Lords Sitting of 17 June 1971

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR On the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Exeter.

BURIAL LAWS REVIEW
LORD GARDINER: 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, when the comprehensive Bill on burial laws, referred to in this House on the February 5, 1963, is likely to be introduced.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (LORD SANDFORD): My Lords, the noble and learned Lord will recall that on January 25, in reply to a question he asked on this subject during the debate on the Wild Creatures and Forest Laws Bill, my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor said that discussions were taking place between the Department of the Environment and the Law Commission. The Commission have since accepted the task of reviewing the law of burial in collaboration with the Department of the Environment and will be reporting to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor, no doubt with a suggested comprehensive Bill. Decisions on the introduction of a Bill must wait until the report is received. The Commission hope to be able to report next year.
LORD GARDINER: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for that answer, may I ask two supplementary questions? First, does he appreciate that the Question is not intended to be a criticism of the Government but of a Ministry which goes on promising this and does not do it? Secondly, is it not a fact that the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, was only persuaded to withdraw his comprehensive Bill in 1963 by a promise by
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the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, on behalf of the then Minister of Housing and Local Government that he would produce a more comprehensive Bill and
" That instructions to the draftsman will be prepared as quickly as possible. By that I mean without delay, though I cannot yet say definitely …when the comprehensive Bill will be ready. Therefore I cannot give a definite date. …We intend to proceed … without unnecessary delay and as soon as possible."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 5/2/1963; col. 508.]
Does the noble Lord not think that eight years is rather a long time to elapse since then?
LORD SANDFORD: Yes, my Lords, but I think that the noble and learned Lord will know that when his Administration took up the task they found that this was not an easy subject and not really suitable for a Private Members' Bill.

PROBATION AND PRISON SERVICES RECRUITMENT
3.9 p.m.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what extra steps it is proposed to take to improve recruiting to the Probation Service and Prison Officer Service.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD WINDLESHAM): My Lords, the Government accept that 4,700 probation officers may be needed by the end of 1975 and are planning to provide 200 additional training places, so that the annual output from training can be increased from 350 to 550. My right honourable friend hopes that at least half of these new training places will be available on one-year courses starting this autumn, so that the students concerned may have completed their pre-entry training before the end of 1972. These courses, together with the existing Home Office one-year course, have been advertised and have attracted some 1,300 applications.
On the second part of the Question relating to prison officer recruitment, the Government are providing for more intensive Press advertising, more local

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recruiting drives and exhibitions, and an experiment designed to attract candidates to specified prisons. Recruitment is encouraging at the moment.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for the Answer that he has given. Would he not agree that, no matter how successful are these recruiting campaigns, they will not match the outgoing staff leaving the Probation Service for other forms of social work? So far the prison officer staff is concerned, is it not a fact that whereas 1,000 more were needed last year, only 260 were actually recruited? Can the noble Lord really stand at that Box and say that there is any chance of keeping the present staff, unless there is an adequate salary structure?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, on the first part of the question, the noble Lord is not quite right. Wastage as regards both probation and prison officers has been less than the increase, so that the total strength of both Services has gone up each year over the last few years. The noble Lord will find that that is the case. On the recruiting of prison officers, the second part of his supplementary question, up to May 31 of this year applications were one-third higher than at that time last year—that is 4,000 as against 3,053. The quality of the response has also improved, resulting in more applicants being accepted—590 as against 375. On the third part of the noble Lord's question, on the need for proper financial remuneration for both Services, of course I agree with him that the very important work that is done should be properly rewarded, as he knows. The question of probation officers' pay is still under negotiation, and prison officers' pay is also being reviewed at the present time.
LORD BYERS: My Lords, quite apart from statistics, does not the noble Lord agree that there is a real sense of grievance in both these Services? Can the noble Lord say what the Government are going to do to remove this sense of grievance at the earliest possible moment?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, I think the noble Lord is referring to pay. The sense of grievance among probation officers on the question of pay has been
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great. The Government have made an offer of between 8 and 8½ per cent. with effect from April 1, 1971, which in our view is realistic taking into account the national interest as well as the special needs of the Probation Service. We had reason to think that this offer was acceptable to the staff side, but at a recent conference the members of the National Association of Probation Officers called on their representatives to resign. New representatives have been appointed and a meeting of the Joint Negotiating Committee is due to be held to-morrow.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that the offer was not acceptable to the staff side at all? It was pointed out to them very clearly that it was very much a matter of "take it or leave it"; so there was nothing very much they could do in the matter.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords. the noble Lord is very well informed and we know his interest in this matter; but I do not think I can say anything more helpful at this stage. The Joint Negotiating Committee is meeting again tomorrow. I am pleased to see that the National Association have decided to appoint new representatives, while retaining some of the present ones, in order that discussions may continue.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, I do not want to make this situation more difficult, but is my noble friend aware that a very dangerous situation will persist so long as there is a wide gap between the salaries offered to probation officers and those obtainable by people in the local authorities' social services?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords. this is one of the factors that my right honourable friend is keenly aware of at the present time.
VISCOUNT ADDISON: My Lords, could the noble Lord give the rate of the increase in numbers which he mentioned in reply to my noble friend Lord Beswick?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, in 1966, five years ago, the Prison Service was 8,700 strong. To-day, it is 11.567 strong, the number having increased each year. As at May 31 last year, the Probation Service was 3,400 strong, having

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moved up each year since 1965, when it was 2,319 strong.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that he is misleading the House by giving those figures? Is he not aware, as I am sure he is, that though there was an increase in prison officers last year there was also an increase in the prison population—it increased last year by 5,000—and that an estimated additional 1,000 prison officers were needed, and only 260 came forward? Would he also reflect upon what he said about the quality of the new recruits? Is it not a fact that many of those who are now being established were rejected on the first application, and is there not great concern because of the number of untrained temporary staff now being taken on?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, I have no information on that last point. My information is that the quality of the response has improved. That is my advice, and if the noble Lord has other information I should he most grateful to hear it. I do not think I was misleading the House. It is quite true that the prison population has increased, and this is something which has given concern to the previous Administration as well as to the present one; but he asked me to give the present figures. The figures I gave him for both the Prison Service and the Probation Service were the actual figures in front of me.
BARONESS BIRK: My Lords, would the noble Lord agree that the actual figures have never reached the target? In 1967, would he not agree that the target was 3,500 and the actual number fell far short of that? The target for 1969 was 3,700, and only 3,121 actually were in employment in the Prison Service. Would he also agree that it seems to be a rather extraordinary economic approach (to leave aside the social points made by my noble friend) to be so stingy with the payment of probation officers whereas it costs enormous sums to keep people in Borstal—something like £20 per week —and considerably more than that to keep people in prison?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, it is true that there is a shortage of probation officers. Anyone working in the courts or who is interested in penal policy is aware of this. However, this is a
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trained service and the key is to increase the number of training places. As I said, the plan is to increase the output from the one-year courses from 350 to 550 per annum—a very substantial increase. The number of applicants, as I mentioned, is 1,300. I think this is the correct approach.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords. might I ask the noble Lord whether he would confirm that the Service is losing experienced probation officers, which results in some courts having far too high a percentage of inexperienced probation officers? This is really a serious matter.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, these are all matters of which my right honourable friend is closely and personally aware. They have been raised during negotiations with the probation officers and they are being taken into account.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord is aware how pleased the probation officers and the people working with the Probation Service were when Mr. Mark Carlisle said before the Howard League that the Department were going to produce a major increase in the Probation Service, on which the whole future of penal reform depends in this country, and how totally discouraged we all are to see what the Home Secretary, supported perhaps by the Government, thinks is a reasonable settlement on pay?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, we must recognise that pay is not the only factor with a bearing on recruiting. There are other motives besides material reward which lead people into probation work and other forms of social service. At the same time, of course, we must take care not to exploit the admirable feelings of service to the community and to make sure that people who are engaged in work of this kind receive proper recompense. We do not think that the target of 4,700 is in any way unrealistic. As I said, for 100 places we have had 1,300 applicants.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware of the number of probation officers who are able to stay in the Service only because they take on secondary jobs, sometimes in farming, for example. and would he agree that it is a remarkable tribute to their

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dedication to the work but that it is also a necessary limitation on efficiency in the performance of their duties?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, I would agree with that; and it is for that reason that the pay of probation officers is, for the second time within twelve months, again under review.
LORD BYERS: My Lords, is it not important not to be bewildered and bedevilled by this percentage? It is not 8½ per cent. which matters; it is the basis from which one starts. And the basis is wrong.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords. we have had a thorough discussion on this matter. I have explained the Government's position, and I have said that negotiations are still in progress. This is the third time that we have discussed the subject, although I do not complain about that. If noble Lords want to raise it again on a subsequent occasion, I will then get further information for the House.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, would the noble Lord clarify one point on the recent offer of pay increase; namely, the additional sum to be paid to graduates? Is this payable to graduate probation officers already in post, or only to new entrants? This is quite an important point.
LORD WINDLESHAM: Yes, my Lords. I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising that matter. He is referring to the supplementary allowance. This applies to everyone in the Service, graduate and non-graduate, beyond the first four points on the salary scale. The graduate entrants, as the noble Lord will know, come in at the fifth point. Therefore it will apply to them at the time they join.

CIVIL AVIATION: EUROPEAN CONFERENCE AND FARES
3.22 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 will make a statement concerning the one-day conference attended by representatives of the Department of Trade and Industry and British European Airways under the auspices of the European Civil Aviation Conference in Paris on June 2, and whether changes in the fares-fixing machinery were discussed.]
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (LORD DRUMALBYN): My Lords, the purpose of this meeting with the airlines was to exchange views about traffic on the North Atlantic routes and the possibility of reducing fares. There was also some discussion of the International Air Transport Association's unanimity rule, but this was any incidental to the main topic of conversation. No conclusions were reached.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, while regretting that no conclusions were reached that is a little more information than usual. May I ask the Minister whether he is aware that the normal summer upsurge in scheduled airline traffic has not so far materialised this year? Is he further aware, and could he do anything to make B.E.A. aware also, that this upsurge is not likely to materialise unless some account is taken of the needs of the ordinary scheduled airline traveller, and some financial benefit offered to him, as well as to everyone else?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I think I can reassure the noble Baroness to this extent: that there is a growing awareness of the need for scheduled services to be able to cater for the more popular demand, if I may so describe it, as well as for the normal scheduled travellers. This is a matter that will certainly be discussed at the IATA Conference on fares on the Atlantic routes which is to take place at the end of this month in Montreal.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, is the Minister aware that that is about the best answer I have had to date, except that which I got last week? May I ask him whether or not he would agree that lower fares would generate more traffic? Is there any reason why the ordinary scheduled airline traveller should

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suffer because of the over-capacity of our airlines?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, this is a question which depends largely on the unanimity rule in IATA, and it always has been a principle that there should be established fares for the scheduled lines, from which the concessionary fares derive. What I was saying was that side by side with that it should be possible to cater for capacity along the lines of the Earlybird fares.
LORD REIGATE: My Lords, can my noble friend say whether, if at the forthcoming IATA Conference some common sense is not introduced into the present IATA restrictive fare structure, they have any steps which they propose to take in conjunction with other Governments?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, my noble friend knows the way in which IATA functions. But I can say that the British representative at recent talks made it quite clear that, if IATA failed to introduce the right low fares, Governments would find it increasingly difficult to go on protecting the scheduled services against charter competition.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, would the noble Lord not agree that it is about time that the IATA unanimity rule was modified, in that it is a rule which allows inefficient operators to continue and prevents lower fares for those who wish to fly on scheduled lines?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, there is some pressure at the present time for modification of the unanimity rule in IATA.

GIBRALTAR AIRPORT RUNWAY
3.24 p.m.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will consider having a feasibility study made (including a cost/ benefit analysis) for a runway extension at Gibraltar:

(a) by means of the proven methods of construction in off-shore locations;

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(b) by means of a floating platform; or

(c) by means of a land/platform combination.]

THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (THE MARQUESS OF LOTHIAN): My Lords, this proposition has been considered more than once in recent years. As noble Lords who know Gibraltar will appreciate, any proposal to extend the runway in Gibraltar will involve a number of difficult problems. The whole matter has very recently been raised again by the Gibraltar authorities and is under examination.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, I thank the noble Marquess for that reply. As this matter is being examined, would the Government consider examining a technically viable proposition, which I understand it to be, and that is for an extension to the East, partly on rock fill, and partly on a piled platform, with a floating breakwater at the end. That, I understand, is technically feasible. Can the Government look into this, if they are considering this matter seriously, as I hope they are?
THE MARQUESS OF LOTHIAN: My Lords, any investigation into the feasibility of this extension to the runway will, I am sure, take into account the point that the noble Lord has raised about extending the runway to the East. I was only pointing out that there are, as I am sure the noble Lord is well aware, great difficulties regarding the depth of water, and such matters. These are all problems which will have to be investigated thoroughly.

E.E.C. AND BRITAIN
VISCOUNT GOSCHEN: My Lords, with the leave of the House, my noble friend the Leader of the House will be making a Statement on the E.E.C. Parliamentary timetable at a convenient moment after half-past three o'clock.
BRADFORD CORPORATION BILL [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
NULLITY OF MARRIAGE BILL
Read 3a, with the Amendments, and passed, and returned to the Commons.

HIGHWAYS BILL
3.29 p.m.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (LORD SANDFORD): My Lords, I beg to move that the Commons Amendment to one of the Lords' Amendments be now considered.
Moved, That the Commons Amendment to one of the Lords' Amendments be now considered.—(Lord Sandford.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

HIGHWAYS BILL
  COMMONS AMENDMENT TO ONE OF THE LORDS AMENDMENTS
  [References are to the first Lords print—Bill 115. The Commons Amendment is printed in italics]

  LORDS AMENDMENT
  After Clause 27, insert the following new clause:
  Provision of areas for parking heavy goods vehicles, etc.
  "—(1) A highway authority shall have power to provide on land adjoining, or in the vicinity of, a highway or proposed highway for which they are, or, as the case may be, will be, the highway authority an area, which may be used for all or any of the following purposes, that is to say —

  (a) the parking of heavy goods vehicles;

  (b) the transfer of goods to or from any such vehicle from or to any other vehicle; and

  (c) the temporary storage of goods which have been or are to be carried or hauled by heavy goods vehicles.

  An area provided under this section is in this Act referred to as a "lorry area".
  (2) For the purpose of enabling a lorry area to be used as mentioned in subsection (1) above, the highway authority by whom the area is provided shall have power to erect buildings and execute works on the area for the purpose of providing all or any of the following, that is to say—

  (a) parking places for heavy goods vehicles and, if the lorry area is to be used for either or both of the purposes mentioned in subsection (1)(b) and (c) above, parking places for other vehicles which will be on the area in connection with that purpose or those purposes;

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  (b) a means of access to or from the area from or to a highway;

  (c) facilities for the accommodation of persons who will be on the lorry area in connection with any purpose for which the area may be used in pursuance of subsection (1) above or with the provision on the area of any such facilities as arc mentioned in this subsection;

  (d) facilities for the provision of meals and refreshments for such persons as are mentioned in paragraph (c) above;

  (e) facilities for handling and storing goods which have been or are to be carried or hauled by heavy goods vehicles;

  (f) service station facilities for such vehicles and for other vehicles entitled to be on the lorry area;

  (g) sanitary conveniences (including lavatories) for such persons as are mentioned in paragraph (c) above;

  and power to install or provide in buildings erected by them under this subsection or elsewhere on the lorry area such equipment, furniture and apparatus as may be necessary for the purpose of providing such facilities or conveniences.
  (3) A highway authority shall have power to make arrangements with some other person, not being a council, for anything which that authority have power to do under subsection (2) above to be done by that other person and power to lease the lorry area or any part thereof to that other person, but shall not themselves have power to operate any such facilities as are mentioned in paragraphs (c), (d) and (e) of that subsection.
  (4) Where a lorry area is provided by the Secretary of State under this section he may enter into agreements with a local authority for the exercise by that authority of all or any of his powers under subsection (2) above or of the powers conferred on him in his capacity as a highway authority by virtue of subsection (5) below, so, however, that section 10(2) of the principal Act (discharge of functions delegated by the Secretary of State to a council) shall apply to the exercise of the powers of a local authority under any such agreement and to the conditions to be included in any such agreement as it applies to the discharge of functions delegated under that section to a council and to the conditions to be attached to any such delegation.
  (5) Section 31 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1967 (power to make orders as to use of certain parking places) shall apply in relation to a lorry area as it applies in relation to an off-street parking place provided under section 28 of that Act as if for references to a local authority and such a parking place there were substituted references to a highway authority and a lorry area respectively, and sections 84A, 84B, 84C. 84D and 85 of that Act (provisions with respect to certain orders and offences, including orders and offences tinder the said section 31) shall have effect as if—

  (a) references therein to the said section 31 and a local authority included references to that section as applied by this subsection and I a local highway authority respectively;

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  (b) references in section 84D to a parking place included references to a lorry area; and

  (c) the reference in section 85(2) to the local authority for the parking place included a reference to the highway authority by whom the lorry area was provided.

  (6) The power of the Secretary of State under section 235 of the principal Act to make, with Treasury approval, advances to a highway authority shall include power to make such advences in respect of expenses incurred by such an authority in connection with the provision of a lorry area or in the exercise of any other power under this section.
  (7) A local authority may contribute towards any expenses incurred by the Secretary of State under this section.
  (8) In this section—
  " goods " includes goods or burden of any description;
  " heavy goods vehicle " means a motor vehicle constructed or adapted for use for the carriage or haulage of goods, being a vehicle having an unladen weight of two tons or more, or a trailer;
  " local authority" has the same meaning as in section 27 of this Act;
  "motor vehicle " has the same meaning as in the Road Traffic Act 1960;
  " trailer " means a vehicle constructed or adapted for use for the carriage of goods and drawn or intended to be drawn by a motor vehicle.")
  The Commons agreed to the above Amendment but proposed the following Amendment thereto:
  Line 48, leave out (" and (e)") and insert (", (e) and (f)").
  LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth agree with the Commons in their Amendment to the Lords Amendment. Your Lordships will see that this is not what we would call a substantial Amendment, substituting (e) and (f) for (e), and correcting a small drafting error which crept in through inadvertence when we were amending one of our Bills.
  Moved, That this House doth agree with the Commons in their Amendment to the Lords Amendment.—(Lord Sandford.)
  On Question, Motion agreed to.

SUPPLEMENTARY BENEFIT (DETERMINATION OF REQUIREMENTS) REGULATIONS 1971
3.30 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (LORD ABERDARE): My Lords, I beg to move, That the Supplementary Benefit (Determination of Requirements) Regulations 1971, the draft of which was laid before the House on May 17, be approved. These regulations increase the existing rates of requirements laid down in regulations made under the Ministry of Social Security Act 1966. The new rates of requirements will, together with an allowance for rent, make up the guaranteed levels of income for retired people and others not in full-time work, from September 20. As your Lordships will know, the last increase in Supplementary Benefit rates took place in November, 1970. It was more than enough to restore the value of Supplementary Benefits to what it had been a year before, in November. 1969. It is intended that this year's increase should fulfil the same purpose, of maintaining, indeed improving slightly, the standard of living of the most vulnerable members of our community—the elderly, the sick and disabled, widows, fatherless families and others who are unable to support themselves. The proposed increases, which will keep Supplementary Benefits in line with benefits paid under the National Insurance scheme, are large enough not only to protect people who depend on them from the effects of the rise in prices which has taken place in recent months. but also to provide them with at least some margin in hand for the future.
As your Lordships will understand, these regulations set out, not the actual rates of cash benefits but new levels of requirements, and a person's other income, including retirement pension and other National Insurance benefits (but leaving out some items which are disregarded), has to be taken into account when working out how much benefit he requires in order to bring his total income up to the guaranteed level. The main increases proposed in these regulations are 60p in the rate for a single householder, taking the rate up to £.5.80 a week, and 95p in the rate for married couples, giving a new rate of £9.45.

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There are also proportionate increases in the rates for other adults, young people and children. In addition, some of the new rates include selective improvements which go beyond a proportionate increase and which are designed to concentrate help where it is most needed. The beneficiary who is not a householder receives a fixed addition for rent which is the equivalent of the rent allowance of a householder. This addition is also being increased by these regulations so that the amount will go up from 60p to 65p.
The general overall increase is set at 12 per cent. Taken with last year's increase, this means that Supplementary Benefit rates will have risen by one-fifth from 1969 to 1971. Although future price rises cannot be predicted with any certainty, the Government are confident that this will be more than adequate to make good the erosion in the value of Supplementary Benefits due to rising prices and thus to protect those members of our society who are unable to provide for themselves. The selective improvements, of course, go beyond this general increase. The first of them is an additional increase, which has the support of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, in the rates for children and young people aged from 13 to 20. The amounts that represent. an improvement here—that is, the sums over and above what a strictly proportionate increase would he are 35p for the 13 to 15 age-group, 25p for those aged 16 to 17 and 20p for those aged 18 to 20. This improvement will bring the rates for older children closer to those for adults and provide additional help for parents on Supplementary Benefit who have children in these age-groups.
The other selective improvement is an enhancement in the long-term addition of 50p which is paid to all supplementary pensioners and those under pension age (with the exception of the unemployed) who have received Supplementary Benefit for two years or more. The long-term addition replaces small discretionary additions to benefit for miscellaneous needs, though further discretionary additions can also be made if the long-term addition by itself is inadequate. It is proposed to increase the long-term addition
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by 25p to 75p when either the pensioner or someone dependent on him is over 80. This will be a small, but real, improvement for those among the oldest supplementary pensioners (mostly widows and single women), whose special needs are not already provided for by discretionary additions to benefit over and above the long-term addition.
My Lords, I mentioned earlier that these regulations lay down levels of requirements, to which a person's other income is brought up (leaving out some items of income which are disregarded). National Insurance benefits are counted in full as income when the rate of benefit is being worked out, and I must therefore tell your Lordships that all the improvements made in those benefits by the National Insurance Bill now before Parliament, must be offset against people's requirements in deciding whether they are entitled to Supplementary Benefit. This principle applies also to the selective improvements in National Insurance benefits—such as those for the long-term sick —which the Government are introducing. We have given much serious thought to the possibility of disregarding part or all of the new National Insurance benefits when working out the entitlement of those recipients who also need Supplementary Benefit, but we have decided that this is not the right course. The National Insurance and Supplementary Benefit schemes are complementary parts of the total State scheme of social security; if National Insurance benefits were to be disregarded, the effect would be to provide twice over for the same contingency. This principle applies fully to the National Insurance benefits for the long-term sick. If it were abandoned, the effect would be to undermine one of the purposes of these new benefits, which is to reduce the extent to which the chronic sick have to rely on Supplementary Benefit.
However, my Lords, I am glad to say that these considerations do not apply to the new attendance allowance of £4.80 per week, which will be paid to the very severely disabled from December. This allowance will be paid to all who have, for a period of six months, satisfied the medical conditions of entitlement and the residence qualification, but there are no contribution conditions to be fulfilled. Because it meets a recognisable

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and specific need which is common to all beneficiaries, it is right also to introduce into the Supplementary Benefits scheme a new provision for attendance requirements, applicable to those severely disabled people who will qualify for it; and this is achieved by draft Regulation 3.
The cost of the increases, if they are taken on their own, will be just under £116 million pounds in a full year. However, National Insurance benefits are also being increased this year, and this will lead to a saving on Supplementary Benefit expenditure which will more than offset the cost of the Supplementary Benefit increases, so that expenditure on Supplementary Benefit will actually be somewhat reduced. This is because an increase in National Insurance benefits always leads to a reduction in the amount of Supplementary Benefit paid to National Insurance beneficiaries. The increases will help nearly 3 million people and their dependants, including, as well as over 2 million pensioners, many thousands of the sick, widows and the unemployed. As well as protecting the standard of living of all those who must rely on Supplementary Benefits, these regulations seek to give additional help concentrated in the places where it is most needed. I am sure your Lordships will approve the purpose of these draft regulations and will wish to give them a speedy passage. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Supplementary Benefit (Determination of Requirements) Regulations 1971, laid before the House on May 17 last, be approved.—(Lord Aberdare.)
3.38 p.m.
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord for explaining the Supplementary Benefit Regulations, and, of course, as he will be aware, we on this side of the House will not attempt to do anything other than welcome them. I would merely say, while not wishing at this point to debate the principle underlying the changes which we shall probably have ample opportunity to do during the passage of the new National Insurance Bill—and this is not a Party point—that it always seems to me, each time we discuss these matters (and I felt this when I was in Government), that we make the
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whole thing so complicated that we must, of necessity, employ far more people to administer the system than would be needed if it could be satisfactorily straightened out. While you are working out disregards and "claw-backs", you must be involved in some very complicated sums. I am happy to see that the attendance allowance is going to be available in December, 1971. But I would remind your Lordships, although perhaps no reminding is necessary, that if you are 80, the sooner you get your benefit the more likely it is that you will enjoy it on this earth, because if you have to wait for a year a great number of changes can take place during that time. I am glad to hear the noble Lord say that this change keeps pace with the increase in prices. It seems that we shall need to review these matters far more often if prices continue to rise at the present rate. However, I give every welcome to the Order now before the House.
LORD ROYLE: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, can confirm that the Supplementary Benefit increases will coincide with the National Insurance increases; that is to say, that they will be operative in September of this year?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, for the general welcome for these Regulations. I agree with her that all these matters are very complicated. Perhaps one of the reasons, particularly on the Supplementary Benefits side, is that they seek to take into account individual circumstances. If I may be allowed to pay tribute to the staff of some of these supplementary benefits offices, I would say that immense care and trouble is taken to ensure that special circumstances are taken into account and that discretionary grants are made. I also sympathise with the remarks the noble Baroness made about the elderly; certainly that point is well taken.
The noble Lord, Lord Royle, asked me when the Regulations come into effect. Regulations 1 and 2 come into operation on September 20, and Regulation 3 on December 6.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I attach a great deal of importance to what the noble Lord said about the

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constant attendance allowance. We so often find people who know little about new regulations. What method are the Government going to adopt to draw the attention of the people of the country to the fact that this constant attendance allowance has been introduced and is of such considerable value?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, this is a new allowance and already there has been a considerable publicity drive to draw everybody's attention to it; and the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, is busily at work dealing with claims. But I certainly agree that this is a subject to which we must give continuing publicity.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

E.E.C. AND BRITAIN: PARLIAMENTARY TIMETABLE
3.44 p.m.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (EARL JELLICOE): My Lords, I should like, with the permission of your Lordships' House. to repeat a Statement which is now being made by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister in another place. This is the text of the Statement:
" With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I should like to make a Statement on how the Government sees the arrangements for Parliamentary consideration of the question of British accession to the European Communities.
" It may be helpful if I begin by setting out the stages which must be completed before we can become a member of the Communities. We have first to resolve the major issues outstanding in the negotiations. Second, Parliament should be invited to take a decision of principle on whether the arrangements so negotiated are satisfactory and whether we should proceed to join the Communities. If that be agreed, we have, third, to resolve the remaining issues in the negotiations. Fourth. a treaty of accession has to be prepared and signed. Fifth, legislation to give effect to that treaty has to be drafted, considered by Parliament and enacted. Finally, we and the other parties to the treaty have to deposit instruments of ratification of the treaty.
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"As to the first of these stages, we hope that it will be possible to resolve the major issues outstanding in the negotiations by the end of this month. As soon as possible thereafter the Government will publish a White Paper setting out in detail the arrangements that have been agreed and the Government's conclusions on whether they constitute a satisfactory basis for joining the Communities.
" The timing of subsequent stages depends upon striking a balance between a number of conflicting considerations. On the one hand, uncertainty will persist until Parliament has taken its decision. We owe it to our partners in the negotiations, to our fellow-applicants for membership, whose decisions will to some extent depend on ours, and to ourselves, to resolve this uncertainty as soon as we can. Moreover, the marketing and investment planning of British industry, and future planning in many other sectors of our national life, are vitally dependent on the decision. It is right that all concerned should know as soon as possible where they stand.
" On the other hand, the Government has always acknowledged the need for the whole question to be fully considered and discussed by Parliament and by the public before Parliament is asked to take the decision of principle on it. Although it is true that the main arguments for and against our joining the Communities have been before the public since the first application for membership ten years ago, it is right that we should take time to consider them in the light of the outcome of my right honourable and learned friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster's negotiations in Brussels and Luxembourg.
" In the light of these considerations, the timetable which the Government proposes is as follows.
" The House will be invited to debate the White Paper before it rises for the Summer Recess. The detailed arrangements for this debate will be discussed through the usual channels. The Government envisages that it should be an expository and exploratory debate, on a Motion which does not invite the House to take the decision of principle at the end of this

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debate, though we must of course reserve our freedom of action in the event of any substantive amendment to such a Motion.
" Then, when Parliament meets again after the Recess, there will be a second debate, at the conclusion of which the House will be asked to decide in principle whether Britain should join the European Communities.
" In the meantime, our delegation in Brussels will continue to negotiate on such issues as still remain outstanding. The aim will be to carry forward these negotiations and work on drafting a treaty of accession so that, if Parliament decides in the autumn that Britain should join the Communities, the treaty of accession can be signed by the end of this year.
" This would allow the whole of 1972 to complete what would require to be done before our accession. In Parliamentary terms, this would mean that Parliament would be invited to consider and to pass the consequential legislation, which would be substantial, by the end of the Session 1971-72. Thereafter, the instrument of ratification of the treaty of accession would be deposited, in time for our accession to the Communities to be effective from January 1, 1973."
My Lords, that concludes my right honourable friend's Statement. I should perhaps add that it would be our intention here to propose broadly similar arrangements for discussing this subject in your Lordships' House as are being proposed for another place. The precise timing of such arrangements and the details could well, I suggest, be followed up through the usual channels.
3.48 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, the House will be very grateful to the noble Earl for repeating not only a Statement but a Statement which seems, to me at any rate, to be very clear. I am quite sure that the Government are right and have listened to wise advice. No doubt this wise advice came from within the Government as well as outside, judging from the reports in the Press, not to rush a decision. Whether we are for entry into the Common Market or against, depending on the terms, I am sure this is a matter
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of such momentous importance that it is right that it should be given the fullest consideration. I should therefore like to ask the noble Earl, while again expressing satisfaction that he suggests we should discuss this matter through the usual channels, where he thinks he is going to find time for the debate before we rise for the Summer Recess. Perhaps he will find a way of achieving this. I ask this question for the serious reason that I am quite sure that there should be sufficient time to allow all noble Lords who desire to speak in the debate to do so. This House classically is good at expressing individual opinons and giving counsel, and I suspect that we shall need quite a long time for this debate. Therefore, I hope that it will not be a matter of squeezing it in, as sometimes inevitably happens, in too short a space. It would be helpful if the noble Earl could express whether or not he is in agreement with that sort of approach. I will make no further comments now, because clearly the time to debate the terms is when we come to the debates proposed by the Government.
LORD BYERS: My Lords, I appreciate that this is a compromise solution and that it has to be one, but I can only express regret that it has not been found possible to have a decision taken in principle before we go into Recess. It is Parliament that has to make the decision, and if we are fully apprised of the situation at the end of June I should have thought that Parliament would be well enough informed to make the decision in principle by the end of July. Having said that, and appreciating the difficulties, we shall reluctantly have to accept the proposed timetable.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I am grateful for the reception of this Statement which has been accorded by the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition and the noble Lord the Leader of the Liberal Opposition here. In reply, I will confine myself to saying that I entirely agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, has said about the need for finding them. I also agree, in view of the inevitably rather crowded programme —and we always have this problem in your Lordships' House towards the end of the summer, and perhaps for one reason or another we have it rather more acutely than usual this summer—that we

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must take steps to find the time. Whatever view we take of the subject, this is a matter of vital importance to the future of our country. All I can do is to assure noble Lords that I recognise the need to find adequate time, and I can give an unqualified assurance that adequate time will be found before the Summer Recess.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, may I first express my gratitude to the noble Earl for repeating the Statement? I have not a copy of the Statement before me but it seemed that there was one caveat, and I should like to have it clarified. We gather that this debate is for exploration and exposition, but somewhere in the Statement it said—if I took it down correctly—" though we must reserve freedom of action ". By that statement are the Government reserving a freedom of action to make a decision?
Lastly, while thanking the noble Earl for saying that we shall find the time, we need to have a debate without hurling ugly epithets at one another because there may be differences of opinion. I sincerely hope that we shall have at least two days to discuss this matter, if not three.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, answering first the second point put to me by the noble Lord.. Lord Davies of Leek, the amount of time will depend, of course, on the number of noble Lords who wish to speak; but quite clearly we should not wish to squeeze in this debate. In my view, it would be quite wrong to do so, and all I can say at this stage—and, of course, it is rather hypothetical, because we do not know how many noble Lords will wish to speak is that adequate time will be found without a squeeze. I attach great importance to this, as indeed to the fact that the debate should be conducted in the way that is appropriate and customary in your Lordships' House, and I have absolutely no doubt that such will be the case.
On the first point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, perhaps I should just repeat that part of the Statement in order that it may be, quite clear, although I think it is self-explanatory:
" The Government envisages that it should be an expository and exploratory debate, on a Motion which does not invite the House to take the decision of principle at the end of this debate, though we must of course reserve our
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freedom of action in the event of any substantive amendment to such a Motion."
LORD ALPORT: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether he realises that there are others who are private Members in your Lordships' House who would agree with the noble Lord, Lord Byers, in regretting that no substantive decision has been made on a matter which is of great political importance—far greater political importance than economic importance—and the political issues of which have been well-known to Parliament for many years past? May I also express the hope that perhaps circumstances may arise between now and the end of July which will enable the Government to change their attitude to this.
May I ask, secondly, whether my noble friend, no doubt after much consultation through the usual channels, will consider that this is the one—if not perhaps the most important—occasion during this Parliamentary era when there should be a free vote in your Lordships' House?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I will take note of what my noble friend has said, but on the question of the Government's decision, to which they have come regarding the arrangements proposed, all I can say is that there was a difficult balance of considerations to be taken into account, but I can assure my noble friend that these various considerations have been very carefully weighed.
LORD ROYLE: My Lords, I am quite sure that it is my fault, but it is not quite clear to me exactly when the second and more decisive debate will take place. The noble Earl said that it would be after the Recess: does that mean in the overlap of this Session or after the opening of Parliament for a new Session?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I envisage that our expository and exploratory debate will take place towards the end of the next month or very early the following month—if in fact we are still here then. That would be the approximate timing, and the timing for the further debate would be in the autumn. I would rather assume that it would be in October, but I would not wish to be committed to any specific timing at this stage.
LORD ROYLE: My Lords, does that mean that it might be in October, before the opening of Parliament?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I said that I would not wish to be committed to a specific time at this stage.
LORD BURNTWOOD: My Lords, without wishing to extend the scope of the present exchanges, may I ask whether, within the terms of the present negotiations, it is possible for representations to be made to the Commission or to the negotiators on the subject of industrial directives which may at present be in process of being tabled by the Commission, so that the interests of this country, which would be highly prejudiced should such directives go forward at this point in time, would be protected in some way by our tabling information which could in fact guide the Commission? I realise that this is a very wide question, and one does not wish in any way to call into question the good faith of the Commission and the people it represents, but at the same time one knows that important directives are in process of being tabled which possibly might justifiably be stayed for a little while until the position has become settled.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I do not feel that it would be right for me to go too deeply into the substance of the negotiations in discussing what is, after all, a procedural statement. All I would say is that the consideration which the noble Lord has adducd is one which is in the mind of my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. I would prefer to leave it at that at this stage and perhaps we could refer to the matter later.
LORD AUCKLAND: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that his Statement will give great pleasure to many of us who, while hoping that we still will enter the European Community, recognise the considerable needs of the Commonwealth? Is he further aware that the country at large (and particularly the Commonwealth) will welcome these flexible negotiations and the fact that there will be no undue rush?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I can detect some slight difference of opinion between my noble friend who has just spoken and my noble friend Lord Alport. All I would say is that I think it becomes
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me to tread warily this afternoon, like Agag, and say once again that there was a balance of considerations here.
LORD COLYTON: My Lords, while personally strongly supporting our adherence to the E.E.C. on proper terms, may I ask my noble friend a question which possibly lies a little outside the Statement on the programme which he has made? Can he say whether our partners in the European Free Trade Area are being regularly consulted in these matters and to what extent the EFTA Treaty, which I presume is still binding upon us, can be reconciled with our joining the Community? May I ask that this point, which is a rather important point because in a way it affects our honour in relation to other countries in EFTA, will not be lost sight of?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I can give the noble Lord straight away the assurance which he has asked me to give. Our EFTA partners are being very closely consulted by us at all stages in these negotiations. As my noble friend knows, some of the other applicants are also members of EFTA, and my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, after the last meeting at Luxembourg, flew to a meeting of EFTA in Iceland. There is the very closest consultation between us and our EFTA partners.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, can we gather from the noble Earl's Statement that the French President has given his approval or expressed his agreement to the timetable that the noble Earl has announced?
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl whether, before the treaty of accession is signed, we shall have a guarantee, a definite assurance and guarantee, that the Governments with which we sign the treaty of accession are viable? Will he take note of the difficulty experienced in Italy at the present time, and it may be in the foreseeable future, of creating a stable Government?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I will take note of the noble Lord's attitude, which, as usual, has a trace of mischievousness about it.

STATUE LAW (REPEALS) BILL [H.L.]
4.2 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD HAILSHAM OF ST. MARYLEBONE): My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee (on Recommitment) on this Bill.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee (on Recommitment).—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee(on Recommitment) accordingly.
[The EARL OF LISTOWEL in the Chair.]
Clause 1 to 3 agree to
Schedule [Enactments Repealed];
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD moved, as an Amendment, to leave out Part I of the Schedule. The noble Viscount said: The reason I put down this Amendment is that I do not consider that Part I of the Schedule of this Bill, which relates to constitutional rights of the Irish Peerage, is the correct procedure to deprive a substantial group of people, numbering in all 145, of their Parliamentary rights. My noble Leader said a moment ago that he felt rather like Agag. I feel rather, as I survey the noble and learned Lords on the Cross-Benches, like David as he surveyed Goliath. I do not wish my noble and learned friends on the Cross-Benches to suffer the same fate as Goliath, but I must warn them that I consider that I have some very stout stones in my sling.
Perhaps, for the convenience of some of your Lordships, we might briefly run through the history of the case of the Irish Peers as it affects the House of Lords. All your Lordships will know that the Union with Ireland Act 1800 gave the Irish Peers the right to elect 28 of their number to your Lordships' House for life. In 1922, as your Lordships also know, three-quarters of Ireland became the Irish Free State under various Acts culminating in the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act. When that came to pass, the machinery for electing representatives of the Irish Peerage lapsed, because as the machinery consisted of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and the
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Clerk of the Crown of Hanaper, sitting in Dublin, those two offices became obsolete. Since the machinery lapsed, no representatives of the Irish Peerage have been elected, the last Representative Peer dying in 1961. Just about the time the last Irish Representative Peer in your Lordships' House died, the Irish Peers' Association was formed. At that time, as your Lordships remember, we had just passed the Life Peerages Act, and various reforms were coming up in your Lordships' House; and so the Irish Peers thought that they ought to combine to protect their interest. I have had the honour of representing the Association of Irish Peers in your Lordships' House. I am afraid I have not been very successful in promoting their interests as regards your lordship's House, but perhaps, if I may so, the odds have been against me.
Then we come to 1924 when the third Lord Oranmore and Browne sought the opinion of eminent counsel; he sought the opinion of two very eminent lawyers at that time, F. H. Maugham and W. A. Greene, who later became respectively Lord Chancellor and Master of the Rolls. May I just read the opinion of those two eminent lawyers on the rights of the Peers of Ireland as at that date? They concluded:
" The North of Ireland now represents Ireland for those purposes of the Act of Union which involve the representation of elected Irish Peers in the House of Lords whose rights to sit and vote on the part of Ireland notwithstanding the recent legislation "—
by which they meant the legislation setting up the Irish Free State—
" is unassailable."
So we have those two eminent lawyers who gave that opinion: that the right of the Irish Peers to be represented in your Lordships' House as at that date was unassailable; that the Act which set up the Irish Free State had not affected their rights in any way. This was printed in the Public Law Book. 1967.
In 1962 a Joint Committee of your Lordships' House, the Joint Committee on Lords Reform, was not in favour of the revival of any such representation, but they gave no reason for that view. In 1966 a Petition was presented by 12 Irish Peers to the Committee for Privileges praying that your Lordships will declare.
" the right of the Peerage of Ireland to be represented by 28 of their number in your

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Lordships' House in accordance with the Union with Ireland Act 1800."
As your Lordships will know, the Committee for Privileges is not a court of law. The majority of its members are political from your Lordships' House. It is what one would call, in legal jargon, a "lay tribunal". Of course there are Law Lords on the Committee for Privileges, and on this occasion the Chairman of the Committee was a very distinguished noble:and learned Lord, whom I see on the Cross-Benches. the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid. He was supported by other Law Lords, including the noble and learned Viscount. Lord Dilhorne, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce. and, I think, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hodson, and the noble and learned Lord. Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest.
The Committee for Privileges dismissed the Petition, but gave reasons for their decision. The case was argued before them by counsel for the Association of Irish Peers, and it was gone into reasonably thoroughly. The Committee accepted the Opinion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, that the Irish Representative Peers were to sit "on the part of Ireland" but, as he pointed out, as a result of the Irish Free State legislation in 1922, Ireland as a whole no longer existed politically. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, said— and I quote from col. 365 of Vol. 278 of the OFFICIAL REPORT:
" If the Irish representative Peers were elected to represent Ireland, I cannot see how there could be an election of a Peer to represent something which no longer exists politically."
The Opinion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, rather contradicted the Opinion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid. They rather tore each other's opinions apart. Notwithstanding that, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, did agree to the dismissal of the Petition, and this House accepted the Committee's Report.
In his speech the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, went on to say to the Committee:
" On the other hand, if I could hold that the Irish representative Peers sat as representatives of the Irish Peerage, I would not find it possible to say that any right of the Irish Peerage to he represented in this House had lapsed or has been repealed."
We now find ourselves in the position where the most eminent lawyers in the
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land disagree as to our rights. We have the opinions of the noble and learned Lords, Lord Maugham and Lord Greene, that,
" The North of Ireland now represents Ireland for those purposes of the Act of Union which involve the representation of elected Irish Peers in the House of Lords "
and their rights therefore to sit and vote on the part of Ireland are unassailable. We also have the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, disagreeing that "on the part of Ireland" can include the North of Ireland. Then we have the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, adding:
"…if I could hold that the Irish Representative Peers sat as representatives of the Irish Peerage, I would not find it possible to say that they have lost any right to be represented in this House."
We now come to a dilemma. I have read the Act of Union and the supporting Acts. The Act of Union itself and its supporting Acts are indecisive on this very point. An Act passed under the authority given in the Act of Union to settle matters of procedure refers to Representative Peers sitting as representatives of the Irish Peerage; actually not on the part of Ireland but as representatives of the Irish Peerage. I think it is generally held that Peerages are not territorial. One can quote several learned works, such as Halsbury's Laws of England to prove this point. There was the Berkeley Peerage case in 1858 to 1862 which, I thought, settled once and for all that you cannot have a peerage of tenure. In other words, Peers are not territorial. We have had many men who have been created Irish Peers who have had no connection with Ireland at all. Therefore, whether or not it is correct, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid. says, that Irish Peers only sat on behalf of the whole of Ireland, they would appear to have equally good a case to sit as representatives of the Irish Peerage. In fact, I cannot really describe this situation better than to say that it is typically Irish.
But where do we go from here? The Irish Peers have gone where we never knew we were going. We were never told that we were going where we have gone. We have gone to the Joint Committee of the House of Lords and the Commons on Consolidation Bills, et cetera,

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but we have come in the "et cetera" in this Statute Law (Repeals) Bill, jumbled together with a host of defunct ecclesiastical Measures. It was brought to my notice, by chance, that the repeal of the rights of the Irish Peerage were included in this Bill. It might have slipped through, and none of us would have known anything about it. Could we not have been informed'? We have a large Association and a Committee. Why were representatives of our Association not called before the Joint Committee to give evidence? I realise that the Joint Committee is relatively an innovation. I think it was started by the noble and learned Lord who sits opposite me, the former Lord Chancellor. Like all innovations, perhaps it is not quite sure yet of its ground. This was, to use a legal phrase, a value judgment. I understand that previously in this Joint Committee when they had a value judgment and individuals' rights were being affected the Committee sought their views, but it would appear that we have been treated, not arrogantly but, to use an Irish word in a "flahooley" manner—if there is such a word. I rather pity the shorthand writer. But we have been treated rather carelessly and inconsiderately.
If the constitutional rights of individuals or groups are to be altered or abolished by Committees closeted away somewhere upstairs, this sets a rather dangerous precedent. We do not want to return to the Star Chamber, in which one or two of my ancestors, I think, were involved. Whatever views one may hold about the rights of Irish Peers, the use of the clauses in this Bill which purport to repeal enactments which are no longer of practical utility is really not the proper method for bringing about changes of such constitutional importance. After all, if this Statute Law (Repeals) Bill goes through unamended, we shall be depriving 145 Peers of their Parliamentary rights to sit in this House as Irish Peers. We shall be depriving them of their constitutional rights. Surely it would have been far better if the Government had produced a Bill solely for that purpose. It could have been called the "Repeal of the Rights of the Irish Peers under the Act of Union of 1800." Everybody would then have known what
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was being proposed. It would have been quite plain and above board, and that would have been a far more dignified method. I beg to move.
4.22 p.m.
THE EARL OF CORK AND ORRERY: I rise to support the Amendment of my noble friend, with appreciation for the lucid and admirable, not to say entertaining, way in which he has given us a rundown of the whole history of the Irish Peers and their difficult situation. It is not among the least of the charms of your Lordships' House that, from time to time, it makes an excursion into what can almost be called inconsequence. It might even be possible for a stranger coming into the Public Gallery to be deluded for a moment on a particular day into thinking that the Palace of Westminster was to some extent a Palace of Varieties. We have such an occasion this afternoon. We are met together to discuss the repeal of various laws, including the Steam Engine Furnaces Act 1821, an Act to enable Her Majesty to settle an annunity on Her Royal Highness the Princess Beatrice Victoria Feodore, and a proper rag-bag of old Acts which we are trying to get rid of with as little trouble as possible.
At the beginning of the Bill is an Act dealing with the representation of the Irish Peers. I do not think that these matters go together. By all means let us have an Act to abolish the Steam Engine Furnaces Act 1821—I would say that it is high time. But is it reasonable to abolish the representation of the Irish Peers in quite such an off-hand way as that, by this dustpan and brush method by which you can simply tear up the Acts of Parliament and the ghosts of the Writs of Summons and the Letters Patent which they have received over centuries gone by, and discard them along with the annuity of Princess Beatrice Victoria Feodore into your Lordships' wastepaper basket? I consider—and I think your Lordships will perhaps agree with me—that this is highly improper.
My noble friend has run very ably and rapidly through the history of this matter since the Union and I do not wish to touch on any of those matters again because, as he was at pains to explain, that was not the purpose of his speech. His purpose was simply to guide your Lordships with a little information which

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may not be entirely familiar to us all as to what this is all about. But I think I do not misrepresent my noble friend when I say that that is not what the Amendment is about. He made it clear enough that his point was simply to move an Amendment to have this Schedule taken out of the Bill in order that, if this matter is to be decided by your Lordships' House —and, indeed, how can it be decided anywhere but in Parliament?—it should be decided as a result of proper discussion and deliberation upon the Floor of this Chamber and, of course, in the other place as well. That is something which has never happened. The Committee for Privileges has discussed the matter and has ruled against it. Other learned groups of men have discussed it and, on the whole, have come down in favour of the continuation of the representation of Irish Peers. But none of those bodies, none of those individuals, none of those combinations of individuals, however noble and however learned, has the force that resides alone within your Lordships' House itself.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I think my noble friend is in error there. The Report of the Committee for Privileges was endorsed by a Resolution of this House in 1966. He is mistaken in thinking that it was not.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: That is correct, but it was in a particularly thin House.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: No House can be a thin House which includes my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: That brings me to my feet. I should just like to say this about this matter. The noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, has spoken as if this Bill is taking away rights held by members of the Irish Peerage.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: On a point of order, I think I intervened—I hope not rudely—in the speech of my noble friend Lord Cork and Orrery. I think it is not yet time for us to hear my noble and learned friend on the Cross-Benches.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: I apologise, but I looked at the noble Earl, Lord Cork and Orrery, and he remained in his seat,
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no doubt shattered by what the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor had said.
THE EARL OF CORK AND ORRERY: I think, in fact, that I was shattered at being looked at by the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne. But I am most grateful to my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor for coming to my rescue. I was about to attempt the feat myself, but perhaps I should not have been quite so successful. I take the point of my noble and learned friend, that this matter was discussed and a Resolution was come to. I am not clear, as a matter of law, whether or not that Resolution had the effect of putting an end to the Irish Representatative Peerage. If it had, then this Bill would not be before us now. Therefore it appears to me that in fact the matter has not yet been decided. You cannot have it both ways. We are therefore being asked to decide it this afternoon, and it is my contention and that of my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard that this is not the way to do it.
My noble friend mentioned numerous questions which have not really been discussed with the full knowledge of your Lordships, and I would mention a rider to the question of the Peers of Northern Ireland. Whom do they represent? Do they represent what remains of the Irish Peerage of the whole Kingdom of Ireland? Do they represent only themselves? Do they represent nothing at all? If they represent the whole Peerage of Ireland, why, then, have they been abolished? If they are "territorial"—using that word in inverted commas—then the territory which they represent is still in a state of union with the Crown. and even if they are a part of the Irish Peerage as a whole, which they represent, most of that Peerage has fallen into abeyance or some kind of disbarment from representation and they—at least in the Six Counties—represent a fragment of what is left. In fact, they represent 6 /32nds, which, as I work it out, entitles them to a representation of 5.25 Members in your Lordships' House. That is the kind of thing—without the arithmetic—which ought to he debated, but I do not believe it ever has been.
The Peerage of Ireland, to which myself belong, is not a new thing. It is

723
no different in antiquity or in dignity from any other part of the Peerage—from the Peerage of England, of Scotland, of the United Kingdom or of Great Britain. Is it proper that your Lordships should, in the midst of this little ragbag of a Bill, taken on the afternoon of Gold Cup Day in the middle of Ascot Week, shove all these old Lords out of the way as though they had never been of any account at all? I doubt it. I can stand with a foot in both camps here because, after all, I am a Peer of Great Britain; so I have no interest to declare in this matter. Indeed. who has?—there is no money in it. But it might be as well if, when we are considering whether or not it is a question of the constitutional rights of Peers being taken away, we should reflect too, just in passing, that it is a matter also of constitutional duty being taken away. These Representative Peers certainly never have, and I do not suppose ever would, put themselves forward for election as representatives unless they chose to discharge that duty; and if they were here they would no doubt, as indeed they did when they were here, play a useful, constructive and not unworthy part in your Lordships' deliberations.
Therefore, is it not reasonable that if this ancient Peerage—because it has existed for something like 900 years—is to be swept away for ever from your Lordships' House, it should be done by a means somewhat more dignified than this? Should not the whole of your Lordships' House—I am not using that word incorrectly, I think; I know very well I am addressing a Committee—sit together in deliberation on this matter, to discuss whether or not the representation of a part of your own membership should be allowed to continue or should not? It ought not, simply at this moment in the afternoon, in the midst of a ragbag of old, assorted odds and ends of unwanted legislation, be swept into the rubbish basket. I certainly support the Amendment.
4.33 p.m.
LORD GARDINER: I rise to speak to this Amendment, not on behalf of the Opposition but as a Member of your Lordships' House, because while this matter has been debated many times it has never been treated as a Party question.
724
I do so partly because when the matter was last before your Lordships' House, to our great regret, the noble and learned Lord the present Lord Chancellor was not a Member of the House, and I therefore had to deal with it; and I thought that perhaps I ought shortly to remind your Lordships of the general position.
There is of course no doubt that the Act of Union of 1800 conferred a right on the Irish Peers to elect 28 of their number to sit and vote in your Lordships' House on behalf of Ireland; and legislation laid down the procedure for their election. It was a procedure under which certain acts had to be performed by the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and certain acts had to be performed by a gentleman whose full title, I think, was that of Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper of Ireland. Of course, the country Ireland, as such, has not existed since the Irish Free State Act; there is no Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and there is no Clerk of the Crown. It is not surprising, therefore, that there has been no election since 1919. Those who had been elected remained Members of your Lordships' House until their death, and the last of them died in 1961. I myself have never been able to understand how, in those circumstances, it could possibly be contended that these Acts have any effect any more. However, the matter has been raised several times.
In 1962 it was fully considered by the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform. That, of course, was not the All-Party Conference on House of Lords Reform, of which I had the privilege of being Chairman, but the earlier one. That Committee had before it memoranda by the Official Group, by the noble Lord, Lord Dunboyne, and by other noble Lords interested. The Committee expressed themselves as
" not in favour of the revival of any form of representation for the Peerage of Ireland in the House of Lords ".
The matter was next raised on the Peerage Bill in 1963, when an Amendment was moved which might have had the effect of restoring a right to the Peers of Ireland; but that was defeated by 90 votes to 8. But it was then pointed out that as the Irish Peers were no longer eligible to sit in your Lordships' House,

725
they ought to be eligible, which they were not then, to sit in the other place. Accordingly, an Amendment was moved and carried during the proceedings on the Peerage Bill conferring on Irish Peers the right to be eligible to sit and vote in the House of Commons.
That was not the end of the matter. because in 1965 a Petition was presented in the sense contended for then and now by the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, and I had then to consider what advice to give to your Lordships' House. In February, 1966, the noble Viscount moved a Motion that the Petition should be referred to the Committee for Privileges, and I had to consider whether the time of the Committee for Privileges ought to be taken up with it. But the reason, as I then explained to the House, why I thought that it ought to go to the Committee for Privileges was that it had been said by the noble Viscount—and it seemed to me a good point—that while it was quite true that this question had been raised many times, and always decided against the contentions advanced, it had never been considered fully and exhaustively, and that we should never achieve finality unless it was fully and properly considered by the Committee for Privileges, before whom the Irish Peers could be represented by counsel. I said on that occasion:
"The Petitioners say that, while they have put their claim before, it has never been argued by counsel, as it would be before the Committee for Privileges nor have their legal rights ever been fully inquired into.
"The Government feel that the claim of the Petitioners is one which will probably continue to be raised from time to time unless a full inquiry into the claim is made, and that the Committee for Privileges is the proper body to make that inquiry."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3/2/66, col. 574.]
The Committee for Privileges which considered the Petition consisted of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, as Chairman; the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce; the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury; the noble Earl. Lord Dundee; the noble Earl, Lord St. Aldwyn; the noble Earl, Lord Swinton; the noble Earl, Lord Attlee; the noble Lord, Lord Rea; the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd; the noble Lord, Lord Silkin; the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore; the noble Lord, Lord Strang
726
;the noble Lord, Lord Conesford; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Borthy-y-Gest; and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hodson. I thought at the time, if I may say so, that we had really done the noble Viscount proud. That Committee had a number of meetings, and I observe from their very full Report that the arguments put before them occupy 236 columns of print. The Committee reached a unanimous conclusion
" that. by virtue of the provisions of the Union with Ireland Act 1800, twenty-eight Irish representative peers sat in this House on the part of Ireland, each being elected for life: that on the death of an Irish representative peer an election of a successor was held in the manner provided by the said Act: that no such election has been held since 1919: that those Irish peers who had been so elected continued to sit as members of the House until their respective deaths and that the last Irish peer so elected died in 1961: and …that the provisions of the said Act relating to the election of Trish representative peers ceased to be effective on the passing of the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act 1922: and that the right to elect Irish representative peers no longer exists."
The Committee concluded:
"That for the reasons stated in the opinions published herewith the prayer of the petitioners should be rejected."
It was on November 24, 1966, that the noble and learned Lord. Lord Reid, moved that the Report of the Committee be agreed to. I have carefully re-read everything that the noble Viscount said on that occasion, and perhaps he would agree with me that he has not said anything this afternoon that he did not say on that occasion. We had the Maugham and Greene decisions; we had the fact that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Reid, based his opinion rather more on one ground than another and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, on another. The noble Viscount suggested that the Report should be referred back on the grounds that he has put before the House this afternoon. A number of noble Lords disagreed with that, including my noble friend Lord Shepherd, and the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, said:
" My Lords, as a member of the Committee, I support what has just been said by the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd. The Committee really did go into all aspects of this question. Every single argument was deployed on both sides. We listened to them all, and we came definitely and unanimously to the conclusion that the Petition could not he accepted, for the simple reason that the entity that is the whole of

727
Ireland, which Irish Representative Peers had been hitherto selected to represent, no longer existed. That was the result of our examination."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 24 /11/66; col. 3711
At the end, when I put the Motion from the Woolsack, the noble Viscount did not carry the matter to a Division and therefore the Report of that Committee was unanimously accepted by your Lordships' House. There is no other authority. In the arguments, the Petitioners not only conceded but themselves advanced the fact, that in law the only body which can decide this question is your Lordships' House and no one else. The House has therefore decided. That being so, the only body which can so decide having already decided that under these Acts the Peers of Ireland have not now any legal rights at all, I cannot imagine what can possibly be the good of keeping them on the Statute Book. That was what the Joint Consolidation Committee had to decide; that was what they decided. In one sense nothing is ever final: Parliament, I suppose, can at any time change its mind. There is nothing whatever to prevent the noble Viscount from introducing a Private Member's Bill to-morrow to provide that in the future the Peers of Ireland should have some right to representation in this House. But the Bill would have to contain machinery for their election because, for the reasons I have ventured to give, the present Acts are absolutely useless for that purpose. They are dependent on there being a Lord Chancellor of Ireland and a Clerk of the Crown. I myself, as an individual Member of this House, hope that this Amendment will not be accepted for the reason that I have ventured to give: because of the unanimous decision of this House made in 1966.
LORD COLYTON: My Lords, before the noble and learned Lord sits down, can he very briefly deal with the main point of my noble friend's speech which was the unsuitability of dealing with this matter in this hotch-potch of a Bill? That was the main point.
Loin GARDINER: The object of a Statute Law (Repeals) Bill is to remove from the Statute Book Acts which serve no useful purpose. The whole House, on the unanimous Report of the Committee for Privileges, having decided that
728
the Irish Peers have no legal rights under any of these Acts, I cannot understand what possible object there can be in keeping them on the Statute Book.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, if the decision of the House on the resolution to which the noble Lord has referred is correct, then 1 should have thought that there can be absolutely no doubt that these provisions are obsolete and are properly included, with some very odd bedfellows, in the Bill. What the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, is raising, is the correctness of the decision of the House made on that occasion and the correctness of the conclusions of the Committee for Privileges. He has challenged the views expressed by those who wrote Opinions on that case. May 1 say this? If those Opinions are right, there is no question of taking away in this Bill any rights now held by anyone, by any member of the Irish Peerage at all, because those rights are not there if that Opinion is right.
I do not want to go over the whole matter, except that I think it is worth bearing in mind that the Act of Union provided for there being one Parliament for Great Britain and Ireland. One consequence of that was the abolition of the Irish Parliament, and provision was made by that Act for representation in the one Parliament of Peers, of Bishops and of commoners. I think there were to be 100 commoners elected from Ireland in the Commons, four Bishops elected by the other Bishops of Ireland in this House and these 28 Irish Peers who were to be elected by members of the Irish Peerage. That is how the formation of one House came about. Then it was not a right given as a benefit, as I saw it, to individual members of the Irish Peerage; it was to enable Ireland to be represented in this Parliament. That is recognised in many statutory provisions. When Ireland ceased to exist, then of course Eire was created and an entirely new political entity, Northern Ireland, with a separate Parliament of its own. I for one cannot regard Northern Ireland, the Six Counties, as the successors of any rights which attached to Ireland as a whole as a political entity of its own. That has ceased to exist.
So I say this. I have now read and studied the Opinion to which the noble

729
Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, referred. He referred to it, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, has said, when the resolution was discussed; so presumably that Opinion was known to the members of the association and the Petitioners to the Committee for Privileges, of whom the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, was one, at the time of the hearing. I do not recall any reference being made before the Committee for Privileges to that Opinion. Perhaps it was not thought proper. What I recall is that eminent counsel were employed for the Petitioners and they advanced every possible argument; and the arguments they advanced touched on some of the matters dealt with in the Opinion. I have read the Opinion recently and so far as I am concerned and for what it is worth I would not wish to alter one iota of the Opinion that I wrote. Nor would I feel any doubt as to the correctness of the conclusion reached by the Committee.
LORD MOYNE: My Lords, speaking as an Irish Peer who is not an Irish Peer, I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard on the courageous way in which he has steered through very difficult legal waters. I do not wish to challenge the findings made by so many noble Lords who were listed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner. He made the list seem very impressive. It was very impressive. A great deal of wisdom and experience was in the Committee. We had a debate afterwards: I was there and I spoke, and I remember it. But this Bill has been described as a ragbag. It seems to me more like a consolidation Bill. I have always understood—and there are three ex-Lord Chancellors in the House who will be able to contradict me—that this kind of Bill consolidated Acts of Parliament—not case law, not decisions of the courts, even of the Court of Parliament in the kind of way in which this matter was considered. It seems to me wrong that a controversial matter should be included in a Bill of this kind. If I am not right in that there are plenty of people here who can put me right.
4.50 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I think that I will deal with that point first. It
730
is not a Consolidation Bill; it is a Statute Law (Repeals) Bill—
LORD MOYNE: With respect—
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: Forgive me, but it is not a Consolidation Bill; it is a Statute Law (Repeals) Bill. If I may further comfort my noble friend—it is partly my fault—when I was moving that the House should resolve itself into a Committee I should have uttered certain ritual words which have been agreed upon by somebody or other and which I will now utter, if I may, at an inappropriate place. I should have said: "I should inform the House that this is a Bill prepared by the Law Commission to promote the reform of the Statute Law by the repeal, in accordance with Law Commission recommendation, of certain enactments which, except in so far as their effect is preserved, are no longer of practical utility". In this case the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills made five Amendments to the Bill and were of opinion that, apart from the effect upon certain enactments of those Amendments, the remaining enactments proposed in the Schedule to the Bill for repeal were obsolete, spent, unnecessary, superseded or no longer of practical utility; and in consequence they approved the repeal of those enactments. The Committee decided by a majority—which was nine to one—to include the repeals made by Part I of the Schedule to the Bill.
I now come to the matter—because it is there and because it is the matter we are now discussing—contained in the Amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard. It is not a Consolidation Bill, it is a Bill with the characteristics which I have just described. I am sure that the whole Committee will feel nothing but admiration for the way in which my noble friend Lord Massereene and Ferrard has discharged his honourable obligation to his fellow Irish Peers, both now and also on previous occasions. They will also recognise that nothing could be more disinterested on his part, since though he possesses, if I am not mistaken, two Irish Viscountcies and two Irish Baronies, his tenure in this House is by secure possession of a United Kingdom Peerage of ancient right and he is therefore almost a House of Lords in himself.

731
I must join with other noble Lords—in spite of the persuasion of my noble friend Lord Moyne and my noble friend Lord Cork and Orrery—in regretting that I cannot yield to the arguments. Since the matter is bound to cause disappointment to those who hold Irish, but not United Kingdom, English or Scottish Peerages. I feel that I should give my reasons in detail. I seems to me that the arguments are overwhelming. If I may just deal with the one point put by my noble friend Lord Colyton. which I thought was answered adequately by my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne, it really must be the case that if it can be established, both as a matter of politics and as a matter of law, that there is nothing left in the enactments proposed to be repealed, they are properly put in the Schedule to a Statute Law (Repeals) Bill as being obsolete, spent, unnecessary and of no practical utility at all at the present day.
I hope that nothing I say will be construed as in any way disrespectful of Irish Peers. We have a number of them in this House. En addition to my noble friend the Lord Chairman of Committees, they include the noble Earl, Lord Longford, and many others. They are a most estimable body of men, but not all estimable men a re entitled to be in, or to elect representatives to this House as Peers of Parliament, and it is that question that we are now considering. Of course, as my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne has reminded the Committee. Irish Peers, like the Scottish Peers, were deprived by the relevant Acts of Union of any effective right to sit in their own Parliaments, which originally were separate Parliaments. Instead, they were given the right in each case to elect representative Peers to the United Kingdom Parliament. In the case of a Scottish Peer, it will be remembered that this election took place every Parliament, but in the case of the Irish Peers the elections took place for life. By contrast, the Irish Peers could be elected to the House of Commons—which is contrary to what the noble and learned Lord. Lord Gardiner, said, I think per incuriaim —although not for Irish constituencies and they were constantly so elected. On the other hand, they did not have the right to vote in this Parliament unless by
732
a curious paradox they were actually elected as Members of the House of Commons when they did have the vote.
Even this was conceded to them in 1963 when they were made the equivalent of commoners for all purposes. The reason why in 1963 they were made the equivalent of commoners for all purposes was precisely because Parliament, having discussed the matter in 1963, came to the conclusion that their right to elect representatives did not exist. That is what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, was saying. The reason why it did not exist was as follows: the machinery for election depended in practice upon the existence of the Office of Lord Chancellor of Ireland and some other offices, one of which the noble and learned Lord referred to. Since these Offices were abolished by the Treaty which brought the Irish Free State into existence no elections have taken place.
The reason in fact why no elections have taken place is not a coincidence by any possible chance. It was not an act of omission on the part of the framers of the Treaty; it was always intended that the existing representative Peers should be allowed to continue so long as they lived and no more representatives should be elected. I well remember my father, who was Attorney General at the time the Irish Treaty was passed, explaining this to me in clear language. He said that the understanding was that the Irish representatives would die out in course of time and it was deliberately not thought suitable that the Peerage of a United Ireland should continue to be represented as such after the creation of the Irish Free State. He went on to explain to me, many years ago, that Northern Ireland remained a part of the United Kingdom, but representation in the Upper House of this Parliament could be catered for by United Kingdom Peerages; and that there were two Houses in the Stormont Parliament, and the House of Commons here, in which Irish Peers could sit. That is a fact. In fact no new Irish Peers did sit, and in 1961 the last Irish Peer died out.
Lest anyone should think that my recollection of what my father told me as a boy is, by some means, mistaken, let me tell the Committee what I think has not hitherto been published or known, that he did give an Opinion as a Law

733
Officer, with Sir Thomas Inskip—he was Attorney General—on this very point. It is not without significance that he gave an opinion as a Law Officer on this very point in 1925, the year after the Maugham /Greene Opinion. I have been at pains to secure that opinion. It is quite clear, although it is not referred to by name in the case to counsel, that every argument in the Maugham /Greene Opinion is reproduced for his and for the Solicitor General's consideration. It was perfectly before him, and the Solicitor General, in 1925. He was asked a number of questions—and as it is a Law Officer's Opinion I am entitled to refer to it—the first of which was: are the provisions of the Act of Union relating to representative Peers of Ireland repealed or otherwise materially affected by the legislation creating, and consequent upon the creation, of the Irish Free State? Then there were a number of other questions which they were asked.
In answer to that question, he and the Solicitor General used this unequivocal language:
"Our answer to the first question is in the affirmative. The constitution of the Irish Free State as a self-governing Dominion is in our opinion inconsistent with the continued right of the Irish Peers to be represented in the Imperial Parliament; and the destruction of the machinery requisite for the election of such Peers is in our opinion a sufficient indication that Parliament, in setting up the Irish Free State, regarded the right of Ireland to representation in the House of Lords as determined. The right given to Northern Ireland to vote herself out of the Free State does not give her a right to be represented in the House of Lords: that right was not one conferred by the Act of 1920 on Northern or Southern Ireland, and further there is no such dignity as a Peerage of Northern Ireland."
Nothing could be more unequivocal than that. It was the opinion of the Law Officers of the Crown in 1925, on a case which deliberately reproduced the substance of the Greene/Maugham opinion, which was effectively demolished at rather greater length than I have wearied the Committee by giving. That was as long ago as 1925. The idea that we are abolishing any right of anybody to-day is something which cannot bear the smallest scrutiny.
The House has been reminded of the many occasions since then on which this same right has been put forward, after it had been disposed of completely by the Law Officers of the Crown in 1925. It
734
was raised by the Joint Select Committee on House of Lords Reform, and they recommended that no renewal of the right to elect Representative Peers of Ireland should be made. The Peerage Act 1963 put the Peers of Ireland on the same footing as commoners in this country, so that they could vote for the House of Commons, unlike ourselves, and could sit in the House of Commons, unlike ourselves, precisely on the ground that the right of election of Representative Peers had by that time disappeared.
In 1965 came the Petition of the noble Earl, Lord Antrim, on behalf of the Irish Peers, to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, has referred. The matter was gone into at length in exhaustive arguments by counsel in front of a Committee as dignified and as representative as a Committee could well be imagined to be, containing five Law Lords, an ex-Prime Minister, the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, and almost everybody of account in the House at that time. That Committee came unanimously to the same conclusion, reported that this right had been extinguished; and that opinion was endorsed by the House by Resolution, after debate. What there is left to talk about, I really do not know. This is a Statute Law (Repeals) Bill, and the purpose of the Bill is to get rid of enactments which no longer have any practical utility at all and I should think that this was as clear an example as exists of such an Act, except perhaps the Act to pay annuities to dependent Royalty, referred to by my noble friend Lord Cork and Orrery.
LORD MOYNE: My Lords, perhaps my noble and learned friend, before he sits down, would tell the House how it is that the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills have amended a Bill, which he has told us is not a Consolidation Bill.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, that is one of the functions of the Joint Committee, conferred on them by Parliament. They have the function of considering Statute Law (Repeal) Bills as well as Consolidation Bills.
5.4 p.m.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, may I reply to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, who asked why the opinion of Lords Maugham and Greene was not

735
put before the Committee for Privileges by the Irish Peers. The reason is that by some extraordinary oversight this was overlooked. I know that this sounds typically Irish again. This oversight was a most unfortunate one. That is why I asked in the debate, when the House was asked to receive the Report, that the Committee should go back again and consider the Maugham/Greene opinion. The failure to put before the Committee the Maugham /Greene opinion I was entirely due to an oversight, and I admit that it was rather an extraordinary oversight. What worries Irish Peers is that not all lawyers agree about the subject. If they were all agreed, we should be quite happy.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, may I say to my noble friend that although I know that in 1924 two very distinguished lawyers gave another opinion, I do not know anyone who has expressed one since?
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, I have one here, that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, if the noble Viscount will forgive me, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, agreed with the conclusions of the Committee, but, as so often happens, for reasons which differed.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: That sounds even more Irish.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, if the noble Viscount will forgive me, what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, said was that he agreed with the Report, which had in it this sentence:
" The right of election of Irish representative peers no longer exists."
It cannot be plainer than that, and that is what we are discussing.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, the noble and learned Lord also said:
" I confess to some reluctance in holding that an Act of such constitutional significance as the Union of Ireland Act is subject to the doctrine of implied repeal or of obsolescence."
I agree that the noble and learned Lord eventually came round to the conclusion of the Committee. But that is the way of lawyers.
I should like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, which I think has been worth while. If I may get away for a moment completely from the legal aspect, it seems to me extraordinary that we have coming to this House every year, like salmon coming up the river in spring, waves of Life Peers. I think that here we could have a little element of democracy. We have a large group of Irish Peers, many of whom are eminent men—great soldiers, sailors and airmen, authors: their ramifications are immense—and I cannot see that there would be anything wrong in allowing them to elect a few of their number to sit in your Lordships' House instead of having Peers who are always appointed by the patronage of a Prime Minister. I agree that this has nothing to do with my Amendment, but I should like to make the point. I do not like to waste the time of the House and the time of the officials of the House, and even the paper that the Division Lists are written on. Therefore, with extreme reluctance—
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Do not withdraw!
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: As I have some support, I will not withdraw my Amendment.
5.9 p.m.
On Question, Whether the said Amendment shall be agreed to?
Their Lordships divided: Contents, 12; Not-Contents, 100.

CONTENTS

Amulree, L.

Henley,L.

Moyne,L.

Arran,E

Lauderdale, E.

Reigate, L.

Brockway, L.

Massereene and Ferrard, V.[Teller.]

Swansea, L.

Cork and Orrery, E.[Teller.]

Wynne-Jones, I

Courtown, E.

NOT-CONTENTS

Aberdare, L. [Teller.]

Dundee, E.

Nugent of Guildford, L.

Amherst, E.

Eccles, V.

Nunburnholme, L.

Amory, V.

Emmet of Amberley, Bs.

Ogmore, L.

Ardwick, L

Ferrier, L.

Phillips, Bs.

Arwyn, L.

Gardiner, L.

Rankeillour, L.

Auckland, L.

Garnsworthy, L.

Ritchic-Calder, L.

Balfour of Inchrye, L.

Goschen, V. [Teller.]

Royle, L.

Barnby. I.,

Greenwood of Rossendale, L.

Sainsbury, L.

Belsttad, L.

Gridley, L.

St. Just, L.

Beswick, L.

Grimston, of Westbury, L.

Salisbury, M.

Birk, Bs.

Hacking, L.

Sandford, L.

Black ford, L.

Hailsham of Saint Marylebone, L. (L. Chancellor.)

Sempill, Ly.

Bourne, L.

Shackleton, L.

Brooke of Cumnor, L.

Hankey, L.

Shepherd, L.

Brooke of Ystradfellte, Bs.

Hives, L.

Somers, L.

Buckinghamshire, E.

Hood, V.

Sorensen, L.

Burntwood, L.

Howard of Glossop, L.

Stamp, L.

Carrington, L.

Hoy, L.

Stonehaven, V.

Champion. L.

Hylton-Foster, Bs.

Stonham, L.

Colgrain, L.

Ilford, L.

Strang, L.

Collison, L.

Janner, L.

Strange of Knokin, Bs.

Colyton, L.

Jellicoe, E. (L. Privy Seal.)

Strathcarron, L.

Conesford, L.

Kinloss, Ly.

Strathclyde, L.

Cottesloe, L.

Leatherland, L.

Summerskill, Bs.

Craigavon, V.

Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe, Bs.

Teviot, L.

Craigmyle, L.

Lloyd of Hampstead, L.

Teynham, L.

Davies of Leek, L.

Lovat, L.

Vivian, L.

De Clifford, L.

Malmesbury, E.

Wakefield of Kendal, L.

Delacourt-Smith, L.

Merrivale, L.

Wilberforce, L.

Derwent, L.

Milverton, L.

Willis, L.

Diamond, L.

Molson, L.

Wise, L.

Dilhorne, V.

Morris of Borth-y-Gest, L.

Woolley, L.

Douglas of Barloch, L.

Morris of Grasmere, L.

Wootton of Abinger, Bs.

Douglass of Cleveland, L.

Morrison, L.

Resolved in the negative, and Amendment disagreed to accordingly.

Schedule agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported without amendment; Report received.

POLISH WAR PRISONERS: MASS MURDER IN RUSSIA
5.17 p.m.
LORD BARNBY LORD BARNBY rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will now support an effort to secure pronouncement establishing beyond contention the authorship of the mass murder of over 4,000 Polish officer prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, in the spring of 1940, and bring to light the disappearance without trace of a further 10,000 Polish officers interned in 1939 in the Soviet camps of Ostashkow and Starobielsk. The noble Lord said: My Lords, it is a curious coincidence of Parliamentary Orders that two consecutive matters of business should each refer to countries which are
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alleged to be in the unfortunate position of being oppressed. With the indulgence of the House, I would say that having heard the discussion on the previous Bill I am reminded that I happen to be among the few in this House who actually sat in another place with the Irish, and tonight I heard the familiar talk of the "oppression" by Britain of another country. Perhaps I might tell the House with regard to my Motion that the first time I visited Poland was when she was under the oppression of a foreign country, as the Congress of Poland was still under the subjection of Russia.
To turn to my Question, it has of course no Party partisan aspect. In that way, it is the more pleasing to put forward. I seek to report a gap in history, in the hope that there might be put in motion an exploration through some recognised international authority which will correct the omission. It will be remembered that Napoleon's early victories were achieved with relatively small forces—Marengo with 23,000 and Austerlitz with 73,000. How different from the vast numbers mobilised by whole nations in the last War! But it is with

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regard to the relationship of those numbers that the 200,000-odd military prisoners who fell into the hands of Russia were great in volume compared to the forces with which Napoleon achieved so much.
It is right that I should try to recapitulate some events of history. It will be remembered that in the spring of 1939 Britain signed an agreement with Poland that she would go to Poland's aid if she were attacked. The Germans attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. We declared war on Germany. The German armies had the advantage of the persuasion of Britain in those difficult days of August, 1939, to delay mobilisation in the hope of avoiding a situation. I remember it well, because I was in the South of Poland at that time. I took a train to Warsaw the next day, as a result of a conversation with our Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, and heard from him a conversation that he had had the day before with Goering: and I was curious, as other noble Lords would have been, as to the prospects of peace or war.
Anyhow, the Germans had attacked. Their thrust was strong, and they pushed back the Polish armies. As your Lordships will remember, on the 17th of that month the Russians attacked from the East, and under the pressure from East and West the Polish armies were quickly overrun. Poland was divided almost equally between Russia and Germany by the Ribbentrop-Molotov line. The Germans exercised their power to remove some 1½ million Poles to the extreme East, well into Russia.
Meanwhile, these Polish military prisoners had also been moved to camps well inside Russia. But, of these prisoners, some 15,000 officers were removed to three special, known camps. They were there sifted. Some 500, it is understood, yielded to the temptation of collaboration with Communism, and were appropriately employed. Of the remainder, some 4,500 were removed to the camp at Katyn, near Smolensk, in Russia. Nothing was ever heard of those men again after April, 1940. It should be remembered that Russia was then at peace. We should remember, too, that British officers, prisoners of war in the last war, had access to the International
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Red Cross, and they had contact with home. No such privileges were ever afforded to those 4,500 men, about whom nothing more was ever heard. That is why I think it is right that there should be an appropriate arrangement for the establishment of an iron-clad prisonerof-war protection agreement aiming at effectiveness far beyond that provided by the rules of the Geneva Convention of August, 1949.
I return to the course of events. Germany attacked Russia on July 22, 1941, also in defiance of treaties. The German armies advanced rapidly, causing fear in Russia of how serious the position might be. Russia decided to make a treaty with Poland, who by then had a Government resident in London, and General Anders, released from Lubianka Prison and commissioned to raise an army, naturally asked to get the officers who had been captured, many of whom were known to him personally. Excuses were made, and no officers were produced. General Anders proceeded with the mobilisation of what forces he could. Those were the armies that fought so gallantly with us at Monte Cassino and elsewhere throughout the world, adding to the effective support given by the Polish Air Force in the Battle of Britain, where I understand they had the highest proportion of "kills". So we should keep in correct perspective the gallant support that we had for the Allied cause from the Polish Army.
In April, 1943, Germany had been in possession for some eighteen months of big areas of Russia, which included that in which was situated the Forest of Katyn, near where these prisoners had been. They began to dig, and they discovered the graves of a great number of Polish officers. The Germans invited the International Red Cross to investigate. The Russians refused to agree. The Germans then decided that they would appoint an international medical commission—this was in 1943—which was accorded every opportunity of access and research, and made an impressive report. At this stage, I would remind your Lordships that there exist two excellent books on this subject: one is entitled Katyn, by Louis Fitzgibbon, and the other, Death in the Forest, by J. F. Zaviodny.
I would wish to expound at greater length, but time does not permit. Other

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speakers will follow, and I hope that reference will be made to points with which I shall not deal, other than to tabulate them. There are the report of the international medical commission which the Germans appointed; the sequence at Nuremberg of the charges; the unreserved findings of the U.S.A. Congressional Committee in 1952; and the recent convincing B.B.C. documentary film. I did not myself see the film, but I understand that it was a very good impartial presentation of the facts; it was historical and effective in its presentation. Why did the Soviets refuse to agree to an International Red Cross investigation? Lastly, where were the officers in 1941 that Anders sought to man the force which he raised in Russia and with which he proceeded to the Allied front? There has been a complete conspiracy of silence. There is a blank in history as to the authorship of this odious crime. There has been much talk in other circles of our obligation, the British obligation for the respect of international morality. There are other concurrent contemporary topics. I feel this is one which justifies ourselves and the other Allies examining our consciences.
If I may be pardoned for striking a personal note, I speak on this matter because between the wars I visited the then Polish Independent Republic four or five times a year and travelled widely. I knew at that time a good deal about Poland and I was astonished, as all noble Lords would have been had they been there, at the achievements of Poland in the integration in a short time of the currency. weights and measures and legal system. Those three systems were merged into one as a result of the fusing together of the areas occupied by Russia, Austria and Germany.
A similar Motion to this one, with over 180 signatures to it, is down for debate in another place. I understand that steps are being taken to put this matter on the agenda of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, or before the General Assembly of the United Nations which next meets in September. It will be thought by many: why raise this subject now so long after its occurrence? My Lords, what are the thoughts of the relatives of those murdered men and all the other Poles who died in the Allied
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Cause in the last war? No indemnification was every received by any of them. Now the relatives of those living in our country, ageing, many in dire poverty, believe that their feelings would receive some balm if they could only be assured as to what had happened and what was the fate of these people. Many of them are living with us in an alien country without normal contact with their own people.
My Lords, I have tried to approach this question with a fairness of mind and a moderation of language. But I do so with the feelings of the deepest emotion. I have tried to compress my remarks into a reasonable time, but I have sought to get the matter into focus. I am sure that these remarks will be amplified by succeeding speakers much more eloquently and clearly than I can do. In conclusion, with all sincerity, I would urge that the Minister in reply not only offers sympathy, but also the prospect of some action of an effective character. I beg to ask the Question.
5.36 p.m.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, when I examined the list of speakers earlier this afternoon I learned that it was the intention of the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, to follow the noble Lord. Lord Barnby. I have since received an intimation that the noble Marquess prefers to defer his observations until later in the debate. It would have been a high distinction to follow the noble Marquess because, if nobody else in your Lordships' House is familiar with the subject, he was at the time in question, in 1939, occupying an honourable position in His Majesty's Government. Therefore he will speak with expertise, with a knowledge of the subject which I cannot claim to possess.
May I begin by offering congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, for his exposition. He has coupled logic, a series of facts, with a quite creditable and justifiable emotion in the circumstances. I offer my congratulations to him. In the course of the week questions have been asked about whether this debate was necessary: Why delve into history? It is all of the past. Why refer to old complaints, sores and the like? It is singular that such questions should have

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been asked because preceding this debate there was another in which we discovered that in 1925 it was decided by a Privileges Committee of your Lordships' House that only a certain number of Irish Peers were entitled to be represented in this Assembly. In 1925 the matter was settled. That was just as remote—even more remote—than the incidents which form the subject of this debate. We are entitled—completely justified—to delve into the history of this sordid and squalid affair.
In 1939 war broke out; the Nazis invaded Poland. They bombed Warsaw and practically destroyed it. Almost simultaneously the Russians, for reasons best known to themselves, decided to invade Poland. As the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, stated in the course of his observations, we were, so far as Russia was concerned, at peace. We had declared war because of the invasion by the Nazis of Poland. Russia was at peace. Nevertheless, after the Nazis had bombed Warsaw and had engaged in wholesale destruction, Russia invaded Poland. The question may be asked: Why did they invade Poland; why did they carve Poland up along with the Nazis? Why did they seek to obtain as much loot as possible? And, moreover, why did they take from Poland a large number of officers and men of the Polish Army and deport them forcibly to Russia? The reason is best known to themselves; these officers and men were never heard of again. This is a justifiable Question, even although the matter seems remote and no longer topical.
Let me recount a personal incident which has some bearing on this subject, but I preface my observation by asking a question. Why was it—perhaps the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, could respond in the course of his remarks later on—that the Foreign Office at the time, although it must undoubtedly have been aware of what happened, never said a word about it; appeared to take no appropriate action? I can recall Questions asked in the other House on the subject. Rumours were floating around. No facts were available to honourable Members in the other place. But the Foreign Office must undoubtedly have been aware, because of the rumours that were current, that something of the kind,
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on which the rumours were based, had been operating.
At just about that time I was asked to pay a visit to the Russian Embassy when Maisky was the Soviet Ambassador. Maisky was a friend of the United Kingdom. I had gone at his own request to talk with him about the possibility of Russia's entering the war on the side of the Allies. Noble Lords may wonder why I should have been consulted by Maisky. It so happened, although some of my colleagues decided to join Winston Churchill in the Coalition Government, that I refused the invitation, and so I found myself on the Opposition Bench, not the official Opposition Leader, but unofficial—if noble Lords prefer it, self-appointed. Maisky asked me to come and meet him. His reply to my question, whether Russia intended to enter the war on the side of the Allies, evoked a rather peculiar reply. He did not reply directly, but said, "Britain will not be defeated." I remember that remark vividly. So far as Maisky was concerned, he was on our side.
I repeat the question: If the Foreign Office were aware of what was happening in Poland, why were the facts not exposed? It may be because the Foreign Office diplomatically, and probably rightly in the circumstances, had no desire to offend Russia, in the hope that Russia would join with the Allies against the Nazis, and in the circumstances that would be regarded as a correct posture. I certainly at the time would not have objected to it because, like others in the other place, I wished for the successful prosecution of the war against the Nazis. It is remarkable how these events have been shrouded in obscurity, despite several commissions of inquiry. For example, there was the United States Congress Commission of Inquiry, when it was stated that there was not a scintilla (I am quoting accurately from the Report itself) of evidence which could refute the allegations and the rumours about the destruction wrought by the Russians when they invaded Poland and deported officers and men.
There was another inquiry. I am not certain whether it was of an international character: I think it was the International Red Cross. They engaged in an inquiry and were satisfied that there was truth in the rumours connected with

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the allegations about the massacre of officers and men—the number stated at the time was something like 15,000. Even Winston Churchill made no reference to the subject, except in relation to a controversy in which he engaged with Stalin at the end of 1945 when they were discussing what was to happen about the carving up of Poland and the frontiers. The references are contained in the Sixth Volume, 29th chapter, of World War, for which Churchill is responsible.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, if I may interrupt my noble friend —did he mean 1944 or 1945?
LORD SHINWELL: 1945.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: 1945? But Churchill was not in office at the end of 1945.
LORD SHINWELL: No, my Lords; I am wrong. I have the dates wrong. It was immediately after the war. Churchill was engaged in controversy on what was to happen about Poland. This is contained in the reference I have just mentioned. Perhaps my noble friend would care to consult the volume in the Library, and there he will see the actual statement made by Churchill about the disputes with Stalin. It was not about the events which have been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, which occurred in 1939 and the year following. This was in connection with an allegation about a smaller number of officers who had been captured by the Russians and massacred. Churchill asked Stalin whether anything could be done in order to prevent happenings of that kind from recurring. Stalin absolutely refused, and in point of fact, according to Churchill's reference in the volume which I have just mentioned, Stalin went so far as to declare these officers as revisionists who were trying to defeat the aims of the Soviet Union on behalf of, presumably, so-called reactionaries. This is part of the story: the rumours in 1939 and in 1940, and then a similar event when Churchill came to office and engaged in controversy with Stalin on a similar subject but of course concerning fewer men.
It may be argued that we ought to be extremely careful not to engage in disputation of this kind which might offend the Russians. I have a reply to that.
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We are a small country, Russia is a big country. Militarily we are not as strong as Russia, but that is no reason why we should not seek to rectify incidents mentioned in this debate. It may also be argued that in Poland at the present time they have been somewhat regardless of minority interests, and therefore although Poland was an ally of ours during the war (so far as it was possible to be an ally under General Anders, who was operating in this country on behalf of the Polish exiles) we ought to be extremely careful not to offend the Russians. But, after all, we are concerned with principles. We are concerned with the question of whether there should be an exposure of those events, whether there should be some rectification, some justification, some compensation— I am not speaking financially, because most of those people have died. Probably some of their successors are still alive and are in this country or elsewhere, but it is not a question of financial compensation. It is a matter of an inquiry which may afford consolation for those events, and, in the circumstances the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, was justified in raising this topic.
I do not want to proceed any further than that, except to repeat that, so far as I know, no responsible person—the Prime Minister or Lloyd George, for example—took any action in the matter. A reference is made to Lloyd George in the book by Frank Owen The Tempestuous Journey which must he familiar to noble Lords, in which he refers in a casual fashion to the rumours that were current in 1939; but Lloyd George took no action in the matter. Winston Churchill took no action in the matter, although he must have known what was happening. The Foreign Office must have been aware. I am not quite sure who was Foreign Secretary at the time, whether it was Lord Halifax or Sir Anthony Eden (now Lord Avon)—perhaps the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury, will be able to tell us who was Foreign Secretary at the time. At any rate no prominent person and nobody in the Foreign Office raised the issue, presumably because they dared not offend the Russians.
It may be said even now that we must not offend the Russians. I do not want to offend the Russians or anybody else,

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but I want what the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, is anxious about: that there should be an exposure of what happened, so that the world should know who was responsible for those events. That is the reason why the noble Lord has asked this Question; whether the Government can respond by appointing a Commission is a matter for them to decide. My own impression is that they will refuse, presumably because Russia is a strong country militarily and we must be extremely careful, we must be prudent, we must be cautious.
I should like to end by saying one thing on the ideological issue. I am not concerned about Russian ideology for Russia and the Russian people, but I condemn Russian ideology which is used as propaganda in all parts of the world for subversive reasons. If for no other reason than that, I think the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, was justified in raising this issue, and the very least that the Government can do is to endeavour to find out the facts of this squalid affair, so that history can place them on record. They were based on rumours at the time, but rumours which obviously had an element of truth. I support the noble Lord, Lord Barnby.
5.54 p.m.
THE EARL or DUNDEE: My Lords, the massacre of Katyn took place a long time ago, probably in the spring of 1944, and if we are asked, as the noble Lord who has just spoken thought we might be asked, what good purpose can now be served by raking up this 3I-year-old atrocity in a world where violence and cruelty seem to be becoming almost universal, I think the right answer is that we should try to put ourselves in the position of a near relation of any one of those Polish soldiers who, after having fought in vain for his country and after being held for seven months in a prison camp, was then slaughtered, together with 4,000 of his comrades, and buried secretly in the neighbourhood of the camp.
A great many of the families of these men are now living in this country. You would not feel, if you were one of them, that it made very much difference to your son or your brother or your husband or your friend whether he was murdered by the Russians or by the Germans, but
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I think it would seem important to you that history should seek to tell the truth about his death. I am sure that history makes a great many mistakes, and even in the most liberal society where freedom of speech and freedom of writing and freedom of research are all fully permitted the best historians may sometimes be deceived by the false propaganda of an earlier age, or even of their own age. If Germany had won the last war school children in many civilised countries would have been taught a version of history which would have been prescribed by Dr. Goebbels, and some of it might never have been unlearned.
When the news of the discovery of the dead bodies at Katyn was published in the latter part of the war, in 1943 or 1944, I, like the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, was a Member of another place. We had to choose between two contradictory statements, one by a Communist Government, another by a Nazi Government, both based on political philosophies which shamelessly subordinate truth to expediency. But I think the noble Lord will bear me out when I say that my recollection is that at that time, although the Germans were our enemies and although the Russians were our allies, nobody in Parliament had the slightest doubt that the Russian version of the affair was a totally false fabrication.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear!
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, that was not because of Nazi propaganda; it was, as the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, has mentioned, mainly because of the evidence of the International Red Cross, who had examined the circumstances on the spot.
Since then I think it has always been recognised in this country that these were the facts, and I doubt whether my noble friend Lord Barnby would have troubled to raise the question now if it had not been that one of the directors of the B.B.C. who was going to make an official visit to Poland had his visit cancelled the other day by the Polish Government because of a documentary film about Katyn which had been shown on B.B.C.2. We know very well how extremely offensive the dissemination of false history can be. We have ourselves seen a citizen of a country which is now free, the German Hockhuth, publishing

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the most inexcusable libels about both Sir Winston Churchill and Pope Pius XII, and some of them I think have appeared on the stage and on the screen. Of course we can understand if young Polish Communists have been officially taught and indoctrinated with a falsehood about the slaughter of their fellow countrymen at Katyn, how they may be offended when they hear the truth which they have been taught to regard as a falsehood.
My noble friend Lord Barnby asks in this Question for a pronouncement which will put the facts beyond contention. When he says "beyond contention", I take it he means beyond reasonable doubt in a country where men are free to examine the historical evidence, which I am afraid does not apply to the inhabitants of Communist countries. If we were to make such a pronouncement, accompanied by hostile criticism of Communist Governments for suppressing the truth, I would say that such criticism might only have the effect of delaying the time, if the time ever conies, when writers in Communist countries may begin to be allowed some degree of intellectual freedom. But I think it could do no harm if we were to publish, not in any provocative manner but in a purely objective and rational context, without any moral overtones, a true summary of the facts about this unhappy story of Katyn. in the interests of true history and for the sake of the exiled families of those murdered men who once helped us to fight for the freedom of the world but whose own country has lost its freedom in doing so.
6.2 p.m.
THE EARL OF ARRAN: My Lords, 1 have waited 30 years for this day; I have waited for an inquiry preferably by the United Nations, and for a straight answer by a British Government, which I confidently expect, on the simple question as to "who done it?" Meanwhile, history has been traduced and with the deliberate connivance of successive British Administrations, for, my Lords, it is and always has been common knowledge in the Foreign Office that Katyn was the act of the Russians and not the Germans. I am prepared to believe anything bad about the Nazis between 1939 and 1945, and indeed I would draw a sharp distinction between German murders and Russian murders; the one, I should like to suggest,
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deliberate, administrative, cold-blooded, sadistic; the other inefficient, haphazard and in some ways comparable to the murders of Shin Fein. But whether we like it or not, this odious crime at least is not attributable to our German friends and allies but to our comrades of yesteryear.
I do not propose to go into the evidence; it has been ably presented by the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, and the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. I have only one small piece to add to the jigsaw. In 1943, I was working closely with the Foreign Office news department. Its head, Sir William Ridsdale, had personal access to the Foreign Secretary, and his job was to give information and background guidance to the diplomatic correspondents of the British Press, information which those distinguished men used with all the care and discretion which was enjoined on them. At the time of the discovery of the Katyn graves, I distinctly remember Sir William telling his conference of officials that though there was little doubt that this was the deed of the Russians, it was regarded by the War Cabinet as highly dangerous to put the blame where it properly lay. I believe that Mr. Iverach McDonald, then Diplomatic Correspondent of The Times and Mr. Richard Scott, then a member of the department and now Foreign Editor of the Guardian, were concerned and would confirm it.
I understand this blurring of the truth at the time; I understood it then and I understand it now. To blame the Russians might have meant a break of the Alliance and even losing the war. We were forced to accept this, together with other odious necessities. For instance, we were forced to declare war on Finland to appease the Russians. Finland which we had tried to defend in the winter of 1939 with a voluntary brigade. The Americans, who have a soft spot for Finland, perhaps because it was the only country to repay its First World War debts, were furious with us. But I believe we were right; quite simply, we had no alternative. After the war, too, it could be and was agreed that in our desire to keep on terms with the U.S.S.R. at any price it would be impolitic to take the skeletons out of the cupboard. Hence the persistent refusal of successive

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Governments to face the issue, to set up, for instance, the inquiry demanded by the late Professor Sir Douglas Savory and over 100 members of the other place; hence the deliberate concealment of what those Governments knew and this Government know to be the truth.
But there can surely be no justification to-day for keeping silence. There is no further reason to appease the Russians. "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" There is no reason for falsifying history. Over the years history can all too easily become mythology. Who knows but that perhaps one day the vile story of Sir Winston Churchill's responsibility for the death of General Sikorsky may not come to be accepted as at least a possibility?
There is only one country which we in Britain cannot look squarely in the face, and that is Poland. In 1939 we guaranteed her territorial integrity. To-day our guarantee remains unfulfilled, our pledge broken. The Poles are forgiving and realistic; they do not expect us to honour our undertaking. But they fought at our side for just that reason. They realise that to do so would mean war against Soviet Russia, and that is totally impossible. But I repeat: towards Poland and the Poles we must have a had conscience, for we broke faith. Should we not do what lies within our power to redeem our national honour? We cannot give Poland back her freedom. Should we not at least give her back her history?
6.8 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, I should like to support, briefly, for there are others who have to speak, but most sincerely, what has been so well said this afternoon by the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, and those other noble Lords who have spoken. I suppose none of the many horrible things which were done in the last Great War have more appalled the conscience of humanity than the Katyn massacres. The killing of 4,000 officers, and almost certainly 10,000 more, would in any case be a dreadful thing, but what made it so specially shocking was the fact that it appears to have been done not in hot blood, not even in revenge, though that would have been bad enough, but quite deliberately in cold blood as an act of policy, to remove from Poland her
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natural leaders and maim her, if possible, for ever. That it utterly failed in these objects because of the unvanquished spirit of the Polish nation does not make it any the less atrocious. It remains an indelible stain on the nation responsible, and if such a crime is never to be perpetrated again, it seems to me of the first importance that the guilt should be nailed down, once and for all, officially, where it belongs. The facts, as the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, has said, are now pretty well known, and that should not be an impossible task.
I am not going into the question of what we should have done or should not have done in the past, to which the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, attached so much importance. I believe that now to be a sterile inquiry. I am concerned more with what is, I believe, to be the true purpose of this Motion, and it is surely this: what should we do now? I would say that I believe it is our duty to the Polish people, who have fought so heroically and so tragically on our side in that Great War, that this matter should be finally cleared up. I hope that it will be possible for the Government, in their reply, to make it clear once and for all. and in no uncertain fashion, that that also is their view.
6.12 p.m.
VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCH LEY: My Lords, your Lordships will be glad to hear that, because so many of my noble friends have said what I had intended to say, I have cut my speech in half. I want to take a slightly different aspect, in that Poland was, and is, the geopolitical heartland of Europe, and every struggle has gone over or through Poland. Every time she has been put down she has been resurrected, and I am sure she will be once again.
Towards the end of the war I was in Palestine and used to go up to the border of Persia to meet the Polish troops coming out of Russia on to our side, as it were, and one always noticed the shortage of the middle rank officers. They were simply not there. There were some very young and some very old, but in the main there were not sufficient officers of any sort coming out of Russia, through Persia, into Palestine to take part in the rest of the war. When General Anders was released from Lubianka to form the Polish Army

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to fight with the Russians and the West, he asked, "Where are the missing 15,000 officers?". He knew that there were 15.000 officers missing altogether. We now know, both from the evidence of a doctors' commission, which was international, and from a British officer and a United States officer who were in a German prisoner-of-war camp and were allowed to go to see that at least the 4,500 were killed—murdered, as several of my noble friends have said, in cold blood. Worse still, from the evidence, they were probably shot at close range from the back, falling into the graves they had probably had to dig themselves. This is known, but has never been really fairly and properly put. To do this in war, when you have been at peace with that nation and you want them to fight on your side, is almost inconceivable; but, as my noble friend Lord Salisbury said, it was cold policy to stop the future leaders of the Polish nation—those who would be leading Poland now had it not been for this ghastly act of inhumanity.
We owe a debt of honour to the Polish people, even to those in Poland now who are free to hear the truth. I want to add that not only do we owe a debt of honour, we owe a debt to truth. The United States of America has admitted some of the terrible things that have happened with some of her troops in Vietnam, has "come clean" and has charged the people concerned. Why not have the truth on this matter? We know what happened in Czechoslovakia, and we know what happened a little further back in Hungary. It is the truth that we ought to have, and truth has no deadline.
6.16 p.m.
LORD HANKEY: My Lords, without adding unduly to this debate, I should like to say a few words about this Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Barnby, because I was First Secretary of the British Embassy in Poland before the war; I was a diplomatic liaison officer with the Poles in Rumania, and afterwards in Iran, when General Anders and his Polish Army, and about 70,000 civilians came out at rather short notice—may I say, one of the miracles of our century—and I was again Counsellor in Poland at our Embassy in Warsaw after the war. After that I was head of the Northern Department, and had responssibility at departmental level for Anglo
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Polish relations, including the political problems of demobilising the Polish Army in the West. Afterwards I was Minister in Hungary, and I know, to my cost, what living under the N.K.V.D. in the last years of Stalin's life was like.
I cannot echo too strongly what has been said about the appalling, hideous massacre at Katyn. There is no doubt that it really is a very shocking crime, and if the facts were to come out in an absolutely incontestable form, nobody would be more glad than I. I should like to say that the file of the German Inquiry did, as a matter of fact, pass through my hands at one time, and I had the opportunity to look through it carefully. The date at which this massacre took place has always been slightly difficult to identify with absolute clarity. In actual fact, it depends largely on the diaries found in the pockets of the dead men. I can confirm what the noble Viscount, Lord Monckton of Brenchley said, that these men were shot in the back of the head, which was a practice unfortunately current on both sides of that terrible front.
The dates of the entries in the diaries all end in about March and April 1940; but as the evidence was released by the Germans in 1943, it is incredible that they would have allowed any diaries to survive which had an entry of a subsequent date. Therefore, one has to say that there is a conceivable residual doubt on this subject. I am not in any very great doubt myself, I am afraid, as to where the blame lay. I only say that if you want legal evidence, there is a legitimate residual doubt, and I do not think that it has been possible to clear it up on the evidence which has hitherto been released.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, would it have been possible to fabricate a diary which came to an end in March, 1940, with all the rest of the diary blank?
LORD HANKEY: No, my Lords; I do not think it would. I have seen photographs of the entries in the diaries; they were incontestably genuine. I personally think that the evidence points strongly to the fact that these men lost their lives in April, 1940; but all I say is that the Nazis were consummate liars and when they brought out a lot of evidence of this sort it was hard to know

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exactly what to believe. It was difficult for the Foreign Office at that time—faced as they were with the difficulty of encouraging the Russians to go on fighting, although we were not in a position to launch the Second Front which they demanded with such insistence—to take this matter up on evidence released by the Germans. I do not think it is true that the Foreign Office suppressed the evidence. One noble Lord suggested that, but I do not think that is true. I was not in the Northern Department at the time, but I do not think the Foreign Office ever suppressed evidence.
THE EARL OF ARRAN: My Lords, I am very sorry. I speak only for the official and not for the Ministerial level. But it was the guidance given out by the News Department, which I am sure the noble Lord respects as much as I do, that the Foreign Office was firmly convinced that it was a Russian crime and not a German crime. But it was impolitic to say so, and I personally agreed with them at the time. Mr. Iverach McDonald, now assistant Editor of The Times and then diplomatic correspondent of The Times, and Mr. Richard Scott, of the Guardian, would confirm that that was the guidance given to us.
LORD HANKEY: My Lords, I am not disagreeing with the noble Earl, and I think he is quite right. I think his remarks about what Sir William Ridsdale said were extremely significant and very interesting, and I share the same view. In fact I thought I was agreeing with him. All I am saying is that the Foreign Office did not conceal this. They did not think they had absolutely cast-iron evidence; and, anyhow, even if they had, they would not have thought it very politic to release the evidence at a time when the issues of war were so very great. Nor would the Foreign Office at any time—and nor should any of us—be greatly impressed by crocodile tears shed about this by the Nazis. Nothing could be nearer to hypocrisy than Nazi sorrow about a crime of this sort.
When I was. in Poland after the war, I made it my business to go to the extermination camps of Majdanek and Oswiecim, which is better known in this country by the German name of Auschwitz. and I saw evidence of what the
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Germans did which really makes one's blood run cold. I have seen the receipts given by the man at the gas chamber of Majdanek. The Germans were very careful; a receipt was given once every 20 or 30 minutes for several years, and every time about 35 people were put to death. A typical receipt would be, "10 Poles, 12 Polish Jews, 6 Ukrainian women with 5 children, one Norwegian and one Rumanian Jew." I have seen the tins of poison gas which were used for the purpose, labelled" Zyklon" and produced in tins with a skull and crossbones on them and red paint all around, and with many notices about the danger of handling it.
The Germans were very careful. Before the prisoners were pushed into the gas chamber, everybody was given a hot shower and a shave. I have seen a receipt given by a firm in Hamburg for 1,000 kilograms—which is a ton—of human hair. I have seen 800,000 pairs of shoes in an enormous hut, one of several consignments which were left behind. I had the chance to examine them. There were the sort of shoes worn by old Polish women in going to market. There were the sort of shoes worn by Frenchwomen to go shopping. There were Norwegian shoes, German shoes, Ukrainian shoes. every imaginable sort of shoe in those 800,000. There were tiny shoes, two inches long. It was a terrible sight.
I am sorry to say that, on many occasions, the gas chambers could not work hard enough, and the men who had to carry the corpses up the incline to the furnaces were unable to get there quick enough. On those occasions the S.S. men shot people down into ditches. I have seen the ditches which they were shot into. At Auschwitz they did not leave things at all to chance. The gas chambers were mechanised. They pressed a button, on went the moving floor, and the bodies were tipped into a furnace. I am sorry to spoil your Lordships' evening, but it is necessary to see the terrible crime of Katyn against the other appalling crimes that have been committed in Poland against our gallant allies. This is a most shocking affair and one wonders how it could have happened.
We British have made one terrible mistake in our time. We have been inclined to say, " Well, it does not much

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matter what people believe. What really matters is what they do." We could not have been more wrong. When Rosenberg produced his theory of "dehumanisation" or Entmenschlichung, which was that if by suffering you could dehumanise people and reduce them to the level of beasts then it did not matter if you killed them, perhaps we ought to have taken more notice. Perhaps we ought also to have realised that these terrible doctrines would find expression in the appalling acts which we have seen in our century. You have to go back hundreds of years to find the like.
Many of my friends died in the Warsaw Ghetto. They were herded into it, deprived of food and finally destroyed and burned alive. Many of my friends were killed in the Warsaw Rising. It was impossible after the war, when Warsaw had been destroyed by flame-throwers, house by house, to know what continent you were standing in when you stood in the middle of the Castle Square in Warsaw. I remember that in the house next to the one I lived in there was a handwritten notice which said, "Under this doorway there are two bodies. Do not disturb them. I will come back and bury them." It was signed, "Their brother". During that terrible episode of the Warsaw Rising—I saw all the diplomatic telegrams at the time—we made many applications to the Russians for them to give help or to allow us to send aeroplanes and to drop help ourselves. Warsaw was too far away for our bombers to go there and back at that time, without being able to land and refuel in Russia. It is a matter of history that Stalin, although pressed at the highest levels, refused to allow that to be done. The Russians were just over the river in the suburb of Praga. Your Lordships must imagine that the Germans were here and the Russians were at the Shell centre or possibly at the Elephant and Castle, somewhere between the two, but nothing whatever was done to help those gallant men, all our allies, fighting the Nazis in Warsaw. It was, I think, a crime not much less to be condemned than the crime of Katyn, for I suppose that far more gallant men were killed in that appalling episode.
I am not very much in favour of looking back on these shocking episodes of our century, except that we may be able
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to learn some lessons for the future. What can we learn from these awful events? First of all, how can we help our gallant Polish allies? We have in the United Kingdom a wonderful Pole in almost every office. They are very valued and esteemed members of our community. They earn a good deal, because they are efficient people and very devoted and they work hard. But there is much hardship, also, among the widows, and especially among the retired intellectuals and the elderly people who cannot earn their living any more. They need our help and sympathy. There are excellent Polish charities which I can recommend for your Lordships' consideration.
Secondly, we have to recognise that we should not handle this affair, or other affairs, so as to stir up the Poles in Poland against the Russians. It is no good: one has to recognise the strategic facts of life in the years in which we live. I have heard it said (I have never had concrete proof) that there were broadcasts either from London or from Russia —the two sides blame each other—requesting the Poles in Warsaw to rise when they did. I have never seen the actual proof; but there is no doubt that when they did rise they got themselves effectively destroyed. If we were to say the same to the Poles to-day, it would just be another Warsaw rising; it would just be another Czechoslovakia of 1968. I think we should not do them any good. I should like to go further than this. I should like to say that, viewed in modern terms, Poland has nothing to gain by East/West tensions.
I think that one can go even further than that now and say that it reaily is essential to bring about better East/West relations altogether. I myself believe that we should never miss a chance to settle outstanding issues with the Russians. We have a great common interest in the preservation of peace. Poland is perhaps not so well off as it would have been if it had been a free Western country, but it is making some progress and the people there seem to keep alive. Nevertheless, my Lords, it really is a grim and sombre cloud that hangs over the East of Europe. The Russians are a people with very high discipline. They are extremely secretive about their affairs. I think there will never be any chance of establishing the facts of Starobielsk and the other

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camps unless the Russians give permission for an investigation, or undertake an absolutely objective investigation themselves. Therefore, I find it very hard to see how we can carry this matter to the full elucidation of the truth which I agree would be desirable.
Fourthly, my Lords, I think the time has come, looking at these events on the broadest scale, to recognise how important it is that we should strengthen Western Europe. The U.S.S.R. aims to exploit the differences between nations: she despises weakness. The lightning invasion of Czechoslovakia was really the writing on the wall. It is high time—very high time, my Lords—to unite Europe still more. I think we should draw NATO closer together; and in my view it is high time that the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community and lent its weight to those who wish to strengthen the Free World.
Finally, my Lords, as a philosophical reflection, if I may be permitted this at the end of this very distressing speech, I should like to say that it is important to strengthen our own society. I believe, looking back at the history of Rosenberg and at the history of what happened in Russia, that it is vitally important to look into our own society and to look at the doctrines on which our young are being brought up. How do you think they will react to possible future crimes of ruthless lust, violence and brutality, such as Katyn, or new Katyns nearer home, when they are nurtured daily by the cinema and T.V. on scenes of rape, murder and bestiality? Should we not be thinking about the ideas on which we are bringing up the young generation, whose duty it will be to control the Governments of the future? Was it not the failure of German and Russian opinion to control their Governments which led to the terrible events of our century? With Katyn, Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto behind us, and having before us much ruthless murder and violence in our own cities, especially in Northern Ireland, with declining security in many cities in North and South America, I am full of foreboding for the future of our civilisation. For democracy to be worth while, it should know what it believes in and be prepared to defend its beliefs at home and abroad.
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At present, our Christian civilisation is living on capital, and there may not be all that much capital left—and perhaps not so much time, either.
6.35 p.m.
THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE: My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, I too have personal recollections of Poland, though they are not so extensive or so far-reaching as his. But I was sent to Poland in July, 1939, as a special correspondent of The Times to cover the events leading up to, and indeed following, the outbreak of war. Therefore, to this day I remember with great vividness the first days of the World War there: the darkened, silent streets; the disappearance of men to mobilisation and, only a very few days later, the disintegration, the partition and the arrival of the Russian tanks. Like the noble Earl, Lord Arran, I share a haunting sense of a foul conscience over Poland—a Poland that we urged to fight, a Poland that we encouraged to fight, a Poland that we promised to back to the end.
My Lords, as the noble Viscount, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, put it, we owe a debt of honour to the Polish nation. "Oh !", it is said, "Why rake it all up again? Why revive old quarrels?"
LORD HANKEY: My Lords, I am very sorry to interrupt, but on a point of historical fact—and I did see all the diplomatic correspondence in 1939—we did not encourage the Poles to fight; we really did beseech them to be very moderate, and they really were very moderate. I do not think that we carry responsibility for pushing the Poles into war.
THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE: My Lords, with the very greatest respect, and paying particular respect to one who was much closer to events than I was, because the noble Lord was in the Diplomatic Service, I remember Mr. Chamberlain's "Peace Front", which was an endeavour to ring Germany round with allies in Eastern Europe; and, whatever may have been done diplomatically, the people of Britain prayed that the Poles would resist and prayed that our Government here would stand up and fight as well. But this is a matter of opinion, and I am sure the noble Lord and my personal friend Lord Hankey will agree to let us differ on that interpretation.

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What I do believe is that there are times when we must look back, albeit with prudence. Those who were responsible on either side are no longer with us. The Baldwin-Chamberlain epoch of appeasement, when young Tory reformers denounced their Front Bench as a row of extinct volcanoes and their BankBenchers as the Forty Thieves, may have been shameful in many ways. But the epoch of Hitler and Ribbentropp, of Stalin and Molotov, which begat the Nazi-Soviet Pact—this is something very different. For that Pact was one of the great betrayals of history, and that Pact is the context of this debate. I am not one who shares the common fashion of believing that foreign policies should be founded on moral indignation about the domestic affairs of other countries, because I do not believe that Governments are the same as individuals. Nor can one expect them to be responsible in the same moral sense as individuals. But at Nuremberg we joined with the United States, France and Russia to judge and condemn crimes against humanity. My belief is that, whoever was responsible for the Katyn massacres—and the opinion of this House, it is quite evident, is unanimous so far—the Katyn massacres were certainly in the class of crimes against humanity.
"Oh, yes", they say, "but it is all old history; let bygones be bygones." My Lords, there are two attitudes to history. You may say, as did Lord Chesterfield, that it is just a "confused heap of facts". You may say, as did Carlyle, that history is "a great dust heap". You may even re-echo, as did Lord Beaverbrook, the immortal words of Henry Ford that, "History is just bunk". I believe that the dignity of history deserves to be better attested, and by whom better than the father of history, Thucydides himself, who said that history is philososphy learned from examples, or in the words of Sir Walter Raleigh, something from which we may gather a policy,
"no less wise than eternal by the comparisons and applications of other mens forepast miseries with our own like error and ill deservings."
Perhaps it was best summed up in Schiller's lines:
" Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht."
—world history is the world's judgment.
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It has been said of a man before now that if he has no enemies he has no honour. It has been said that, if so, he also deserves no friends. We have had brave friends among the smaller nations: Greece, Jugoslavia, New Zealand and Poland come to mind at once. I pray God that this House and this country will never, never shrink from supporting, encouraging and honouring our friends. To discard our friends is to besmirch their honour; to neglect their record—or to connive at such a thing—would be to dishonour ourselves. I beg Her Majesty's Government to recognise to-day our debt of honour at least to go as far as, in the words of this Motion, "To support an effort.
6.41 p.m.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, we have been debating this afternoon an epic tragedy and an epic crime, the deliberate assassination of close on 15,000 defenceless prisoners of war, mostly officers and intellectual leaders. These were men who had surrendered and whose surrender had been accepted, under the existing rules of war by which civilised nations normally abide, even when they arc dragged by cruel circumstances or by cruel design over the brink of war. These men had surrendered in such circumstances to a powerful and crushingly victorious foe. They had conceded and defined their helplessness, with bitter dismay, and placed themselves in the hands of that victorious enemy. They were totally defenceless, totally at the mercy of their captors. They had ceased to fight and counted upon the laws of civilised man to preserve their lives. There was no question of any form of trial before their execution, because their innocence of any offence was patent and never in dispute. The condemnation of this House in this debate has been unanimous. How could it be otherwise?
Let there be no mistake or underestimate as to what this Unstarred Parliamentary Question contains. It contains a charge, a charge that the Soviet authorities, in the spring of 1940, planned and implemented this mass assassination. It is a crime, as I have said, perpetrated thirty years ago, but it concerns the future conduct of human affairs in a way which the equally bestial crimes of Nazi Germany do not concern that future. It concerns our world and its

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future because the accused is not only free and unpunished but powerful, self-righteous and influential. It even claims to be a pattern of morality, a mirror in which the more gullible nations of the world, the more gullible groups and individuals, are encouraged to gaze bemused. Some of them gaze; many are bemused. That is a danger which confronts the present population of this globe.
This small but significant debate does not pretend to be a trial of the Soviet rulers, either those immediately accused or their successors who express no concern over this unexpiated crime. This is not a trial of the directly accused, because your Lordships' House is not sitting judically; and if it were there would be no sanctions or penalties available to such a court. But in a sense, at one remove or at two removes, somebody is on trial to-day and we all hope within a few minutes to see innocence declared and proven. Her Majesty's Government, of which I am a devoted supporter, is on test, if not on trial, in the terms of my noble friend's Question. Her Majesty's Government are asked to do something well within their power, to support an effort to secure pronouncement upon the authorship of mass murder.
THE EARL OF ARRAN: And to tell the truth!
LORD ST. OSWALD: And to insist upon the truth being known, as the noble Earl has said. Their response to this disinterested appeal will be a measure of their own sense of international morality. I am confident that this Government's sense of morality is at least as high as that of any Government in the world.
Evidence of the crime was first discovered after a delay of nearly three years, and the evidence then bore the stigma of being presented by the German Nazi Government and through the agency of Dr. Goebbels. The British Government of the day stood back, understandably enough, from judgment. I think that we can be indulgent to the then Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, for saying in his statement to Parliament on May 4, 1943:
"His Majesty's Government have no wish to attribute blame for these events to anyone except the common enemy."
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Later in the same statement, he said:
" The Germans need indulge no hope that their manoeuvres will weaken the combined offensive of the allies or the growing resistance of the enslaved populations of Europe."
That reassuring forecast was accurate in a large degree. Goebbels's propaganda, based so consistently on lies, did not succeed, when, by a savage windfall of war, it was able to employ the truth. It did not succeed in undermining the will of the Anglo-American alliance. What is more wonderful by far is that it did not lead to a reduction of fighting effort by the Poles themselves who had such grim, predictive evidence of the future awaiting them, when one form of slavery would be exchanged for another. These Poles were still to throw themselves, heroically, into the taking of Monte Cassino in the Allied cause; they were still to undertake the sacrifice of the Warsaw rising when they were so ruthlessly, deliberately, betrayed by the Soviet Army, on the orders of the Soviet Government; condemned to slaughter by the retreating German invaders, who crushed that rising while the Soviet forces waited outside Warsaw and allowed them to do so. The purpose then was identical with the cold purpose of the massacre of Katyn: to kill off, or to permit to be killed off, the flower of the leadership of a nation not amenable to the despotism they were preparing to impose.
That could have been the end of it, an incident quietly, quiescently, forgotten or relegated as a footnote to history. That would be comfortable, perhaps. But nations have achieved greatness and maintained greatness by other endeavours than simply seeking comfort, by sheltering behind the circumstances and conditions of the past. To pick up Sir Anthony Eden's phrase again, to go back to May 4, 1943, and submit it to the factors of our day: there is now no war and no common enemy to menace our existence; by the same token there is no common scapegoat and no sweeping indemnity—and in saying this I am echoing the theme of the noble Earl, Lord Arran. To-day all nations are equal before the law, in theory at least. What my noble friend Lord Barnby is demanding is that, in the light of recorded history, with the threat of Nazism long extinguished, never to be revived, Her Majesty's Government shall insist on a proper and public evaluation of the evidence assembled and tested

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in the thirty years subsequent to that savage and sickening event.
The crime in itself, the massacre of 14,500 Polish captives, is not questioned. Nobody claims that they evaporated in some miraculous and painless manner. The corpses of 4,133, each with a bullet in the back of the neck, have been exhumed in the Forest of Katyn. The fate of the remaining two-thirds is a matter of conjecture so far as the whereabouts of their murders is concerned; but nobody doubts that their end was violent, treacherous and inhuman. This is an epic atrocity of our own times. It is a condemnation, perhaps, of what our own highly developed species can do to each other in the 20th century. It is the deliberate, organised, premeditated nature of the crime which sets it apart from many other crimes of our epoch.
There is another characteristic upon which my noble friend Lord Barnby and following speakers have thrown a strong light to-day. Nobody has been brought to the bar of justice. There was a cynical attempt to add this to the list of Nazi crimes paraded and punished at Nuremberg. With all the facilities for gathering and presenting evidence available to that court, the attempt was so hollow that this charge, though included in the initial indictment at the behest of the Russians, was significantly omitted altogether from the judgment. It is a matter so horrifying in its nature that, so it seems to me, it must be treated either at great length and in great detail or briefly, by concentrating upon the essence of the crime itself. Important and poignant is the opportunity given to us by my noble friend this evening. It is not, as I see it, the opportunity to present the full case; and to attempt to present a condensed case would be to duplicate the opening speech of my noble friend Lord Barnby.
Evidence there is in abundance and, as we have seen, much of that evidence has been studied by noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. There is the evidence of those few who escaped, by some quirk or some strange reasoning of their captors, the fate which befell their fellow prisoners; and whose surviving witness points to guilt convincingly enough for most of us. There is the Report of the International Medical Commission which went to the scene of the massacre in Katyn Forest in
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April, 1943. There is the Report of the Select Committee of the United States Congress, a model of thoroughness and meticulous research. There is the report of the Polish Government Special Committee set up in 1944, its findings published in February 1946, under the title The Facts and Documents Concerning the Polish Prisoners of War captured by the U.S.S.R. during the 1939 Campaign. There is other separate fully corroborative evidence which has been collected over the years.
In the course of the past few months two books and a 70-minute television programme, all three comprising deep, systematic research, have brought part of that research in a responsible form before the scrutiny of the British public. At this point I must mention a factor which possibly I should have mentioned earlier. We are so properly scrupulous in this House in declaring an interest of any kind that I must mention my part as the publisher of one of those books. The impulse to publish and the impulse to speak sprang equally from a conviction—shared by all those taking part so far in this debate— that this hideous page of history should be studied and judged upon. Both of those books have been referred to more than once in this debate. One is entitled, Death in the Forest; the other, Katyn, A Crime Without Parallel. I do not know whether the latter is a valid title, for who is capable of comparing one crime with another?
My Lords, we deem ourselves as living in a civilised age, an improvement on others. How sound is our diagnosis? It seems crucial to me that we should study ourselves, not simply as individuals or nations but as a civilisation which will have to pass on an inheritance, hopeful, ominous or indifferent, to those who come after. I do not think it is inordinately hubristic to claim that the nations of the democratic West are healthily self-critical compared to the self-glorifying dictatorships of the East. Certainly in the strictures which opposing political Parties pass upon each other in this Parliament building there is plenty of scope for questioning and for debunking our designs. This we all believe to be our strength. There is a corresponding weakness in the dictatorships which we ignore. But because that weakness

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weakens the world we live in, we cannot, responsibly, shrug it off or look the other way.
I have myself seen and listened to the hubristic arrogance of the Communist countries, and I have seen how easily duped are the unwary and the uncommitted nations, gapingly impressed by such aggressive confidence. I have seen them unimpressed, contemptuously unimpressed, by the manner in which we, the Western nations, willingly, repeatedly, turn the other cheek and give a soft answer in preference to an honest and informative answer—anything for a peaceful life, even if it means cringing away from awkward facts. Here we have an undoubted awkward fact. I have said earlier that the innocence of the murdered was never disputed. I do not believe that the guilt or identity of the murderers can be disputed to-day, in this place or in any place where free speech is permitted. Very little, if any, investigation remains to be done. The material evidence, collected, codified and ready for inspection, is there. The weight of that evidence, to one who has studied it, is overwhelming. It awaits an authoritative judgment and verdict delivered to the world. It could be the simplest, least laborious task that the United Nations had ever been set. I hope that Her Majesty's Government, satisfied by the force of what has been said to-day and no doubt satisfied by the facts which they themselves have read, may present that task to the United Nations.
The Soviet rulers are on visibly weak ground in the matter of treatment, past and present, even of their own minorities within their own borders. This weakness is reflected in the monstrously arrogant or widely diversive speeches delivered by their spokesman at the United Nations when kindred subjects are raised; either in the Third Committee, in the Economic and Social Committee, before the Human Rights Commission or before the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Here is a case concerning the dead who cannot be brought back, a case which cries out for world attention and obloquy. What is required is a lead, and I believe that lead could most properly be given by the British Government. Yet for thirty years British Governments
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have been treading water; or, to put it more luridly, since this is a lurid chronicle which has to be related, Governments of all complexions and of many lands have been treading blood. It is the blood of 15,000 of our own innocent and defenceless allies; of a nation which fought staunchly and with legendary valour beside us in the war against Nazism from the beginning to the end. Such a lead would also demonstrate hearteningly that good men are not forgotten; that gratitude does not wither; that decent people care about the fate of their fellow men, whether they lie in a known or a secret grave, furtively buried beyond sight by their assassins. We owe this assurance in particular to Poland, one of the noblest, bravest and most unflinchingly loyal of allies that this country has ever had the good fortune to fight beside. I was surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, say that had we raised the matter of Katyn we could not have persuaded the Russians to go on fighting. Nothing stopped the Poles fighting, even after they knew that part of our victory would be the sacrifice of their own land!
What we, who have taken part in this debate to-day, are trying to achieve is not to punish a still unpunished crime, because punishment is neither feasible nor desirable in this context. What I think most of us have been trying to do is to state the obvious, and not turn away and leave it in placid anonymity. The obvious to us all is that where an inhuman crime has been committed, there is a criminal to be arraigned. What is dangerous for us all is that this criminal should be permitted to stalk and straddle the world scene, not simply flaunting his immunity, but repeating his crime, as a kind of primitive droit de seigneur, repeating it in the Baltic countries, in one Balkan country after another, in Poland again, in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia. We have been persuaded to dignify it with the title of the Brezhnev doctrine. It has come to the point where we accept the primitive, brutal appetite of Soviet Russia in each new manifestation as if it were a kind of unfortunate, now almost hereditary, mannerism, a recognised and tacitly legalised mannerism with which we have to live, so far at the cost of our neighbours, while we whistle and look the other way like a philosophical, docile peasantry.

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Even though there can be no penalty attached to the judgment we utter to-day as participants in this debate, let us treat this—and I beg the Government to treat this—as a test case. Take it as a detective challenge, so much more of a challenge because the case is thirty years old, an ostensibly unsolved crime, only unsolved because so far nobody has had sufficient mettle to name the criminal. If an unquestionably democratic Government such as our own were to go back thirty years to pin a historic crime upon the criminal, that would impress the uncommitted world—and it would impress the criminal. It might even do something to deter continuing crime. That is the opportunity that my noble friend Lord Aberdare has this evening, in giving the Government's answer to the Question presented to them.
7.4 p.m.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, this has been a very moving debate and not surprisingly, I think, virtually unanimous. The crime which gives rise to this debate is, I suppose, one of the greatest crimes in history. As has been said by previous speakers, it is difficult to give an order of villainy but it is difficult to conceive of a viler crime than this was. If anything could increase its vileness, I think it would be that this colossal act of murder seems to have been executed as an exercise in social engineering, the necessity to prejudice the possibility of a country's recovery and its future by taking away all power —and generally the simplest way of doing that is by taking away all life—from its natural leaders.
My noble friends in all quarters of the House have so well expressed the points I should have made that I should not have added my voice to-night had it not been that my silence might perhaps have been misunderstood by my Polish friends. It so happens that Poland has played a large part in my political life, for it was 26 years ago that I found it necessary to resign from Winston Churchill's war-time Government because it seemed to me that the Agreement at Yalta was unprincipled and wrong. I thought then, as I have thought ever since, that it was not only unprincipled and wrong, but that it was one of the great blunders of history. When I
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resigned, for reasons which seemed to me overwhelming, I do not think that I then had a Polish friend. My action depended on what I thought of the issues involved. But since then I have had a great number of Polish friends, and I should not like any of them to think that I was lacking in support on this Question that has been raised to-day.
But there is another ground on which I commend the proposal before the House, one that was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Monckton of Brenchley— the truth. Some people may think that the establishment of the truth may not much matter, and it is difficult to demonstrate that it does. I suppose that fundamentally it is a matter of faith. I believe that the establishment of the truth is always right. I will not enlarge on that, because it is a matter of faith. In the end, the truth will be established. Lies will not prevail for ever—at least, I hope not—unless the Communists conquer the world. But there is something to be said for accelerating the revelation of truth, the discovery and establishment of the truth. I would conclude my few remarks by a notable hut sad quotation from the English poet, Coventry Patmore:
" When all its work is done, the lie shall rot; The truth is great and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not ".
7.9 p.m.
LORD LOVAT: My Lords, I am not on the list of speakers, but as the House is in a reminiscent mood perhaps I could briefly tell your Lordships of a deputation which went to Russia in the dark days of January, 1945, to pay the respects of both Houses of Parliament to the Supreme Presidium of the Soviet Republic. There were two Peers and also members of the Forces, a soldier, a sailor and an airman, and for some obscure reason I was chosen as a Peer and as a soldier. I was suffering from war wounds at the time and I wore my uniform, and I took with me films of the Normandy landings. Perhaps for that reason, I had more chance of talking to Stalin than any other member of the delegation, which was led by the late Colonel Walter Elliot, whose widow Baroness Elliot of Harwood, now sits in our House. Stalin allowed me to ask one question which was of considerable importance from the

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point of view of bringing back information to this country. The question I asked was, "As you roll back the German armies" (the advance was then pushing on from Stalingrad, where Russia turned and fought back) "what will the Russian armies do in the next fortnight?" Stalin replied, through Mr. Maisky, the Ambassador at the Court of St. James's, who had then returned to Moscow, "When we reach the Vistula we shall pause."
This is the point which I think the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, made when he said that was a deliberate policy. The noble Viscount, Lord Monckton, also made the point that it was Russian policy to exterminate the Polish leaders and what happened in Warsaw was the attempted destruction of the Polish people. With all respect to Lord Barnby, to whom we are so grateful for having inaugurated this debate to-day, the massacre in the Forest of Katyn was small beer in comparison to what happened in Warsaw. I feel that the message of whatever we have discovered to-day is that you cannot crush the leaders of a country like Poland. The forest massacre was only one incident in a much bigger series of crimes.
7.12 p.m.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, in putting his Question, the noble Lord. Lord Barnby, spoke with very great sincerity and depth of feeling. This has been the case with every successive speech this evening. Indeed, I think many speeches have gone even further and have been made with deep emotion on this subject, on which all your Lordships obviously feel so very strongly. There can he no doubt in the mind of anyone who has listened to this debate or who may subsequently read it, what your Lordships' opinions are of this tragic affair. There have been some very distinguished contributions, including one from my noble friend Lord Salisbury, and other of your Lordships have made very well informed contributions to the debate. Some new items of history have emerged. The noble Lord. Lord Shinwell, told of the meeting he had with Mr. Maisky: the noble Earl. Lord Arran of his Foreign Office and Press conferences: and just now my noble friend Lord Lovat told us of his
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interview with Stalin. All this has been of great value to the debate.
There was one item of history which I think perhaps might be put right. There was an inaccuracy which crept in at one point when the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell and my noble friend Lord Dundee referred to an inquiry by the International Red Cross. This was something which the Germans sought, but it never took place because of objections from the Russians in 1943; and in fact the Germans set up their own inquiry, which I shall mention a little later and which has already been referred to by my noble friend Lord Barnby. The noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, described it as "a sordid and squalid affair" and my noble friend Lord St. Oswald as "a savage and sickening event". I am sure we all agree. All wars are sordid and squalid affairs, all wars are savage and sickening events; and the Second World War was no exception.
Some of its most atrocious events have begun to fade from our consciousness with the passage of time, though the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, reminded us of some of them. But there is a special and dreadful fascination about the tragedy of the Katyn massacre and the disappearance of 10,000 other Poles, which has resulted in persistent attempts to penetrate the obscurity in which these events are still shrouded. Against the total number of lives lost during the war, a figure of 10,000 or 15,000 is perhaps not striking in itself. At least 800,000 Russians died in the seige of Leningrad alone. But the Polish officers who disappeared, and some of whom were later found dead in the Forest of Katyn, formed part of the elite of the Polish nation, a nation which had already been cruelly buffeted by history and was to suffer still more cruelly before the war was over. It is perhaps this aspect in particular, together with the mystery to which I have referred, that has attracted, and still attracts, the public interest to which my noble friend's Question gives expression.
May I say at once that the Government are not insensitive to public thinking on these dreadful events. Governments are composed of human beings, and we have followed the recent public discussion of the issue very closely. But I would ask the House to bear in mind that,

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unlike private individuals or the information media, Governments are not at liberty to voice half-formed views, speculations or suspicions. Therefore, although I sympathise deeply with my noble friend's motives in raising this question, we must look closely and dispassionately at what the Government are asked to do.
As I understand it, the Question in effect asks Her Majesty's Government to take a lead in organising a definitive pronouncement on who was responsible for the death or disappearance of over 14,000 Polish officers more than thirty years ago. It is towards the Soviet Government that the Question points its finger. It states that the 4,000 victims at Katyn were murdered "in the spring of 1940", and noble Lords will be aware that the Germans did not invade that area until the following year. There are a number of objections to acting in the way my noble friend proposes. First, Her Majesty's Government have absolutely no standing in this matter. It may be said that this is not a legal but a moral question. Even if this were so, and if it were the duty of Her Majesty's Government to take up every moral challenge regardless of legal competence, I ask the House to consider for a moment the history of the question in order to judge whether the proposal of the noble Lord is realistic.
Since the initial discovery of the bodies in the Katyn Forest by the Germans in 1943, there has been no dearth of investigations and attributions of guilt, and my noble friend Lord Barnby explained them. The German Government, as I mentioned earlier, established an International Medical Commission, none of whose members was of German nationality, though all, except one (a Swiss), came from German occupied countries. This Commission found that the Polish officers had been murdered in the spring of 1940; that is, before the German invasion. As I have already pointed out to the House, that is exactly the conclusion assumed in the Question. In 1944, a Special Commission set up by the Soviet Government found that the Germans had perpetrated the massacre in the autumn of 1941. Later still, in 1952, an American Congressional Committee concluded that responsibility for the massacre lay with the Soviet Union.
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I would emphasise that Her Majesty's Government were in no way associated with any of these three investigations, nor have Her Majesty's Government accepted any of their various conclusions. The only inquiry in which Britain was involved took place at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1946. The results were inconclusive and the judgments issued by the Nuremberg Tribunal contained no reference to the Katyn massacre.
In these circumstances, we must ask ourselves what kind of inquiry, by whom and in what conditions, could possibly establish "beyond contention", to use the words of my noble friend's Question, the authorship of those crimes.
LORD ST. OSWALD: I should like to ask my noble friend this question. When the Katyn crime came up for investigation at the Nuremberg trials, was the possibility of Russian guilt investigated, or only the possibility of German guilt?
LORD ABERDARE: My impression is that it was only the question of German guilt that was investigated at Nuremberg. All I wanted was to state exactly what are the facts as seen from the Government's point of view. I was asking what we could possibly do to establish beyond contention who was the author of this crime. Is it likely, is it even conceivable, that the truth about these events could be established now to universal satisfaction, when it was not established in 1941, in 1944, in 1946 or in 1952? The Soviet Government, on whose territory the forest of Katyn lies, maintains the position it adopted in 1941; that all Polish officers in Soviet prison camps were released, and that those found dead at Katyn were killed by the Germans. The Polish Government (whose wishes should surely be respected in the matter) has said that it regards the incident as closed. Can it really be suggested that these Governments would now co-operate in a fresh inquiry? And, if not, what would be the value of any conclusion that might be reached?
I suggest to the House that the only result of a new inquiry would be to reopen old wounds. Historians are free to discuss this mystery, and no doubt they will continue to do so. The Press, radio and televison are not muzzled or controlled in this country. But the noble Lord's Question invites Her Majesty's,

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Government to take certain action, and this action we regard as not only beyond our competence, but likely to lead to nothing but pain, disagreement and illwill. Having said that, may I add that I have been deeply impressed by what your Lordships have said in the course of this debate, and I will certainly undertake to pass on to my right honourable friend the depth of feeling unanimously expressed by your Lordships' House.
THE EARL OF ARRAN: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him: is he saying that Her Majesty's Government are funking it?
LORD ABERDARE: No, my Lords, that was not the tenor of my remarks.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, I have no right to speak again, because this is an Unstarred Question and I have had my opportunity. But I want only to ask the noble Lord this. In passing on what has been said in this House to-day to his right honourable friend, would he also make the suggesttion contained in my speech: that if it is impossible to raise this matter before the United Nations—and I agree that it would be useless, because the Russians would immediately put on their veto—would it not be possible for Her Majesty's Government to do something which they have not done up to now, and that is to express their own view about the Katyn massacre?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I will certainly convey that point to my right honourable friend.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, perhaps I may point out to my noble friend that it is absurd to say that the Polish Government opposes this matter. The Polish Government is under the Russian Government. Of course it would oppose it.

ANGLESEY MARINE TERMINAL BILL [H.L.]
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