keeping is a costly operation, but we shall all surely agree that it is a well worth while one. For example, at the height of the Congo United Nations' operations the costs to be met by the United Nations were 114 million dollars a year, or £38 million, and for the 1960–63 period they were running at £30 million a year. Such is the price of peacekeeping. But who in this country will deny the value of peace-keeping operations in, for example, Kashmir, in Cyprus, in the Middle East and other places; and now perhaps in Rhodesia? If peace-keeping, with all its costs, is to be regarded as a stage on the road to general disarmament, and certainly to an International Peace Force, then any contribution by this Government is money well spent.
6.11 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, I must begin by apologising to the Members of this House for being absent when the debate began. I had a political engagement in Norwich, and I deeply regret that I did not hear the speech with which my noble friend Lord Henderson opened the debate. I would also apologise to the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, for being absent when he spoke for the Opposition.
My noble friend Lord Haire of Whiteabbey has made reference to the fact that this Government now have a Disarmament Minister. I want to emphasise that, because I regard it as of tremendous significance. It is the first time that any Government in this country has had a Minister whose whole thought, energies and enthusiasm are directed to the purpose of disarmament. I not only welcome the fact that we have such a Minister; I welcome the fact that my noble friend Lord Chalfont is that Minister, because none of us can have heard him or met him without appreciating the dedication which he has given to that task. The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, suggested that he was a Liberal who had
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infiltrated the Labour Party. I would rather put it in this way: that Liberalism is a very good apprenticeship for the more developed ideas which not only Lord Chalfont but I myself went through as we joined the Labour Party.
The Minister for Disarmament is mostly concerned in the international field, in the very difficult task of bringing Governments together, in the development of the Test Ban Treaty, and in the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I wish that his duties also included that of influencing the expenditure on armaments of our own Government, which I suppose is mostly in the hands of the Minister of Defence and the Ministers representing the War Office, the Air Force, and the Admiralty. I am going to make a plea this evening that there should be a substantial reduction in our own expediture on defence.
As my noble friend Lord Haire of Whiteabbey has said, our expenditure on defence now reaches the appalling figure of £2,100 million a year. We have a Minister for Disarmament, but that figure is actually £100 million more than it was a year ago. The Government have promised that they will not exceed the limit of £2,000 million a year before the end of this decade, but that limit is to be at 1964 prices, and it may well mean that by 1969–70 the expenditure upon defence by this country will have reached the figure of £2,500 million.
The Government have claimed that this is a reduction of £400 million, on the ground that the programme of their predecessors would have reached that figure. Quite honestly, I find it a little strange that a Government should take credit for a reduction in expenditure of one of its Departments, on the ground of the intentions of the Opposition. I know that the Government are now having a review of the whole subject of defence, and I express the hope that that review may mean that the present figure of £2,100 million will be substantially reduced. I repeat—and I am perfectly sure that my noble friend Lord Chalfont will agree with this point—that while we have this vast expenditure we cannot be building the houses; we cannot be building the schools; we cannot be building the hospitals; we cannot be building the roads, which this country so much needs. Moreover, we cannot, while we are expending

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these vast sums upon defence, be attracting to the most essential services of our country the teachers, the nurses and the others, by paying them the salaries which their service to the community deserves.
I add to that one item in the Labour Government's programme about which I think I am keener in the domestic sphere than any other, and that is that we should establish in this country a minimum standard of life below which no one should be allowed to fall. That is within our programme, but because of the cost of that it has been postponed. I would urge very strongly indeed that we should seek a reduction of our expenditure on armaments and preparations for war, in order that at least we may lift the whole community of our people above a poverty level so that they may enjoy a decent human life.
I want to congratulate the Government, if I may, on certain decisions which they have reached. I include the cancellation of the TSR 2, which has saved us £700 million. There were great fears when that cancellation was announced. There were fears of unemployment among men who were engaged in constructing that aircraft. We have found, in fact, that other industries of a constructive character have been so much in need of their skilled labour that hardly any of the men who were previously employed on the TSR 2 are now unemployed. I must express the hope that the Government will refrain from ordering American aircraft as substitutes for the TSR 2. I should have hoped the difficulties of our balance-of-payments position would have made them careful about that.
I congratulate the Government also, despite what has been said in another place and in this House, on their decision to reorganise the Territorial Services, which, again, will mean a saving of £20 million a year. We have been promised by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that there shall be a reduction by £100 million next year. I welcome that, but even that will only bring us down to £2,000 million, which was the figure for last year, and many of us do not feel that that is enough.
The Minister will be well aware of the feeling in our Party upon this subject. I find it very remarkable that the Par-
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liamentary Labour Party in another place quite unanimously adopted a resolution saying that in their view drastic cuts are required in defence expenditure much earlier than at present proposed. The Minister was present at the Labour Party Conference, and his speech at that Conference, I know, convinced the delegates of the sincerity with which he is facing his task. But he sat through the debate and he knows the intensity of feeling that there is in the membership of the Labour Party for more drastic disarmament—and that has been expressed by the Parliamentary Labour Party in the resolution which it has adopted. Honestly, we cannot be complacent with a situation in which, in every minute that passes, this country is spending £67 million on armaments, on Armies and on defence. That amounts to 15s. a week off the income of every man, woman and child in this country, and the Minister will know how all of us in our Party desire that that should be ended.
May I just put this point from the standpoint of the problem of balance of payments, which is so much the concern of the Government now? Every year £350 million of the money spent on defence is in foreign currency. That £350 million amounts to one-half of Britain's deficit in the external account. May I also draw the Minister's attention to the fact that, whilst our expenditure on defence has been increasing, other Governments have been decreasing their expenditure. The Soviet Union has done it by £240 million; the United States of America has done it by an even larger figure of £350 million, although I am afraid that recently, owing to the war in Vietnam, there has been a tendency to increase; and West Germany, France and Hungary have all cut their defence expenditure. It is a little sad that our Government should be the only Government among the larger Powers whose defence expenditure is increasing.
The Minister will not be surprised if I identify myself with the 78 Labour Members of another place who have asked for a reduction of 25 per cent.—that is, £500 million—in our annual defence expenditure. He has the right to ask how we should bring about those reductions. First, I would say, in the presence of our 50,000 troops in Western Germany. They cost us £85 million a year, of which, again, two-thirds is in the

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foreign currency which we can ill-afford. They went to Western Germany to meet the fear of a Red Army overflowing into Western Europe. I do not believe there is anyone who now regards that as a danger: and I take the view that this is particularly ironic when West Germany itself has recently cut its own defence expenditure by £70 million a year.
The second sphere in which I believe our defence expenditure could be reduced is in the Far East. We have there 55,000 troops, costing us £225 million a year. They are engaged in the confrontation of Indonesia and Malaysia. I make the point only in passing (because I do not want to emphasise it) that from the first I took the view that Malaysia was an artificial Federation. It was to be a Federation of five countries. One of those five, Brunei, did not join at the beginning: another, Singapore, has been expelled from it; and it is now clear that the whole pattern in that area will have to be reconsidered. This is a little outside the sphere of the Minister, but perhaps he could pass it on to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs that surely the changes that have recently taken place in Indonesia itself, and the statement by President Soekarno on this very matter, make it desirable that some initiative should be taken to bring the war between Indonesia and Malaysia to an end, so that a wider confederation can he established in that area which really will reflect the minds of people.
Thirdly, there is the sphere of the Middle East. The bases in Cyprus and Aden cost this country £125 million a year. At the time of the Suez venture the noble Earl, Lord Avon, urged that British action then was necessary in defence of the oil supplies which Britain needed. But the Labour Party has always laid it down that our oil supplies should be guaranteed by commercial arrangements rather than through the use and threat of force. In addition, our Party has said quite clearly that bases should not be retained on any territory against the wishes of the population of that territory. In the case of Cyprus and Aden, I quote Mr. Denis Healey, the Minister of Defence. He has said that they are:
"commitments from an imperial past which have lost their relevance in the modern world",
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and which are—I quote again—
"based on the false belief that it is still possible or worth while to use military force against foreign countries purely to protect our national economic interest".
My Lords, the time has come when this country must adjust itself, not only to the fact that it is no longer one of the great military Powers of the world but to the fact that if there are to be peacekeeping operations in the world, they should be the responsibility of the United Nations rather than the responsibility of any Government or of any group of Governments. I quote once again from a speech Mr. Denis Healey delivered on February 23 last year:
"Our long-term defences have to be adjusted to colonial and foreign policies. We are not, repeat not, going to have bases overseas in ten years' time; certainly not, repeat not, in countries that are not Colonies…The major problem for the next Labour Government is going to be to decide whether there are any real British interests overseas which it is going to be in the long run both politically and militarily possible to protect by force."
Accept that principle, and we shall be able to reduce our vast expenditure on defence.
My Lords, I began by saying that while we have our present expenditure on defence it will be impossible to proceed with urgent measures to relieve poverty, to extend education and to meet the ravages of disease in our own country. I want to end with another reason. Not only has this country to reduce its expenditure on defence, but we have to encourage the Minister in approaching his problem of international disarmament so that world expenditure upon defence may be decreased. It is not only poverty in Britain; it is the fact that nearly half the population of the world is hungry; it is the fact that half the population of the world are not receiving the medical attention which could prevent disease; it is the fact that nearly half the world has no opportunities of education. Added to the present tragedy which that reflects is the increase of population to which the noble Lord, Lord Caccia, referred: the fact that our population will be doubled in 35 years. That population will face starvation because food production in the world is not adequate to begin to meet it. If only the same powers of science which are spent on armaments were devoted to construction, it would be possible not only to remove present

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hunger in the world but to remove the hunger that is likely to develop.
One-third of the territory of the earth is desert. We know that that desert can be made fertile soil. Beneath the desert is water. If it had been oil it would have been brought to the surface long ago, but the water to make the deserts fertile is even more important for mankind than oil. We have seen the wonderful experiments in Israel. We have seen the remarkable experiments in Libya under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. We have been hearing recently of the projects of Miss Campbell-Purdie in Morocco and Algeria which give the promise even of the Sahara becoming fertile area.
One of the great reasons why to-day we should be reducing our expenditure on arms and devoting that expenditure to meeting the needs of the world is the fact that not only our own present poverty but the poverty which will extend as the population grows will doom millions to hunger unless we divert science to the purposes of construction rather than to the purposes of death.
6.35 p.m.
THE MINISTER or STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (LORD CHALFONT): My Lords, I should like first to express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, for introducing this Motion and for doing it in such clear and constructive terms. As has already been said, there is probably no noble Lord in this House more suited by his background to lead us in a debate of this sort, and I find it moving and impressive that he should be following so clearly and well in the footsteps of his distinguished father. I should like, to say a word of appreciation for the many comments that have been made during this debate about my appointment and about the difficulties I face in it. I would say how useful and valuable I have found every contribution made to this debate this afternoon.
Then, if I may, I would refer to the speech just made by my noble friend Lord Brockway. It was, as always, a sincere and moving speech. He is always sincere and I always listen with respect to what he has to say on the subject. But I know he will forgive me if I do
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not follow him in his references to the Defence Review and the changes which may become necessary in the shape of our Defence structure. These considerations I know he will not expect me to comment upon. There is one point that I might make for the record. I make it in no sense as a debating point; but he did suggest (unless I misunderstood him) that we are spending £67 million a minute on defence. There has been, I think, a slight mathematical infelicity here. I would suggest that this sum is nearer £3,500 a minute. That is not small; but it is a little smaller than £67 million.
I hope your Lordships will agree that it is important that, as was suggested, I should from time to time have an opportunity to report to your Lordships' House at some length on the progress that is being made in the international disarmament negotiations and to set out the general lines of thought and policy that guide Her Majesty's Government in their approach to this problem. The noble Earl opposite, in his very thoughtful and careful speech, was good enough to recall that the last time I had the privilege of discussing these matters with you I was taking part in the deliberations of the 18-Nation Disarmament Committee in Geneva in the summer, and that I returned to London expressly to take part in the debate in your Lordships' House. On this occasion, I have returned from the Twentieth Assembly of the United Nations in New York, where the First Political Committee of the General Assembly is now engaged in a disarmament debate.
Before I begin to deal specifically with the issues that we have been discussing in Geneva and New York, perhaps I should make it clear—indeed the noble Earl foreshadowed that I would do this—that the progress I shall have to report will be in no sense dramatic or spectacular. Your Lordships will know, indeed the understanding of this has become clear to me this afternoon, that the problems of disarmament are not the sort of problems that can be solved overnight. They involve, on the one hand, political decisions of great significance, decisions that have to do with the basic political structure of the world; with the concept of the sovereign nation State and all the

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pressures and all the fears that are peculiar to this concept. And, as His Holiness Pope Paul VI said in the memorable address he gave us in the United Nations Assembly a little over a month ago:
"Peace is not built up only by means of politics, by the balance of forces and of interests. It is constructed with the mind, with ideas, with works of peace."
At the same time, within the general framework of these far-reaching political and moral considerations, disarmament and arms control are matters of great technical complexity; they involve the delicate balance between the search for peace and the requirements of security and they involve also the constantly accelerating pace of scientific research and technological development. I say this simply to point out that, although I am convinced that in the long run we shall solve these problems, because we must, it would be foolish and misleading to suggest that they will be solved quickly. I must say, in this connection, that I was a little depressed to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, who has unfortunately had to leave the Chamber, was so pessimistic about the possibilities in this respect. It was not always so in the Liberal Party.
When the Party opposite was in power its representatives at the various disarmament negotiations worked long and patiently for much the same aims as Her Majesty's Government are working for now. In their time there was one significant step forward on the road to disarmament. I mean the Treaty, signed in Moscow in 1963, which prohibited the testing of nuclear devices in the atmosphere, in space and under the sea. Although this cannot be represented, or should not be, as a spectacular achievement in international co-operation, its importance as a step towards the eventual goal of disarmament should never be forgotten; and I have no hesitation in paying tribute to the vital part played in the achievement of that agreement by the British Government of the day. I believe that it is by way of these gradual and painfully achieved steps that we shall eventually break through the political barrier and the psychological barrier to disarmament and the achievement of a world governed by the international rule of law rather than by the rule of force and fear.
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What, in fact, has happened in disarmament negotations since I last addressed your Lordships' House before the Summer Recess? The main weight of effort has been, as I suggested then that it would be, in one particular area of the disarmament problem: what is called the non-proliferation issue—the urgent need to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons—to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in those countries that have the scientific and technical resources to do so. There are disturbing signs that some of them are now beginning, disastrously I believe, to think that to join the so-called nuclear "club" will give them not only greater status in the world but greater security against their real or imagined enemies.
I will not to-day repeat the arguments that I have developed before in your Lordships' House about the gravity and urgency of this problem. It is enough to remind your Lordships that, while we have to-day five Powers in the world that can be called nuclear Powers, in the sense that they have successfully detonated a nuclear device, there are at least a dozen other countries who, if they made the political decision to do so, could probably carry out a successful nuclear test within the next few years; that if we do not find some way of stopping this we may well have within the next ten or fifteen years not five but ten or a dozen nuclear powers. I think I need spend no more time in elaborating the dangers that such a development would bring, or in repeating at length to your Lordships my conviction that if this happens all the roads to disarmament will be blocked for many years to come.
In this context, may I say that I again take mild issue with the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, and agree with my noble friend Lord Soper in his analysis of the danger, the awful, appalling danger, with which this problem confronts us. We should be in no doubt about this and not allow ourselves to be reassured by any false premises or arguments that the growth of nuclear weapons in the world will bring greater security. I believe this to be a pathetic and dangerous fallacy.
In the deliberations of the First Political Committee in New York the delegates at the United Nations agreed, almost without dissent, that this problem is the most

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urgent of all those facing us at the moment, and with this in mind it was agreed that it should be the first item to be discussed by the Political Committee. In three weeks of debate on this one single item the representatives of 59 countries at the United Nations spoke and gave expression to their concern about this danger. I am sure your Lordships will agree that this, in itself, is a significant and encouraging development.
We have always said, since I made my very first examination of this problem when the Government first came to office, that this was the first important problem. Unless we halt and turn back the nuclear arms race, all other questions of disarmament will become merely a matter of academic debate. I believe that anyone who looks at this debate from the outside is entitled to ask one obvious question in the light of what I have just said. If so many people in the world are desperately anxious, as they seem to be, to stop nuclear weapons spreading, what is it that still lies in the way of agreement?
To answer that question I think I shall have to explain that in general terms, as was said by the noble Earl, there are two main elements in the problem. The first is the need for agreement among the nuclear Powers that they themselves will not help in spreading nuclear weapons, or control of nuclear weapons, beyond the present limits. The second is the need to convince the non-nuclear Powers, especially those that are most technically advanced, that it is not in their interest, their security or any other interests, to manufacture or develop, or in any other way to acquire, nuclear weapons or control over their use.
Let me first deal with the question of the nuclear Powers. First of all, let me refer to the latest arrivals in the nuclear club, Communist China and France. This point has been referred to in more than one speech this afternoon. So far, regrettably, there is no evidence that the Government of Communist China has any real interest in disarmament or in the control of nuclear weapons. I believe this to be a reflection of one of the major tragedies of the present international debate, the fact that the Government of Communist China, for a
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whole complex of reasons, remains for the moment outside the main stream of international negotiations.
So far as Her Majesty's Government are concerned, we believe that this state of affairs should not last for one moment longer than it has to. We believe that the Government of Communist China should be represented in the United Nations and that, as a member of the United Nations, they should take part in the whole range of international negotiations, disarmament included. But I must make it clear—it would be wrong not to do so—that the question of whether Communist China should be invited to take a seat in the United Nations Assembly is only one side of the problem. As I have said already, there is, unfortunately, little evidence at the moment that the Chinese would be seriously interested in such an invitation, even if it were made.
So far as disarmament negotiations are concerned, the Political Committee of the United Nations Assembly is at the moment in the course of discussing a World Disarmament Conference, to which my noble friend Lord Henderson made reference. He asked what was the attitude of the Government to this proposal. The World Disarmament Conference is an idea designed mainly to include China in its membership. I am not very much impressed with the idea of a World Conference as an effective forum for serious negotiation of disarmament issues. You cannot negotiate seriously among 117 countries. But the Government's view is that if a Conference of this sort succeeds in bringing China into contact and discussion with the Americans and the Russians (that is a very important point, because otherwise it would not be very effective), if we can do that, and bring those people round the table together, and be there ourselves, it can hardly fail to do some good. But there are many aspects of this idea of a World Conference which will need a lot more deep thought and careful planning than has been given up to now.
Let me look for a moment at the problem of France. Again for a whole complicated set of political reasons, the Government of France at present take no part in disarmament negotiations.

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Their chair at the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Committee in Geneva remains empty day after day, and although they are present at the deliberations of the United Nations, they play no active or constructive rôle in the discussions on disarmament. I believe that the absence of China and France from the disarmament negotiations is regrettable and that in many ways disarmament agreements can never really be complete without them. On the other hand, I think it very important to resist the suggestion which is sometimes made, that disarmament negotiations or agreements are useless so long as the French and the Chinese take no part in them. So far as this particular problem of the spread of nuclear weapons is concerned, it would clearly be altogether more satisfactory if all five nuclear Powers were involved.
On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that either the French or the Chinese, any more than the Russians, the Americans or ourselves, have any interest in wanting to transfer nuclear weapons, or the control of them, to any other country, and for that reason I am convinced that the absence of China or France, although regrettable, is not a limiting factor. But we should leave the way open for them to join our negotiations at any time they may wish to do so and to accede to any agreements that we may reach. But I believe that we should be wrong and irresponsible to relax our efforts simply because, for the moment, they do not feel inclined to do so.
The immediate problem, so far as the nuclear Powers are concerned, is to reach agreement among the three nuclear Powers that are engaged in the negotiations—the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. It seems self-evident to me that none of these three countries has any more interest in the spread of nuclear weapons than has France or China. In fact, I believe that there is a very real community of interest between the Soviet Union and the West to halt the spread of nuclear weapons by whatever means they can devise. What then prevents them from reaching agreement?
I believe that the answer to this question, my Lords, has emerged quite clearly from the discussions that we have had in New York and in Geneva over the
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past six months. There was a time, until the summer of this year, when the obstacle appeared to be the general sense of crisis in the world and particularly the struggle going on in Vietnam. The Soviet Union repeatedly protested that there could be no serious disarmament negotiations between them and the West so long as the war in Vietnam continued. But at Geneva in the summer, Mr. Tsarapkin, the chief Russian disarmament negotiator, answered a question at a Press conference by saying that the war in Vietnam was no longer an insuperable obstacle to an agreement to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons.
Russian negotiators now say that the only obstacle that is left in the way is that presented by the plans that are being discussed within the Western Alliance for the sharing of nuclear responsibilities. They point to the American plan for an M.L.F., a Multilateral Nuclear Force of ships to be built and manned and controlled jointly by the countries of the Western Alliance, and the British plan for an A.N.F., an Atlantic Nuclear Force, which was put forward by the British Government as an alternative to the American plan. The Soviet Union say that they see no difference between these two plans and maintain vigorous opposition to both of them.
In particular (and here, as has been suggested already to-day, I believe is the heart of the problem), they constantly and inflexibly press their opposition to any participation by the Federal Republic of Germany in the nuclear arrangements of the Alliance—to what they call "access by Western Germany to nuclear weapons". This is their slogan. So far, as much as I and my American colleagues have argued, they have refused to accept our proposition, that the British proposals for an Atlantic Nuclear Force already contain full and effective safeguards against the transfer of the control of nuclear weapons.
I think it is important here, partly because of the way in which this subject has come to be discussed in the world in recent days, to make quite clear the attitude of Her Majesty's Government to this problem. Our policy contains two parallel and, to my mind, compatible elements. In the first place, we are determined not to embark on any action which involves dissemination—that is to

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say, which involves the transfer of the control of nuclear weapons to any country which does not at present possess it. At the same time, we are resolved to maintain and to contribute to the strength and the cohesion of the Western Alliance, which in our view—and in this I agree wholeheartedly with what the noble Earl opposite has said—is an indispensable basis for effective disarmament negotiations. How, then, are we to ensure an effective and appropriate rôle for the Federal Republic within the Atlantic Alliance and at the same time move forward towards arms control and disarmament agreements with the Soviet Union?
The first and obvious fact, of course, is that we cannot, and will not, allow countries outside the Western Alliance, and especially those hostile to it, to dictate, for their own purposes, the development of strategic arrangements within the Alliance. But I must make it clear that this does not mean that we cannot discuss these arrangements with the Soviet Union. Indeed, we can, and must, explain our arrangements to them, if we are to persuade them that our plans are compatible with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
But, of course, before we can explain our arrangements to the Soviet Union, or anyone else, in the course of disarmament negotiations, we must decide within the Western Alliance exactly what our own arrangements are going to be. The noble Earl asked what is the attitude of Her Majesty's Government towards these arrangements. Perhaps I might take this opportunity to say as clearly as I can what that attitude is. It springs, in the first instance, from our view of the Western Alliance as an alliance of free nations. Within it there are, of course, nuclear Powers and non-nuclear Powers. But there are no first-class or second-class States. Every member of the alliance has a right to expect that its voice shall be heard in matters that vitally affect its security.
Some of the non-nuclear members of the Alliance feel that, as their security depends in the final analysis on the strength of the nuclear Powers, they themselves should have some influence on how and when nuclear weapons would be used if they were ever used at all. We recognise the strength of this
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view and the validity of the arguments which lie behind it. It is no good telling them to relax and leave it to us: we must do something to resolve their legitimate doubts and remove their very real fears. It was for this reason that the idea of the multilateral nuclear force was born. In the form originally suggested by the United States, the M.L.F. was to have been a fleet of missile ships jointly owned and manned by the countries of the Alliance. Her Majesty's Government never really thought this to be an ideal solution and they never really agreed to it.
Our own proposal—the Atlantic Nuclear Force, or A.N.F.—proposed, roughly speaking, to bring existing nuclear forces under joint alliance control. This proposal is still being discussed within the Alliance. It is now also being suggested that there may be other approaches to the problem, for example, by improving the consultative and planning machinery of the Alliance. The view of Her Majesty's Government is that, in the first place, whatever arrangements are eventually agreed should be agreed quickly, so that constant and endless discussion in NATO does not disrupt the Alliance and, at the same time, make disarmament negotiations more difficult. In the second place—and this is important—when looking at proposals for new alliance arrangements, we should ask ourselves two clear questions. First, does the proposal substantially improve the strength and cohesion of the alliance? Secondly, does it make agreements on disarmament, and especially on a non-proliferation treaty, more difficult to achieve?
I think that your Lordships would agree that there would be little to be said for any proposal that conferred little or no advantage on the Alliance, but which at the same time stood in the way of agreements on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Our A.N.F. proposals, in fact, contain specific clauses designed to forbid any transfer of control of nuclear weapons. And, whatever the arrangements proposed for the future, I must say again now, as I said at the Geneva Disarmament Conference in my last speech there in September, that Her Majesty's Government are resolved never to take part in any

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arrangement that would place the control of nuclear weapons in the hands of any non-nuclear Power.
It was, indeed, over this vital matter of control, as the noble Lord, Lord Henderson, has said, that the British draft treaty on non-dissemination, which I took with me to Geneva last summer, failed eventually to see the light of day. And perhaps I may explain in a few words how that occurred. Our interpretation of non-dissemination was, as it is now, strict, and our treaty as it was drafted would have prevented any possibility that there could ever be a non-nuclear Power, or a group of non-nuclear Powers, in Europe or anywhere else, that could control the use of nuclear weapons without the positive consent of one of the existing nuclear Powers. Sonic of our allies were unwilling to support us on this issue, and your Lordships may have seen that when the Western draft was finally tabled by the United States, while I gave it general support in Geneva, I expressed reservations on this issue on behalf of Her Majesty's Government. That is the reason why the British draft treaty never saw the light of day, and that is the reason why we certainly could not have co-sponsored the one that did. But we must not be too proprietorial about these things. What matters is not who drafted or tabled the treaty, but that a constructive draft treaty was tabled and became the basis for serious negotiations.
What, then, is the position now, after the negotiations in Geneva and the debate in New York? Shortly before the discussions in New York began, the Soviet Government tabled their own draft treaty to be considered alongside that of the West. After the comprehensive debate I have already referred to, the United Nations Political Committee adopted without dissent a resolution which will form a valuable basis for the next phase of negotiations.
I might refer, in passing, to a question which was raised about the wording of part of this resolution, in which we were enjoined to conclude a treaty as soon as possible containing no loopholes, and fears were expressed that this was a form of compromise that would lead to endless argument when we returned to
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Geneva. I think this need not be the case. The resolution was one which has at least enabled us to return to Geneva and to discuss this matter in an expert body of seventeen nations, which I believe to be the correct forum for this sort of discussion. I believe, too, that the resolution that was adopted will give us a good start to get on with these negotiations. We shall not, of course, waste time before we go back to Geneva. We shall be spending a great deal of our time closing the position and discussing it with the Soviet Union and the United States, and I very much hope that when we get back to Geneva any fears about long, futile arguments will be ill-founded. I think that what we have to do now is to close this gap and bring together the American and the Russian draft treaties; and I believe that, with patience and care, we can do so. I hope I may be forgiven for saying that. I hope your Lordships will agree that in bringing this matter to the point of serious, hard negotiations between the Soviet Union and the West, Her Majesty's Government can justifiably claim a modest part of the credit.
So far I have spoken only of the need for agreement among the nuclear Powers. As I suggested earlier, a problem of even greater complexity is how we persuade non-nuclear Powers—especially those with advanced standard, of technology and highly developed pre-occupations with status or security—to undertake voluntarily to deny themselves the option of developing nuclear weapons. There is, of course, no simple or single answer to this. Each of the countries that has the capacity to make nuclear weapons is under pressures peculiar to its own position.
The noble Lord, Lord Henderson, asked me specifically about guarantees or assurances to non-nuclear States. Some of the latter say that before they will sign a non-dissemination agreement their security must be given collective assurances by the nuclear Powers. That is easy enough to say, but it poses problems of fearful complexity. Who, in the first place, is to give the assurances? Can we, for example, expect the Soviet Union to join with the West in assuring India against attack by China? I do not know, but I suspect it would present some very difficult problems for the Russians. And if the West alone proposed to support

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India, would this be acceptable to the Indians in terms of their known policy of non-alignment? And then there is the even more complicated problem of what our assurances would mean. Are they designed to prevent nuclear attack only? If so, they seem to face only the most unlikely contingency. Are they then to prevent attack by conventional forces? If so, how? By the threat of massive nuclear retaliation? Or would it involve the stationing of foreign troops or weapons on Indian soil?
My Lords, I pose these questions here not, I fear, to answer them, but merely to give some idea that the reassuring concept of underpinning the security of a country that is not bound to you by a formal military alliance is no simple matter. But, as my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said in another place, if non-nuclear countries want these assurances, we must try to find some way of providing them. But let us not persuade ourselves that it will be easy. In any case, as I have said, some countries do not want these assurances—their concept of neutrality would not include them.
What else is there that can be offered as an incentive to persuade countries not to acquire nuclear weapons? A great deal has been said—in Geneva and in New York, and indeed in your Lordships' House—about the need for the nuclear Powers to show an example by, I think it has been put, dismantling the nuclear club. Some say that the nuclear Powers should, as an earnest of their intentions, conclude a comprehensive test ban treaty—that is to say, a treaty which would extend the Moscow Treaty of 1963 to forbid the testing of weapons underground. There is no doubt that this would be an important measure of disarmament in its own right, apart from its effect on the non-proliferation issue. But I fear for the moment there seem to be insuperable obstacles in the way. Before the West will agree to such a treaty, there would have to be provision for a small number of inspections; that is to say, inspection teams would actually be exchanged between the countries concerned. These need not be particularly intrusive, but the West demands them in pursuance of the principle of disarmament agreements in order to make reason-
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ably sure that no cheating takes place. The Soviet Union says that such inspection is unnecessary—that national means of detection and identifying underground nuclear explosions, by which they mean the use of scientific instruments like the seismograph, are entirely adequate for locating and identifying all underground events such as earthquakes or nuclear tests. They quite unequivocally refuse to allow inspection teams on their soil, and so far they have refused, too, I regret to say, to exchange with us scientific information about detection methods.
But our own British scientists have been engaged for some time on a seismic research programme to examine the possibilities of a new detection system that might help to break this deadlock. Using electronic data processing and a new system of detection arrays our scientists have set up experimental establishments here in the United Kingdom and in other parts of the Commonwealth. It has become apparent that there are prospects of a real advance in the detection and location of underground events and that an underground test ban might, in the future, be monitored with a relatively small number of detection stations. We are now in the phase of studying specific explosions and earthquakes, using these large arrays; and it remains to be seen to what extent our researches will reduce the need for on-site inspection. I need hardly add, I think, but I will, that British scientists are willing to share their knowledge with any other country in the world if it will help to bring a ban on underground tests any nearer. It was with this in mind that at Geneva in September I welcomed on behalf of Her Majesty's Government a proposal, referred to by my noble friend Lord Henderson, by the Swedish Government for international co-operation in a sort of "detection club" that would correlate and interpret the data from seismic stations all over the world.
Before leaving this subject, it might be useful to your Lordships if I said a word about this idea of what is called a seismic threshold. This is the theory that you might be able to have a ban on underground tests without inspection if you confine the ban to events or explosions above a certain seismic magnitude. The seismic magnitude proposed by the United Arab Republic, who brought this matter

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up in Geneva, was 4·75. I will not try to explain what that means. It is simply a unit on a scale of seismic measurement. I think it would be dangerous to think that there is too much scientific accuracy about this concept. If I simply say that it is possible, by certain techniques, to produce that seismic reaction on the scale by an explosion of 5 kilo-tons underground in certain geological structures, and of 50 kilo-tons underground in other geological structures, you will see, I think, without further explanation, that a 4·75 threshold is not a matter of great scientific exactitude. I say we must not dismiss the proposal, because it must obviously he considered very closely and seriously, but I point out that this is not quite such an attractive idea as it may appear to be on the surface.
There are critics of the nuclear Powers, of course, who go even further than a nuclear test ban, and demand that we should make a start now in nuclear disarmament. Although I believe it would be wrong, quite wrong, to make nuclear disarmament by the nuclear Powers a precondition of a treaty to ban the spread of nuclear weapons, I must confess that I have a great deal of sympathy for this general point of view. I believe, as I have said before, that the security, both of the East and of the West, could be assured with levels of nuclear weapons lower that the enormous armouries which now exist. Already, indeed, the United States has made two important proposals in this direction. In January of last year President Johnson suggested a "freeze"; that is to say, a halt to all production of the means of delivering nuclear weapons. At the United Nations General Assembly this year, the United States has further proposed—and I think this has not received nearly as much publicity as it deserves—an agreement to destroy a number of nuclear warheads, provided that the Soviet Union will do so as well, and to transfer the fissionable material in those warheads to peaceful uses. So far the Soviet Union has shown little enthusiasm for either of these proposals.
I think I might here say in passing that I often wish some of my countrymen who heap constant criticism on the United States would study the record of disarmament negotiations over the last ten years. I think they would be surprised at the way in which our American allies have
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gone on, year after year, trying to get agreement in arms control and disarmament, without very much encouragement from the other side. I should like here, in passing, to refer to something that my noble friend Lord Soper said in his speech. I regret that he is not here, but I think I should say this for the Record. He suggested, I believe, that Mr. Khrushchev was the only man who had proposed a plan of general and complete disarmament under international inspection. This is not factually correct. An American plan also exists, and is on the table at Geneva. I should like, but it is not possible, to follow my noble friend Lord Soper a little more closely in his arguments about Cuba; but I must leave that to another time.
I believe, like my noble friend Lord Henderson, that the West must aim to go even further than these proposals I have just mentioned. We ought to try to come to an agreement, the West with the Soviet Union, as soon as possible, to begin to destroy some of the bombers and missiles that now exist in thousands all over the world. We cannot, as my noble friend has said, expect the non-nuclear Powers of the world to remain contentedly outside the magic circle, while inside the nuclear Powers go on with their own private arms race. After all, when these weapons are used—and they will be one day, unless we come to our senses—it is not only the nuclear Powers who are going to suffer.
I have dealt so far with what I believe to be the most urgent and immediate problems that face us—the spread of nuclear weapons, underground testing, and the constantly growing armouries of the nuclear Powers. There are, of course, many other paths towards disarmament that we must constantly follow and explore. We must encourage steps towards the effective international control of atomic energy establishments. There is a body designed for that purpose. We shall all follow with great interest the efforts that are being made to establish nuclear-free zones in Latin America and Africa; although these efforts, of course, are primarily a matter for the countries concerned. We shall still seek ways of bringing under effective control the international traffic in arms, and, of course, we shall, I am glad to say, give the assurance that we shall continue to give

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our full and wholehearted support to the United Nations as the central and indispensable peace-keeping agency in an armed, fearful and divided world.
There is one complex of disarmament problems to which I have not so far referred. There are a number of proposals, usually associated with the Polish statesmen Gomulka and Rapacki, for various forms of denuclearisation, disengagement or demilitarisation of Central Europe. This problem was mentioned in the pre-Election manifesto of the Party before it came into power last year. It is in fact—I think I can claim this—the only part of the disarmament section of the manifesto in which, during the past year, there have been no real initiatives, no new proposals, and indeed no progress. I have no intention of trying to avoid this issue, because I know that a great many people, a great number of them supporters of the Government's disarmament policies, are anxious to know whether our policy in this matter has changed. One of the cardinal principles of an effective disarmament process, as the noble Earl opposite has very cogently pointed out, is that it must not disturb the military balance in the world until the disarmament process is complete. At no time must one side find itself in a position of marked superiority over the other. The dangers of this are too obvious to need elaboration. All the proposals that I have seen and examined for arms control or denuclearised zones in Central Europe contain a very real danger that the military balance would be seriously upset so long as they are considered outside the context of the political problems of the area. If we could take them together with some of the political problems—Berlin, divided Germany, and so on—then they might present important disarmament possibilities. As soon as Her Majesty's Government see a suitable climate for following up these possibilities we shall do so with all our resources.
Finally, I should like to underline one important fact about all the steps in arms control and disarmament that I have mentioned to-day. I believe, of course, that they are important in themselves. Each small, patient success, however insignificant it may appear to the impatient onlooker, helps to reduce tension, to dis-
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pel mistrust and suspicion, and to create a climate for further and perhaps more ambitious success. But all these things must be, in the long run, steps towards the final goal of comprehensive disarmament under international control. I can assure your Lordships' House, and specifically my noble friend Lord Henderson, that this is the final aim of Her Majesty's Government, and I am glad to say it is the aim of most of the Governments of civilised countries in the world.
But we shall not, as I suggested at the beginning of my speech, achieve that aim this year or next year, and perhaps not in the lives of many of us. But I believe that, if we are ever to achieve it, we must be prepared to go on patiently, calmly and persistently in this back-breaking and often frustrating task of negotiating for small successes. We have to build, stone by stone, a foundation on which a peaceful world can eventually be built. Here, I must refer again, briefly, to a point in the most interesting and sincere speech of the noble Lord, Lord Soper. I shall not, of course, argue in detail the concept of the just war; nor shall I attempt here to argue the concept of absolute pacifism. I will content myself with saying here that, whatever may be the moral position, we should not deceive ourselves on any political terms that any major unilateral disarmament by this country would have much effect on a similar process in the rest of the world.
What then, my Lords, are our immediate prospects? I have set out the main lines of the disarmament policy of Her Majesty's Government—general and complete disarmament as the final and long-term aim; the urgent problems, the spread of nuclear weapons; a comprehensive ban on nuclear tests and a beginning of nuclear disarmament; and, at the same time, constant examination of the problems of nuclear-free zones; collective guarantees for non-nuclear Powers; control of atomic energy and the international traffic in arms—all this within the framework of our contribution to a strong, prosperous and effective United Nations.
What are our chances of success? I believe, my Lords, that they may be, in the months ahead, as great as they have ever been. As I said earlier, there are signs of a change in the attitude of the Soviet Union. The noble Lord, Lord

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Caccia, made some interesting comments and asked some very pertinent questions about this matter, I recall in the worst days of the cold war a British diplomat (not the noble Lord, Lord Caccia) saying to me—I was in the Army at the time—"Negotiating with the Russians is like operating a slot machine. You put your money in and sometimes what comes out is what you want. If it is not what you want, it is sometimes effective to shake the machine, or kick it, but it is no use talking to it." The noble Lord, Lord Caccia, in a more restrained and elegant way was advancing a somewhat similar view of the nature of Soviet diplomacy, and if I may take issue with such a distinguished diplomatist I believe, unless I am mistaken, that this is no longer the case. It is always worth talking to the Russians, even if there is no prospect of agreement.
When Mr. Khrushchev decided in the summer of 1963 that he could accept a nuclear test ban treaty we were able to move quickly to its signature. And the reasons why we were able to move quickly was that for long, sometimes seemingly sterile, months the delegation at Geneva had gone over the ground again and again; so we knew what to do when the opportunity came. It is very difficult, at the present time, to tell how much the Russians want to reach further agreements with the West, and whether they will insist on attaching conditions they know the West will not and cannot accept. As your Lordships will know, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary is shortly to visit Moscow, and I hope that when he comes back to London in a week or so we shall be a little clearer as to exactly what Soviet attitudes are.
But I believe that if the West as a whole is prepared, as Her Majesty's Government are, to react firmly but flexibly; and if the Soviet Union and the West are prepared to shake off old prejudices and to re-examine old assumptions about where the threats to our security lie, we shall be able to make some real progress in the months ahead. Too often, I be-live, in the past there has been a distorting mirror effect in the Soviet and Western estimates of each other—there have been distortions by both sides of the realities of each others' aims and atti-
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tudes. These have tended to be cumulative and self-confirming, so that in the end each has begun to behave as it thinks the other expects it to. There are signs that we may be starting to see things more clearly. But I believe, my Lords, that we must be on our guard against one grave danger. We must not, if we succeed in breaking, at long last, out of the paralysing grip of one cold war, allow ourselves to be drawn into another. That is why, as I have said, we must, as soon as we can, bring Communist China into the whole complex of international negotiations—especially those on disarmament.
My Lords, I apologise for having kept the House so long. It is so rarely that I have the privilege and the pleasure of taking part in your Lordships' debates that I fear I may have trespassed on your courtesy and patience. I hope, however, that I have given you an idea of the way in which the Government hope to move forward in a serious attempt to bring about effective international agreements on disarmament. But success or failure of course does not rest with us alone. Much depends upon what the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, called the political will of the two great super-Powers of the world, and on their desire and determination to find a common interest in the sort of agreements that will lead to a solution to some of the political problems that divide the world.
Much will depend upon the exchanges and visits and discussions of the next few weeks—in NATO, in Washington, in London and in Moscow. Many of the answers may have become clearer when the Disarmament Conference meets again in Geneva—probably early in the New Year. I very much hope that when I next address your Lordships' House it will be with news of real progress. I fear, my Lords, that time is not on our side, but as that great man, Pandit Nehru, said nearly twenty years ago—and I think it is interesting and significant that this remark was made by an Indian:
"One of the most terrible of the conflicts that distort and corrupt our lives is that between nuclear weapons and the human spirit. I have no doubt in my mind that ultimately in this conflict that is confronting the world the human spirit will prevail over the atom bomb."
7.26 p.m.
LORD HENDERSON: My Lords, I think that everybody here will agree with me that we have listened to a very remarkable speech, which has combined an exposition of British disarmament policy with a survey of the recent disarmament discussions and indications of the likely prospects in the coming conference.
I have one regret, and I look at the Leader of the House when I say this; I think our debate started far too late. One of the saddest things about this discussion is the paucity of attendance of noble Lords to listen to the speech just made by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. We do not often have the opportunity of listening to the Minister for Disarmament, and when we do have a debate I think it is essential that more noble Lords should listen to the speech and the progress report given by the Minister. I must confess I am very disappointed that the Minister has not had a far bigger audience, and I think it is partly due to the fact that we were too late in starting the debate. If we had started an hour, or an hour and a half, earlier than we did, the Minister would have started his speech before 6 o'clock and more noble Lords would have been present. I make my protest in public to the Leader of the House. I think he is the best person to make it to, and I hope my noble friend the Minister for Disarmament will not have a further experience of this sort.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I intervene for one moment? I made some apologies earlier to the noble Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, for one thing or another, and I am willing to make them to the noble Lord, but I never thought he would force me to my knees.
LORD HENDERSON: My Lords, my noble friend has misunderstood. The apology is not due to me but to my noble friend the Minister. I wish to say one further thing. I am most grateful to all those noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, which has been a good one. We are indebted to the Minister for a most unusual and informative speech. Having said that, and having drawn an apology from the Leader of the House, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn.