Lords Sitting of 26 June 1978

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Newcastle.

THE LORD BISHOP OF EXETER
Eric Arthur John, Lord Bishop of Exeter—Was (in the usual manner) introduced between the Lord Bishop of London and the Lord Bishop of Newcastle.

LEBANON: SUPPLY OF ARMS
2.43 p.m.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will reconsider their decision to supply arms to the Government of Lebanon.
The MINISTER of STATE, FOREIGN and COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (Lord Goronwy-Roberts): My Lords, the Government have agreed to meet the reasonable requests for arms from the Lebanese authorities in order to help them rebuild their armed forces, which were largely destroyed in the civil war, and thus re-establish the Lebanese Government's authority throughout the country. The Government see no reason to reconsider their decision.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether there are not two dangers: the first is the instability of the Government. The Times on 15th June said that the Lebanon State has "long since ceased to exist". The second danger is that it may be succeeded by private armies which will take over the arms supplied by our Government and lead to an extension of the sectarian conflict.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTSMy Lords, I think the answer to both contingencies mentioned by my noble friend is that in accordance with the United Nations Security Council Resolutions 425 and 426, which sought, among other objectives, to restore order in the Lebanon, the Government have seen fit to assist the only legitimate Government of Lebanon to reassert its authority and to ensure that the kind of circumstances that my noble friend rightly fears shall be made less probable than would be the case if they were not assisted to reassert their authority.
Lord PAGET of NORTHAMPTON: My Lords, is not the trouble with the Lebanon that when you put arms in there it is very difficult to know who is going to use them, and there are far too many arms there already?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the Government have authorised the supply of weapons to the legitimate Government of the country for use by its armed forces. We have no evidence that they are being used improperly or are likely to be transferred to unauthorised hands.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, is it not also already the case that private armies are threatening the Government, and that military armies under the ex-President Chamoun may very well take over and use our arms in a sectarian struggle, unhappily named Christian, against the Moslem population?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, that may indeed happen unless the legitimate Government is properly strengthened to meet all such contingencies, and this is what Her Majesty's Government are endeavouring to do, I repeat, in accordance with the objectives of United Nations Security Council Resolutions.
Lord LEATHERLAND: My Lords, is my noble friend aware of the opinion that although it might be virtuous to refuse these arms, this is a case where virtue is not its own reward because the Lebanese people would immediately go to another country to get them?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: Yes, my Lords, indeed it is a question of whether, if we were to take a wholly negative view of this reasonable request, the Lebanese Government would not find it necessary to apply to some other country, in which case there might be another Question in this House.
Lord KINNAIRD: My Lords, in view of what one reads in the Press today, and for the greater safety of the Western world, would the Minister not agree that certain noble Lords and certain honourable gentlemen would be well advised to give up reading Alice in
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Wonderland and try to understand a children's book called Little Red Riding Hood?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I am quite sure that my noble friend's reading experience is somewhat wider than either Alice in Wonderland or Little Red Riding Hood.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND ILO CONVENTION
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the attitude of the British delegation at the ILO to the complaint made by International Confederation of Free Trade Unions that the Government of Czechoslovakia, by dismissing supporters of the Charter 77 Movement, has violated the Convention 111 which requires that no one be denied employment for holding political beliefs.
Lord WALLACE of COSLANY: My Lords, under ILO procedures the Government of Czechoslovakia has the right of reply to the complaint made by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the right to be present when their reply is debated later this year by the Governing Body of the International Labour Organisation. As these procedures have not yet been completed the matter must be regarded as sub judice, and it would not be appropriate to express views on the substance of the complaint. The Government take the view that all Governments should comply with the terms of ILO Conventions they have ratified.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, while not wishing to repudiate the sub judice issue, may I ask the Government this question very seriously: May it not be that these international agencies in which East and West participate, neutral nations participate and trade union organisations and employers have a part, are the most effective means of exerting influence to end the persecution of dissidents, not only in the Communist countries but in all the countries in the world?
Lord WALLACE of COSLANY: My Lords, I would not disagree with my noble friend. In this case some papers are being submitted, and the matter will be dealt with under the usual procedure. I would not disagree. In point of fact this is, contrary to some people's thinking, a very useful and valuable organisation.

WATERWAYS: MAINTENANCE PROGRAMME
2.50 p.m.
Viscount HANWORTH: 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 why they have not yet authorised the proposed programme of essential maintenance work submitted by the British Waterways Board four months ago, in spite of the fact that they have agreed in principle that the work should start and have allocated funds for the purpose.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, although the programme of work drawn up by the Board poses no problems as such, this significant increase in the Board's normal maintenance programme involves substantial increases in staff numbers and salary levels which raise difficult associated issues. Because of their implications for pay policy and future levels of financing it has not yet been possible to give the Board clearance in respect of these matters.
Viscount HANWORTH: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply. However, I should like to ask first, when is it expected that this difficulty will be resolved, and secondly, does he fully appreciate what a sorry tale this has been? Five years ago the backlog of maintenance was estimated at £40 million but all the Government did was to ask for an independent consultant who confirmed that estimate. At last we have the £5 million but even that, in view of this urgent maintenance, is, for one reason or another, being delayed. Cannot the Government grasp the problem and realise that it is of immense importance to the recreation of a great many people—people who are not the upper classes?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the Government are fully aware of the importance of getting the Board's programme under way with the least possible delay and will do their best to resolve the matter as quickly as possible. As I have said, matters are by no means straightforward. Effective implementation of the first £5 million that we have given for this year depends on the resolution of the staffing and pay problems. I remind the noble Viscount that the Government have already given £12 million a year, which is 50 per cent. of the Board's income; we are now proposing an extra £5 million as recommended by Fraenkel; and there will be another £5 million next year.
Viscount HANWORTH: My Lords, I should like to press the noble Lord further. The £12 million has nothing whatever to do with the arrears of maintenance; it is for the running costs.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, with regard to the long-term question, I should remind the noble Viscount that the recent Commons Select Committee on Nationalised Industries, in its fourth report on the British Waterways Board, made specific recommendations. The Government will be stating their position on that report in the near future. I think that it would not be appropriate for me to comment on it in advance.
Lord GEORGE-BROWN: My Lords, does the noble Lord think that his Answer is really fair? I agree with the point that has just been made, but the real point is that the chairman of the British Waterways Board, a colleague and friend of all of us, has been fighting a battle against successive Ministers for a long time to get this programme authorised. If the implementation of it now presents a problem, that is only because it has taken this long to persuade the Ministers to stop obstructing its implementation. Therefore, is it really fair to defend the present Government proposal for inaction on the grounds that they have themselves brought about what is now a very difficult problem?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the Board provided a detailed programme to support the first grant allocation of £5 million, but that would create many new posts, regrade a quarter of the existing staff and move the entire top management

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on to substantially higher salaries. That of course raises very important questions of pay policy which must be resolved before we can go ahead.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, will the noble Lord remember that the civil construction and building industry is desperately short of work and that there is massive unemployment in that area? Therefore, would it not be helpful to get on with the letting and the planning of these contracts for the maintenance of these important waterways so that jobs can be secured and extra jobs provided?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I am sure that that is a very interesting suggestion which I shall put to my right honourable friend.
Lord MOWBRAY and STOURTON: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that all the Government have to do is to subcontract to local authorities? That would enable my noble friend's suggestion to be carried out?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I am sure that that is another very interesting suggestion, which I shall put forward as well.

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE: STRIKES
2.55 p.m.
Lord LEATHERLAND: 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 permanent machinery can be set up to prevent strikes and threats of strikes by hospital staffs.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, Her Majesty's Government are naturally concerned to avoid strikes by National Health Service staff, especially where they may affect the care and safety of patients. It is considered unlikely, however, that any effective permanent machinery could be devised which would prevent all such action. I am glad to be able to inform your Lordships that
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discussions are currently taking place to consider ways of improving the machinery for dealing with collective grievances.
Lord LEATHERLAND: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. However, in view of the distress caused to relatives and the danger caused to patients by these dislocations, can he tell us the exact nature of these discussions?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, yes. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has met leaders of the major Trades Union Congress affiliated National Health Service trade unions and the main organisations representing the medical and nursing staffs—I am referring to the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives. The purpose of that meeting is to see whether some arrangement can be formulated whereby grievances affecting any group within the National Health Service could be dealt with very quickly. The first meeting was held on 24th May when the representatives to whom I have referred were present. That meeting took place, and future meetings will take place, under the chairmanship of my honourable friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Services.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the principle of withdrawing ones labour is one that we accept and have accepted for a long time? We also accept that almost every strike causes suffering of some kind. However, when it causes suffering to people who are helpless, disabled and cannot do anything for themselves, surely we can depart from the principle, which is accepted by almost everybody, that people have a right to withdraw their labour? Is it not possible to promote some kind of arbitration machinery in cases of this sort in order to prevent, so far as it is practicable, additional suffering?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I am obliged to my noble friend for his comments and observations. The particular purpose of the discussions which are taking place is to see whether some firm conclusions can be reached as to future discussions. It is hoped that when some sort of agreement is reached

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it could, perhaps, be put to the General Whitley Council with a view to its being able to draw up some kind of agreement which would be acceptable to everybody concerned in the National Health Service, should there be any grievance coming from any section.
Lord TRANMIRE: My Lords, do not the present difficulties show that there are certain defects in the Whitley Council machinery? Could the review include a review of the Whitley Council machinery?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I am speaking from memory, but I think that I am right in saying that my noble friend Lord McCarthy undertook, at the Government's request, a complete review into the working of the Whitley machinery, the results of which were published a few months ago after three years' very careful study. The Government are looking at that report. If I am wrong I shall certainly let the noble Lord know.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, my noble friend has mentioned discussions. Have there been any discussions with the TUC General Council about this matter? After all, the Whitley Council has no authority in a matter of this sort; it can only engage in discussions and negotiations. As this is a matter of high moral principle, is it not advisable to have some discussion with the TUC?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, apologise if I did not make it clear, but at the first meeting on 24th May, to which were invited representatives of the various bodies engaged in the National Health Service, in fact a representative of the Trades Union Congress was present.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, instead of setting up any new machinery, could it conceivably be possible in future for hospital staffs not to be engaged unless they voluntarily agree to waive their perfectly justifiable right to strike where lives of patients are concerned?—because such strikes were totally unknown before the advent of the National Health Service.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I think I can say that the Government—and I am sure that I am speaking for the whole of your Lordships' House—deplore matters resulting from stoppages and
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strikes where they affect people in the community. I think it might be very difficult to exact the kind of undertaking for which my noble friend is asking. But, obviously, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State is very concerned, and that is why the discussions are taking place at the moment at the highest possible level.
Lord THOMAS: My Lords, will the noble Lord not agree that although we hear a great deal about human rights in other parts of the world it is about time that we took steps to ensure that the human rights of our own people when they are sick are fully looked after? Further, will he not agree that in these days in this country the so-called National Health Service is neither national nor in a very healthy condition, and does not give a very good service?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I would advise the noble Lord to read the general daily Press. Recently there have been a number of poll on the opinions of the ordinary people of this country who use the National Health Service, asking them to comment on it. The majority of them are very well-satisfied with the National Health Service as it is.
Lord ALEXANDER of POTTERHILL: My Lords, although it might be unreasonable to expect any of the staff totally to give up the right to withdraw labour, would it not be quite reasonable to require them to do so with arbitration procedure until that arbitration had taken place?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Lord. The whole purpose of these discussions is to try to arrive at a formula whereby if there are any grievances at all they can be dealt with almost immediately at Area Health Authority level, so as to prevent any stoppages or strikes.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, is not all the blame in this case being placed on the nurses and the hospital staff? As the father of two nurses,. I know that their conditions have been intolerable. Although I am in favour of necessary arbitration, should not some blame for these situations be attached to the management as well as to the National Health Service staff?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I do not think that any useful purpose would be served if I embarked upon a process of apportioning blame. Let us get down to the fact that discussions are taking place at this moment.
Lord LEATHERLAND: My Lords, while thanking my noble friend for telling us about the three prestigious organisations which his right honourable friend has consulted, will he also bear in mind that the National Union of Public Employees—with which I have no connection whatever—is largely involved in these disturbances and dislocations at hospitals? Would it not be a good idea if his right honourable friend also consulted them?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I thought that I said very clearly that the discussions included leaders of the major TUC-affiliated National Health Service trade unions, which includes COHSE and NUPE.

RHODESIA: MURDER OF BRITISH MISSIONARIES
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House, at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m. my noble friend Lord Goronwy-Roberts will repeat a Statement being made in another place on the killing of British missionaries in Rhodesia.
IRON AND STEEL (AMENDMENT) BILL
Brought from the Commons, endorsed with the certificate from the Speaker that the Bill is a Money Bill within the meaning of the Parliament Act 1911; read 1a, and to be printed.

GREATER LONDON COUNCIL (GENERAL POWERS) BILL
3.4 p.m.
Read 2a, and committed to the Unopposed Bill Committee.

GREATER LONDON COUNCIL (MONEY)BILL
Read 2a, and committed to the Unopposed Bill Committee.

THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACTS
3.5 p.m.
Lord WIGODER Lord WIGODER rose to call attention to the need to replace the Official Secrets Acts by a measure to put the burden on public authorities to justify withholding information; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, those of your Lordships who find the wording of this Motion familiar will recognise that it is taken verbatim from a specific pledge to legislate contained in the last Labour Party Manifesto, issued in October 1974. That pledge was, no doubt, successful in obtaining a certain number of votes for the Labour Party at that Election; it is a pledge that has not been honoured. Whether that thereby makes the Labour Party's Manifesto a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act is a rather nice point of law upon which I need not perhaps embark. Therefore, it is clear that the Government have run into very real difficulties on this problem, and the purpose of this debate this afternoon is to see whether the collective experience of Members of your Lordships' House can help to contribute towards solving those difficulties and facilitating early legislation.
There have been a few rather tentative steps along the road since the days when that Manifesto was issued. In July 1977 a memorandum was issued by the Head of the Civil Service asking those who worked under him to be more forthcoming in the production of official information. In November 1977 there was a Government promise to be more ready to publish background material. It will come as no surprise to your Lordships to know that there is a White Paper on the way. The White Paper has been imminent now for many, many months; as each day goes by it no doubt becomes more imminent. It may be that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, will be able to tell us when we can actually expect its arrival. That is not a satisfactory record on a topic which my noble friends on these Benches regard as one of extreme importance.
The position appears to be this. First, as your Lordships will know, the Official Secrets Acts were passed during one afternoon in 1911, at a time of grave international crisis. They were rushed

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through both Houses in, I think, record time. It is hardly surprising that ever since they have given rise to considerable difficulties.
This afternoon I am not concerned with Section 1 of the principal Act, which deals with acts which prejudice the safety of the State. That is really aimed at espionage. Its scope has perhaps been a little extended. For example, your Lordships may remember that some gentlemen belonging to an organisation called the Committee of One Hundred were successfully prosecuted under that section because they planned to lie down on an airfield in front of some American nuclear-carrying aeroplanes as a protest and a political demonstration. I doubt whether that section was meant to cover that sort of action and it may be that in time it will be necessary to look at it with care and see to what extent it can usefully be reformed.
The real nub of the problem, as your Lordships know, lies in Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act, which deals with the unauthorised disclosure by a civil servant of any official information. It deals with those who receive it and those who subsequently transmit it. It makes them liable to heavy criminal penalties. There are two objections to that section. The first objection is that it is far too wide in its application. It has often been called a "catch-all" section. It applies in theory to every piece of official information, of however trivial a variety. It means, for example, that the Press are in peril of prosecution under that section if they choose to reveal the colour of the carpet in the Minister's office. It is an insult to those people in this country who are seeking to report freely the activities of Government that they should be liable even in theory to prosecutions under a section as wide as that.
There is of course a second problem about that section which is perhaps not so generally recognised, which is that, so far as those who subsequently transmit the information—not the original civil servants—are concerned, the construction of the section is in extreme doubt. Your Lordships will no doubt remember the case where the Sunday Telegraph were prosecuted some years ago over a report relating to Biafra. In the course of that case, Mr. Jeremy Hutchinson, as he then was—we shall have the pleasure of
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welcoming him into your Lordships' House next week—and I stood side by side and argued for some three days before the trial judge as to what precisely the construction of the section was. It so happened that all the defendants were acquitted. There was therefore no need for a ruling from the Court of Appeal or the Appellate Committee of your Lordships' House on the section.
However, in the result, the apparently wide ambit of the section, combined with real doubt as to its precise meaning, has led to Section 2 becoming almost entirely inoperative and almost entirely inoperable. For example, in the lifetime of the present Government, there has been only one prosecution brought under that section. There are, I know, three others pending at the moment, but they are cases where there are also charges under Section 1, the more serious section, and perhaps this consideration does not apply. The position, therefore, is that there is at the moment a section on the Statute Book which is totally ineffective.
The first matter that I desire to stress to your Lordships is that in calling for a reform of that section to make it more realistic and more effective, we must recognise that any reform, however liberally intended, is in practice going to be more restrictive and not less restrictive than the present position, because it will mean that there is an Act which can apply as against an Act which is inoperable. It is for that reason that, in calling for a reform of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act, we on these Benches regard it as absolutely essential that at the same time the whole question of the access by members of the public to official Government information should be dealt with either in the same Statute or in a complementary one.
Reforming Section 2 is in itself perhaps not now a particularly controversial matter. The aim must obviously be first that the law should henceforth be clear, which it is not; secondly, that the application of the criminal law in this field should be reduced to a sensible minimum. I believe that there is a wide measure of agreement now for the general proposition that was put forward by the committee presided over by my noble friend Lord Franks, which came to the conclusion, in a sentence, that the criminal law should

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only be invoked in certain limited circumstances where there was the wilful disclosure, or receipt, or transmission of correctly classified information in certain very limited spheres: defence and foreign policy is obviously one; law enforcement is obviously another.
Information which has been entrusted by individuals in confidence to the Government, or by companies in confidence to the Government, which is of a sensitive commercial nature is, I think, obviously a third category of such information. Certain classes of Cabinet documents require protection. This, I think, is not in dispute. The Franks Committee recommended further that certain sensitive information which if disclosed might affect the currency or the reserves ought similarly to be protected. I know that the Government have indicated that they do not agree with the Franks Committee on that last matter. There is perhaps scope for second thoughts so far as that is concerned, because it may be that there are few things that can cause more damage to this country these days than the unauthorised premature disclosure of classified information which might lead to a drain on our currency reserves.
Those are all matters which are broadly those which the Franks Committee recommended might usefully and properly be made the subject of a revised Section 2. Your Lordships will have noticed that I mentioned that of course a prosecution would only be brought, and the criminal law invoked, in those limited categories and where the disclosure was of correctly classified information. That raises at once a real difficulty, and one faces up to it as a real difficulty, as to who is to determine in the event of a prosecution whether the document has been correctly classified.
The Franks Committee suggested that it might be left to the Minister to do that by way of certificate. We on these Benches would not find that an acceptable solution, for the obvious reason that it would appear to be making the Minister, in a sense, the judge of his own cause. Other suggestions have been put forward. The Conservative Party in the other place, in a debate on this subject, suggested a Committee of the Privy Council. We suggest that, in order to ensure more democratic involvement
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in the process, it might be left to a Select Committee perhaps of Members of both Houses of Parliament who would be able to keep an eye on the legislation and determine whether classifications were being correctly made.
As an alternative it might be left to the courts to decide whether the document had been correctly classified. But I am bound to say I find that not easy to regard as a justiciable issue. I doubt whether it is one which the courts would welcome. It may be that it is desirable to find some method by which that process can be determined in a democratic way before the case goes to the courts on that issue; that is, to as whether or not the document was correctly classified.
I believe that those are now recognised broadly and generally as being the proper limits of the criminal law in this field. I think there would be no difficulty in presenting a revised, reformed Section 2 which would cover those limited categories in that way. But, as I indicated earlier, we would regard it as absolutely essential that, if that were to be done, there was at the same time to be considered the whole question of the right of the public of access to other public records, other Government information. As soon as one mentions that problem one realises that there is a genuine clash of interest, and I think it does no good to the discussion for either side to deride the other. There is a genuine desire among many people for many purposes to obtain access to public records and public information. There is, equally, a perfectly legitimate desire inside the Civil Service for a degree of confidentiality.
We all know that our Civil Service is a most remarkably confident, efficient and uncorrupt body. Its efficiency depends very largely on its ability to deal in complete frankness in its documents with those to whom the observations are being made; but it must follow that the degree of frankness is bound to be in inverse proportion to the degree of publicity and the extent of the circulation which the document will obtain. It must follow that, if unlimited access is given to every Government document of every kind, the result will be that either the documents will be tepid, lukewarm affairs of on value to anybody, or else the documents will not exist and everything will be done

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over a telephone, and there will be no record of what has transpired.
When I talk about the public interest, it is perhaps desirable to try to see just what is meant by the public interest in terms of official information. We in the Liberal Party would regard it in this way: we try to ensure that our democratic processes work efficiently; we try to ensure that ordinary people have the chance to participate, if they wish, in the processes of Government; we regard it as important that those who wish should be able to comment on policy decisions in the light of intelligent, well-informed discussion; and we believe it is equally important that they should he able to discuss policy matters before the policy is announced, because we all know of the grave difficulty that arises of attempting to change the Government's mind once a provisional view has been expressed.
We therefore believe that in order that our democratic process can function more efficiently, it is essential there should be a public right of access to a vast variety of information. Perhaps the simplest and most effective list of that sort of information was given in the appendix to the Outer Circle Policy Unit's document on the Official Information Act, which has been one of the more constructive contributions to this discussion.
They had in mind—and I support what they said—documents of this nature: reports of commissions of inquiries or committees, councils or other bodies established by the Government outside the ordinary departmental structure; reports by valuers; reports of specialist investigatory bodies within the departmental structure; environmental impact studies; statistical surveys; feasibility and technical studies; reports on product tests; studies, surveys reports and factual documents compiled by departmental officers; reports of courts and boards of inquiry, including the evidence that is given, except of course where that evidence was given in camera.
That is the kind of information we have in mind as being essential if people in this country who want to play a full part in participating in the processes of discussion are able to fulfil their role properly. I stress, and I want to make this perfectly clear, that I am not suggesting there should be access by the public
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to a vast mass of internal departmental or interdepartmental memoranda; I do not believe that would carry the matter any further. It is documents of the kind I have indicated to which it is important that there should be access.
The view which we on these Benches take has not entirely commended itself to some of the wilder extremists who have leaped on to this bandwagon. We have nothing in common with those whose patron saints are Messrs. Agee and Hosenball. We have nothing in common with those who, because there is a trial of three people pending, are able to determine without knowing evidence that they are clearly innocent and the prosecution is utterly outrageous; we have nothing in common with those who, in a fit of extreme childishness—and that may be a rather charitable word for it—thought it was clever to disclose the name of Colonel B; we have nothing in common with the Scientologists;, who are clearly out to grind their own axe in this particular matter; and we have nothing in common with that group of Socialist workers inside the National Union of Journalists who are anxious to get at every conceivable document, however confidential, simply for the purpose of stirring up trouble and, if possible, for the purpose of bringing Government grinding to a halt. The Liberal aim is to open up Government so that there can be assistance and free discussion in the formulaton of policy in the belief that that will make Government more accountable, more responsible and more efficient.
I dealt with the question of criminal sanctions in a very limited sphere. So far as the rest of the documents are concerned which can properly be kept confidential, we believe that can be left to the ordinary processes of Civil Service discipline. Therefore the only other question I want to raise with your Lordships this afternoon is this: how is access by the public to the type of document I have indicated, the official information which is of real help, to be achieved? There are ways by which this has been done abroad, but perhaps we should be a little careful before assuming too readily that what is done in quite different constitutional systems is applicable to this country.
There is the American system under which there is a vast, highly expensive

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procedure for cataloguing every conceivable document so that the public might look at the lists and decide what document to obtain. I doubt whether we could afford that in this country. There is the Swedish system, which I think we should much prefer, by which citizens are entitled to ask for any particular document they may wish and that must he disclosed unless it comes within certain statutory grounds of exemption which the Civil Service or the Minister may claim. That raises the practical difficulty as to how one asks for a document if one does not know it exists, bearing in mind the need for some form of cataloguing. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich could help as to the extent to which there is already in this country a catalogue or index of the principal types of documents I have indicated which might make the Swedish system adaptable and suitable for this country.
There is the proposal, just put forward by a distinguished committee of a distinguished body known as Justice, that there should be a code of practice which would enable this information to be made available to the public. Obviously that is worthy of consideration, but perhaps it smacks just a little of being a concession by the Civil Service to the right of people to know what is going on, and it may be that it would be better embodied in legislation.
There is, finally, the possibility that there might be a statute relating to official information which would set out the specific categories of information available—it could be added to as experience showed that it was being successful—and that would be, we should hope, policed by a Parliamentary Commissioner, either a new one or one of the existing ones if it were possible for him to take on that burden. That would be, we hope, under the general supervision of the Parliamentary Select Committee that I indicated previously.
Those are matters for consideration as to how this end is to be achieved. What is not a matter for consideration, in our view, is whether any longer there is a need to reform the Official Secrets Act and a need to provide information of this kind to members of the public. We regard this as a very high priority indeed
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if we are to seek to build up a really free society in this country. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.28 p.m.
Lord WINDLESHAM: My Lords, I approach the subject of today's debate with an open and, I confess, still somewhat undecided mind. I found the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, a thoughtful and informative introduction to this topical issue. The Official Secrets Act has been regarded for very many years as both a clumsy and inappropriate way of safeguarding official information. It originally went on the Statute Book 67 years ago against a background of espionage and extreme concern over national security. It passed through Parliament, as Lord Wigoder said, in a single day and with little debate in either House. It has remained ever since, reinforcing the tradition of secrecy and non-disclosure which has been a feature of the Whitehall scene throughout the period.
As the activities of Government have increased, the policies and decisions of Government have come to affect a wider and wider range of the affairs of its citizens; and it is worth noting that economic policies and decisions have become as important and sensitive today as were defence policies and considerations in the period when this Statute first became law before the First War.
At the same time a vast quantity of detailed information, much of it of a confidential nature about the conduct of private individuals, is accumulated by the State. Side by side with this process of development—and fortunately for the health of a democractic society—has been the emergence of a multiplicity of interest groups often trying to get at information which Government would prefer not to release, while the power of the Press has been considerably strengthened by the advent of television.
The objections to the Official Secrets Act are many, but I single out three. The first I shall refer to only shortly because the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, has already made the same point. It is this: the Official Secrets Act is far too wide in its application, in that it covers the unauthorised disclosure of any information which comes to a Crown servant in the course of his work, irrespective of its

21
confidentiality. The second objection is that it does not distinguish between those Crown servants, including Ministers, judges, senior civil servants who can themselves authorise disclosure, and hundreds of thousands of officials inside and outside the Civil Service who have either a strictly limited discretion or none at all. For example, in the recent debate on this matter in the House of Commons an instance was quoted of a young student working as a temporary gardener at Hampton Court. She was required to sign a form incorporating Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act and to do so, presumably, as a condition of employment. These forms, which have no legal force and never have had, have been the subject of much criticism, and it is disappointing to find they are still so widely and unnecessarily used.
The Act is also objectionable in that it applies criminal sanctions not only to the person who discloses the information but also to the person who receives it. The picture of a journalist in the dock has never accorded well with the idea of a free Press and this has been one of the most contentious aspects. Behind these three objections—and there are many others which no doubt we shall hear in the course of the debate—there is the fact that the Official Secrets Act encourages, and in a sense legitimises, a prevailing atmosphere of secrecy which is no longer in accord with the spirit of the times. It is thus hardly surprising that all of the three main political Parties, plus an official Departmental Committee under the chairmanship of Lord Franks which reported in 1972, and a host of special interest groups, including Justice, have urged reforms in this field.
Incidentally, reform would have come many years ago as the situation would have become untenable had the letter of the law been observed; but for one requirement—and I do not recall that this was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, when he dealt with the point in his speech. The consent of the Attorney-General is necessary before any prosecution is launched. Experience has shown that successive holders of this office—looking, as they must, to a public interest wider than that of the Government of which they are a member—have used this discretion sparingly, and they have been wise to do so. As a result,
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there have been few prosecutions under Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. The total between 1945 and 1971, for example, amounted to no more than 23 cases in all.
If, therefore, the case is male out, as I believe it is, for the repeal of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act, the question then arises of what should take its place. Some absolutists might reply, "Nothing". The necessary degree of secrecy for the defence of the realm is contained in Section 1, while the Civil Service and other public bodies have their own disciplinary procedures. Others see a continuing place for the application of the law in this field, including criminal sanctions, but only to protect what is of real importance. Some people lock to the model of the Freedom of Information legislation in the United States, which is relatively new legislation seeking to give effect to the right of the citizen to know what is being done in his name by the Administration and by other agencies of Government. There are differing views on the effectiveness of this legislation in the first few years in which it has been in operation.
Another approach is that contained in a report published last week by Justice which was summarised in an article in yesterday's Observer by its principal author, Mr. Anthony Lincoln. Here the proposal is for a non-statutory code of practice to be adopted throughout the public service, backed by the authority of Parliament, and with cases of dispute referred to the Ombudsman.
All of these are interesting proposals and each of them is worth debating. But, in the end, I am inclined to come down in favour of the approach Advocated in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Franks. This recommended rim legislative provisions to take the place of Section 2 which would be more limited in range and more certain in application. Only clearly defined categories of information would be protected and the mere receipt of information would no longer be an offence. The consent of the Attorney-General or, in certain instances, the Director of Public Prosecutions would still be required and the penalties were spelt out. One of the main objections that have been raised to this approach concerns the practical difficulties inherent in classification and where in controversial

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cases a particular set of circumstances might fall on one side of the line or the other. Partly for this reason some interests, including sections of the Press—although not Independent Television, which gave evidence to Franks in favour of a change—would prefer to see no change at all, on the grounds that it might make things even worse. Conservative arguments of this sort have been expressed also by Parliamentarians. For example, one distinguished former Minister gave evidence to Franks in December 1971 in these words which I quote from the Franks Committee Report, vol. IV, page 188:
"if I were asked to be a member of this Committee I would think a long time before I could draw up a schedule which would enable me to say, 'This falls on one side and this falls on the other side'. I think, therefore, if it is not improper for me to say this, unless you are capable of drawing up such a schedule and being pretty certain that it will work better than the existing Section 2 does, I would be inclined to leave it alone as it is, rely upon the prescience of all those concerned, the sense of responsibility of others, and the fact that the press watch the situation extremely closely. I have a feeling—but I will read what you conclude with very great interest—that in the end you may draw up a different distinction and a different line, but it will not be any better than the existing one, and I see no reason why one should just alter things for the sake of it".
The name of the witness was the right honourable James Callaghan, M.P. Perhaps we can see in this statement of opinion one of the reasons for the Government's hesitation and delay in bringing forward proposals in the form of a White Paper. Nevertheless, I believe that the debate in this House today will show, as did the recent debate in the House of Commons, a degree of unanimity in all parts of the House for some action to be taken. And let it he soon.

RHODESIA: MURDER OF BRITISH MISSIONARIES
3.41 p.m.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, with the permission of your Lordships, I will now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary. The Statement is as follows:
"I will, with permission, Mr. Speaker, make a statement about the appalling
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tragedy which took place at the Elim Pentecostal Church Mission near Umtali on Friday the 23rd June. I am sure that honourable Members will join me in expressing the deepest sympathy of this House for the families and friends of the 12 people so callously murdered and our admiration for the Christian spirit and courage with which the Church has responded in its decision to stay on in Rhodesia, working for conciliation and peace between all the people. We are in close touch with the Pentecostal Church Headquarters and are giving all possible assistance to its members and the families of the murdered missionaries to travel to Rhodesia for the funeral.
"The fact that those who have been murdered were solely concerned with working for peace and conciliation between the races is a horrific reminder of the dangers in Rhodesia today and of the escalating level of indicriminate violence which has been building up now for five years. The House will recall the incident at Gutu a month ago in which at least 50 Africans were killed. Also the killing of the two Salvation Army women. There have sadly been many other incidents involving both white and black Rhodesians.
"This latest tragedy confirms the urgent need to bring about by every available means round table talks to achieve a negotiated settlement which will bring an early end to the fighting. We have a joint Anglo/U.S. team at this moment in Salisbury and I believe that we are making some progress towards our objective of round-table talks. It is for the leaders of all the parties to respond now in a way that measures up to their overriding responsibility to bring about a non-racial, peaceful and independent Zimbabwe."
That concludes the Statement.
3.44 p.m.
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, the whole House will wish to be associated with the noble Lord and the Government in condemning this massacre and expressing our horror at what has happened. No civilised person, whether he be black or white, can condone such brutality, for any reason, political or otherwise. If I may say so, I am glad that the Foreign

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Secretary in this Statement has, to an extent, remedied what seemed, though perhaps unintentionally, a selective condemnation of terrorist murders.
This incident highlights the deteriorating situation in Rhodesia. I think that the time has now come when the Government must be seen to be taking some further initiative or action—or, at any rate, to be giving some indication of why they believe that they are making progress towards a further round of talks. All the information which we seem to have is that this is becoming more and more unlikely. I should have thought that the incident over the weekend made it that much more difficult to achieve those talks which the Government seek to arrange.
It appears that the Patriotic Front is not interested in a peaceful settlement, except, so to speak, a surrender on its terms. In the meantime, the internal settlement is, to say the least of it, faltering and is not carrying out those reforms which would make it abundantly plain that it was a new African Government committed to ending racial discrimination. The Government really must either succeed in the very near future in getting a conference going between the parties in accordance with the five principles, or support the internal settlement equally on the five principles. To continue on their present course will not only sabotage the internal agreement but substitute nothing in its place.
3.46 p.m.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, the whole House will deplore this horrifying and senseless massacre. Those of us who have seen dedicated missionaries such as these at work in Rhodesia and elesewhere, looking after the welfare of Africans and their families in the field, can only denounce in the strongest terms the utter waste and stupidity of such indiscriminate violence as this.
We extend our sincerest sympathy to the bereaved families and their friends. From these Benches we offer full support to Her Majesty's Government to do all they can to obtain an effective cease-fire for a period in which renewed efforts can be made to get all the parties round the same table to bring peace and security to this area. I should like to support what the noble Lord, Lord Carrington,
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said in his concluding phrases: we cannot go on like this; something must be done.
Lord GEORGE-BROWN: My Lords—
3.47 p.m.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, of course I am most willing to defer to my noble friend. Both he and I are used to the procedures on these occasions. He will, I am sure, allow me to make a brief reference in reply to what has been said by the two noble Lords who lead the Opposition.
We shall all be in full accord with the words of horror and sympathy which have been spoken by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, and the noble Lord, Lord Byers. I would say that my right honourable friend's condemnation of terrorism has never been selective. Repeatedly he has denounced it, from whatever quarter or for whatever alleged cause it has been exercised. As to progress, we all agree it is urgent that progress should be made for an all-in, comprehensive settlement on the basis of the five principles. This is what Ambassador Low and our own Mr. Graham are engaged in at the moment. As I have said, as I have repeated, and as my right honourable friend has just said from the other place, I believe that we are making some progress towards our objective of round-table talks, which indeed was the objective emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington—a round table conference based on the five principles—and which was endorsed by the noble Lord, Lord Byers.
3.48 p.m.
Lord GEORGE-BROWN: My Lords, I had no desire to get in the way of the normal procedures of this House. Sometimes it is difficult to forget the procedures down at the other end of the corridor. May I associate myself completely with the horror that we all feel about this particular incident. However, I am very glad too, as the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said, that in the Statement today, both in justice to himself and in recognition of what we all feel, the Foreign Secretary did include the blacks and others who have been treated in this way over a very long period. The fact that the present incident involves white missionaries may give us a peculiar shock but does

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not give any more distinctive, peculiar shock to those who are concerned with the black families, the black missionaries and the black social workers who have already been thus maltreated. I wholly endorse that recognition.
At the risk of being slightly out of tune with the mood, may I say to the Minister of State, with all compassion and sincerity, that the reiteration of the phrase "calls upon all parties to cease these horrible deeds" begins to have a horrible, sanctimonious and rather distressing sound about it. Let us be clear—he is clear, is he not?; I am sure that he is—that there are only two parties engaged in these murderous, mutilating attacks. They are the two external guerrilla armies led by Mr. Nkomo and Mr. Mugabe. Some of us had the distressing experience, in the past few months, of seeing Mr. Nkomo feted and cosseted here in London by all kinds of gatherings, and by Government Ministers. Is it not time that we made it clear that we are not putting Bishop Muzorewa, Reverend Sithole or Mr. Chirau in the same bay as the murderous leaders who are organising and condoning these kind of things, and even calling for them to take effect?
Finally, I want to put a point to the Minister of State. I know that he will not be able to agree with me, though I am not sure what his private views may be as compared with what he will be required to say here. Will he put it strongly to the Foreign Secretary that some of us believe that, in view of the circumstances, the time really has come to announce firmly that we will recognise as of now the internal settlement, the internal Government, with all its weaknesses; and that in order to give the non-murderous Rhodesian leaders a chance to succeed—as well as, incidentally, a chance of survival, because they, too, have been set up for assassination—we will start to organise the raising of sanctions so that they can receive the weapons and the supplies they need in order to give that internal settlement a chance in this horrid situation?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I much appreciate the tone and the content of what my right honourable and noble friend has said. I wish to take up from what he has said something that I should have said in response to what the
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noble Lord, Lord Byers, said. I wish to make special mention of the Christian courage of the missionaries in situations of this kind. I believe that this incident has shown once more the intrepidity and the self-sacrifice—up to the ultimate sacrifice—of people who venture out into these countries and conditions solely to serve their fellow men, of whatever colour or background.
My noble friend Lord George-Brown rather narrowed the issue by saying that only two parties were responsible for these incidents. I do not want to take issue with him at a time like this, but it is a fact that we could quote examples of fairly recent terrible happenings which affected, not white people in Rhodesia, but black people. There was the incident at Gutu in which 52 black Africans were killed; Bishop Muzorewa himself put the number at 105. However, I do not think that there is any advantage to be gained by exchanging examples of atrocities in this way. This is a situation which breeds atrocity, from whatever source it may come.
My noble friend's proposal that we should examine the possibility of a new departure is of course worth studying. I freely and willingly undertake to bring the words of the concluding part of his intervention to the notice of my right honourable friend; and, as my noble friend knows, my right honourable friend very carefully considers everything that he says in this House on foreign and Commonwealth affairs.
Lord HOME of the HIRSEL: My Lords, I, too, should like to associate myself with the expressions of sympathy extended to the victims of this terrible massacre, as well as pay tribute to the courage of the missionaries. This is not an isolated incident. The noble Lord, Lord Goronwy-Roberts, is obviously aware of this fact; he said so. The Statement also recognises this. The casualties in Rhodesia are, I think, running at about 150 Africans a week—20 a day. I should have thought that the whole House would agree that that kind of situation is not tolerable. Obviously the round table conference is the right answer, if that can be achieved. Nevertheless, it seems that in these circumstances patience can be carried too far, and can be carried to the point of overwhelming tragedy. Therefore, is it not necessary now to tell the leaders of the

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Patriotic Front that, unless they come to the negotiating table within a stated time—which should be days, or, at the most weeks—the British Government will have to give the fullest possible support to the Salisbury provisional Government? I see no alternative to that.
Indeed, I should go almost as far as the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown. I think that we should go to the United Nations very soon and say quite clearly, and above board, that the situation has arisen—and has been brought about by the Russians and by the Patriotic Front in alliance—in which Britain will have no other possible course but to lift sanctions and to give help to the provisional Government in Salisbury, unless they come to the conference within a given time and without arms. I believe that we should be quite above board and open, and go to the United Nations and say this very soon.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Home of the Hirsel, for putting us in perspective about these horrifying incidents. As he said, it is quite true that the situation affects black, as well as white, Africans; and proportionately, but not in terms of human tragedy, more so the black people of Rhodesia. I have figures here which I could give, hut I do not think that I need emphasise the point already made so well by the noble Lord, Lord Home. This is a situation of common tragedy for everybody in Rhodesia.
The noble Lord also spoke of the overwhelming tragedy which would overtake that country and its people unless certain policies were followed. I must say in all sincerity that the Government, having considered this very closely for a very long time, believe that the overwhelming tragedy—even the intensification of what is already appalling—might very well occur if we went ahead without the co-operation of the very substantial Rhodesian elements now outside the internal régime. It is a matter for very serious thought indeed as to whether we should take the steps suggested to us by the two noble Lords who have just spoken.
I have said that I shall certainly bring the words of my noble friend to the attention of my right honourable friend,
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and of course I shall, naturally, do the same regarding the words of the noble Lord, Lord Home. However, I ask the House to consider very carefully indeed what might happen in terms of intensified tragedy if, in a mood of desperate urgency, howsoever well motivated, we forged ahead, without the consent and cooperation of the very substantial elements who are right outside of, and resistant to, the internal regime.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, as the son and a grandson of Christian missionaries, I look upon this appalling incident with personal feeling. In addition to the horrible circumstances of the incident, we must surely remember that very many others—Africans, as well as whites—have died in this conflict. Surely our aim must be to bring the armed conflict to an end. I wish to ask the Minister to consider, while studying the proposals made by the Leader of the Opposition, whether recognition of an internal settlement would be likely only to intensify the conflict and the deaths which would follow. I also wish to ask him whether the proposal for an all-Party conference is now an increasingly practical suggestion. Has it not been reported that Mr. Ian Smith has declared in favour of entering such a conference if it is constructive; and has not a large majority of African members of the Legislature also declared in favour of this all-Party conference? If we are going to seek an end to these horrors in Rhodesia, would it not be for all of us to concentrate upon that hopeful proposal?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, it is of course a fact, as I said last week in this House, that the Patriotic Front are prepared to attend round-table talks. It is an encouraging fact that in the last few days Mr. Smith has indicated that on certain conditions he might now attend such talks. This is part of the meaning of the phrase that my right honourable friend used when he said that he believes there has been some progress towards such a round-table conference. On the second point made by my noble friend, it is of course true that there would be a clear danger of an intensification, even of this appalling situation, if we went ahead without something like the support, the near agreement, of the Patriotic Front and the Front Line

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Presidents, the rest of Africa; especially, I would suggest, when, in the last few days, the Organisation of African Unity, which contains some very good friends of ours, have gone on record as saying that they take the view of the Patriotic Front about the Rhodesian question. I suggest this calls for very serious consideration before we proceed on the line that the noble Lord, Lord Home of the Hirsel, suggested to us a few minutes ago.
Lord ALPORT: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether the Government recognise that a large proportion of the guerrillas are no longer under the political control of the leaders of the Patriotic Front? Do they recognise, at the same time, that the security forces in Rhodesia are no longer under the political control of the Executive Committee, and that a very large proportion of that country, particularly in the Tribal Trust areas, is not under the control of the security forces? Do they recognise that, before there can be any political solution or any purposeful round-table conference between the parties immediately concerned, it is going to be essential to restore law and order within Rhodesia and prevent the continuing militancy of the Patriotic Front forces in Zambia and in Mozambique; and that therefore a prior condition of any successful outcome from the present situation is the establishment in Rhodesia of an international force with, at the same time, the co-operation of the Front Line Presidents in order to bring the militant forces under control? Is it not most important, therefore, that the conference should not simply be a round-table conference with the Patriotic Front, Mr. Smith and the other internal leaders, but should be on an international basis under the United Nations?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, if I may say so without in any sense patronising him, the noble Lord, Lord Alport, has very considerable experience of Africa as a High Commissioner, and I think he has come very close to the nub of this international action. But I would ask the House to consider very carefully what reception the United Nations would give to a proposal for action of the kind we have heard urged this afternoon. It would hardly be interpreted as the kind
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of international action that the noble Lord has suggested. I think that what he has said has some chance of success. Indeed, there is general agreement that a United Nations force might be the crux of a transition period. The noble Lord's contribution will be very carefully studied. One sees the possibilities in what he has said. I am afraid I cannot, with all respect, see any possibilities in the alternative urged by my noble friend Lord George-Brown and the noble Lord, Lord Home.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, would the noble Lord bear in mind that, currently, 20 black and white people are being murdered in Rhodesia every single day, and that this position is getting worse, more serious and more bloody every single week? Could not the Government call on the live Front Line Presidents for a ceasefire even before we have the round-table conference? Could he not also set a target, as my noble friend Lord Home has said, of days or weeks—14 days, say, before there is to be a roundtable conference—seeking in the meantime to persuade the United Nations to bear some responsibility, so long as any such force could he put together quickly, but announcing at the same time that if this does not come about then we shall have no alternative but to lift sanctions so that simple self-defence arms can be imported to better defend the inhabitants of Rhodesia, black and white, from the terrible holocaust which is going to come upon them?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, has reminded us once more of the extent of the consequences of war-like action on both sides. I have figures here supplied from Rhodesia: that since 1972, when irregular activity of this sort at last started, seven years after the beginning of UDI, 530 members of the security forces have been killed and 4,555 guerrillas, as well as 1.899 civilians, of whom 158 were white civilians. Proportionately, far more black Rhodesians than white have been killed, but that does not reduce the human tragedy, especially for the people concerned and their families. The point I am making is that this is a human situation affecting all peoples in Rhodesia, and that we should try to solve it on the basis of securing that these appalling

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figures are not kept up in the next few months, as they have been in the last few months.
As to how to do it, there is clearly a difference of opinion as to how to go about this. There is the suggestion that we should issue a kind of ultimatum. Fourteen days—and then what? We take unilateral action? What would be the attitude of the world authority, of the UN, to such? These are questions to be asked and studied very carefully indeed. In the meantime, Ambassador Low and Mr. Graham are there. They have not returned because they are meeting with some success; and my right honourable friend has said in another place today that he believes that some progress has been made in the direction of a roundtable conference. If we can get that, if we can get the Patriotic Front and the OAU as well—some of us forget that the OAU is crucial to this; crucial to any action we might take unilaterally; certainly crucial to a settlement around a table—then we may engage in a concessional process which may be monitored in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Alport, has suggested; and it is in that direction that Her Majesty's Government are working.
Lord HOME of the HIRSEL: My Lords, would the noble Lord allow me one more word? I do not want there to be any misunderstanding. I would far prefer the noble Lord's solution and that of my noble friend Lord Alport, but the essence of this matter is speed, and neither of these solutions so far seem to me to be within sight.
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (Lord Peart): My Lords, I think noble Lords feel deeply about this, and we have had an important Question period. In view of what has been said, which my noble friend is prepared to convey to Ministers, I think we should proceed.

THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACTS
4.9 p.m.
Debate resumed.
Lord GOODMAN: My Lords, it is not altogether easy to return our concentration even to so important a domestic
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matter as the one we were discussing before this Statement was made; but we must do so, and we can perhaps reflect with some contentment that our most intractable problems compare very favourably with the appalling situations which prevail elsewhere. That may be quite a healthy mood in which to continue our discussions.
The two previous speakers, in this debate have, if I may venture to say so without being patronising (if I may borrow a word from the Minister of State), made a very distinguished contribution to it. It is an exceptionally difficult matter, and it is one worthy of the best attention we can give to it. It is not a matter of exceptional urgency because, so far as the principal absurdities of the law are concerned, they have been healthily counteracted by the common sense of juries. This is an important consideration. It is sometimes unwise to leave it to the common sense of juries to correct the state of law which is inherently unsatisfactory. The Sunday Telegraph case demonstrated, as did a number of the cases which occurred previously in the general area of censorship, that twelve men can rectify very adequately some of the prejudices and built-in notions of people much wiser and holding more eminent positions who have arrived at settled conclusions not in consonance or consistent with public opinion of the moment. But you cannot leave that too long. First, you do not know how long you can rely upon the common sense of a jury and also you do not know how long a Government that has been defeated in this way will continue to lick its wounds. After a time, confidence is restored and some further absurdities are perpetrated.
What I would say about the Official Secrets Act is this. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, that what we are concerned with is Section 2 and not Section 1 of the Act. Section 1 has obviously assumed much greater importance as Section 2 has advanced further into the area of the absurd and the ludicrous. Section 1 becomes more imporant because today we could be totally dependent for our survival on being able to control the desemination of security information and classified information. In the days when the design of the crossbow was not perhaps an appallingly secret matter—and for a

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long time we know that the more rudimentary long bow continued to prevail—it was not necessary to send to prison anyone who had travelled to France with an advance copy of the bow that we were going to use at Agincourt.
Section 1 was not then an especially important consideration; nor was it there, if I may venture to say so. But today, when we have atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs and when every kind of appalling device that mankind has thought out for his own destruction can come into existence by reason of treachery on the part of people, often well-intentioned people, as we know from some of the post-war cases, people moved by the highest motivation who fail to recognise that their principal obligation is to their own country—today, when these things can happen, Section 1 is of the greatest importance. I do not know whether it needs to be rectified or extended in any way; but I do not think that that is what we are discussing today.
Today we are discussing the absurd situation of Section 2 which, as has been said so rightly, is the section which allows a man to he prosecuted, at least theoretically, for divulging any information that has come his way in the course of his employment. That cannot be sensible; it cannot even be sane. As Lord Wigoder said, you can be prosecuted for divulging the colour of the carpet in your room or for making known something you heard on the telephone while someone was talking to his wife; you can be prosecuted for any triviality. It is the fact that the history of these prosecutions very often touches the ludicrous and the absurd. Some noble Lords may remember the Compton Mackenzie prosecution, and others the Sunday Telegraph case. I should declare an interest, an interest which shows me to be a person of singular altruism becasue I have occasionally earned an honest penny by being concerned with the defence in these cases. I had the privilege of retaining the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, in the Sunday Telegraph case. I was concerned in the Richard Grossman case, where my firm acted for the publisher. In so far as Section 2 gets abolished, this cannot be of any advantage to me; it cannot be of any advantage to honest lawyers; but I do not think, important as their interests are,
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that they are necessarily the supreme interest when the salus populi arises.
I venture to think that on this point I find myself in mild disagreement with Lord Wigoder. He said that there is no way of amending the Official Secrets Act without, in fact, making its bite more vigorous and more effective and making it a stronger instrument for censorship. But there is one way, of course: it is to abolish Section 2 entirely as far as it relates to criminal law. This is the major suggestion that I wish to make.
What is the vice of Section 2 at the moment? It is a very important social vice: that it interferes with important freedoms of expression. It inhibits the historian, it inhibits the newspaperman, it inhibits the journalist and the author. It leaves him in an appalling state of insecurity and uncertainty about what he can do. It has been rightly said that one of the most effective forms of censorship is uncertainty in the law. You could not have a better illustration of that than in relation to Section 2. What I want to suggest—and I do not put it forward as a positive solution that I have formed in my mind as necessarily right—is that in the current mood in the country, the general feeling that secrecy is something prevalent among Governments is a very unhealthy feeling. I do not believe it to be true; but a lot of young people believe it is true.
Undoubtedly there is an atmosphere in Government reminiscent of the mood of the man who in his house says, "Do not speak so loudly, the neighbours will hear!" This is the sort of psychological attitude that needs to be rectified. I do not think that you can start to amend this Act unless you decide what is going to be your philosophy; unless you decide what it is that you want to do. Many years ago, when I first became the Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, I suggested to a meeting that we should admit the Press to our discussions. I cannot tell you with what horror this proposal was received. It would be quite impossible to do it, I was told in the firmest terms by the officials and the other members of the Council: that no one would speak his mind. I think we have progressed some distance since then. People are not inhibited from speaking their minds from a fear that other people will know what is in their minds, if there

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is anything in them at all. I believe that the first approach to rectifying this situation is to ensure that we do not necessarily try to inhibit the spead of information in a belief that it will be injurious. Most of the information that people seek to protect can do no injury to anyone.
What we must remember, in amending this section, is that our purpose is not to protect individuals from awkward, inconvenient, embarrassing revelations about views that they have expressed. That is not what we are about to do; but genuinely to protect a public interest. Of course, it is embarrassing to be reminded of advice or of views which one gave at one time. No one who has practised as a lawyer can fail to know what an embarrassment it would be to be reminded of previous advice given. I have never heard of anyone protected from having advice that he had uttered to a client or patient published in public terms. I do not think that we should give consideration to this.
There is a very interesting passage in the judgment of the Lord Chief Justice in the Crossman case. The interesting part of that case was the fact that it demonstrated with great force the total futility of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. The defendants in that case—and there is no secret about it; it emerges in a book about the case—were all strongly advised that they had no defence under the Official Secrets Act and that if the Official Secrets Act had been pleaded in the action against them, there was no defence available. But the Act was not used. Unkind people may say it was because it was a Cabinet Minister involved. Kinder people may say it was because it was regarded as being inappropriate to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But, whatever the reason, why is there need to retain an Act of which we make no use of any kind when a serious issue arises? Judgment in that case demonstrated beyond peradventure that that Act is of no use in those circumstances. One cannot conceive of the Act being used against a Cabinet Minister or an important civil servant in circumstances where it was an innocent revelation, made with deliberation because it was thought that the public ought to know something.
What the case shows is the urgent necessity of revising the whole of the law
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on the censorship area; because the law is an appalling muddle and mess when you think of the area of possible censorship that arises in these matters. You have the Official Secrets Act, Section 2, which prohibits your saying anything about anything if you happen to have learned it from an official source; there is the law of copyright which prohibits the printing of a document unless you are certain that you enjoy the copyright to any substantial extent; and the rights of quotations are extremely limited; there is the law of confidentiality. I would invite even the noble and learned Lord who sits on the Woolsack to tell us what the law of confidentiality says at this moment or to what extent it can operate.
There was an interesting case recently which also indicated the social mood in which we are moving and which also indicated the necessity of bringing the law into line with it. This was the case, I think, a few weeks ago. You will find it in the 1971, 1 All England Reports, page 700-odd. It was a case where two "pop" singers sought to restrain their previous agent from selling articles about their activities. One pop singer's name was Jones and the other was Humperdinck. I do not think that he was the composer of the famous opera. Whoever he was, the fact remains that these two gentlemen had employed an agent to publicise their affairs. The agent was employed by them and he had signed a letter undertaking that he would not disclose any information about their affairs. Then he proceeded to write four articles, I believe for the Daily Mirror. After three had been published, the unfortunate principals awoke to the fact that what he was saying was not wholly complimentary. They sought to enjoin the fourth article from being published.
My Lords, you will be astonished to hear that in the present mood tilt!), failed. The Court of Appeal—Lord Denning's judgment—held that as the gentleman had been employed to publicise them, these people could not complain whatever the publicity he gave them—at least to the point of getting an injunction. So they totally failed to get an injunction, but they were left with a remedy in damages which, as any lawyer will know, is a very dubious remedy in such circumstances. That reflects the present social mood. I do not say that the judgment was right;

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I do not say that it was wrong. I say that it is a contemporary judgment indicating how people feel about things today. If we are going to introduce new laws, we ought to introduce them in key with how people think about things today.
In his judgment in the Crossman case, the Lord Chief Justice made some very pertinent observations. He made it clear, for instance, that under the existing law he would regard genuine Cabinet secrets that were still current as open to protection by the law of confidentiality. So it is not necessary to have an Official Secrets Act to use this. He also made it clear that civil servants were not entitled to the protection of that Act: that it was inappropriate to seek to protect civil servants on the basis that they had given advice that was now being brought to light.
May I say this: I have absolutely no animus against civil servants; I have a great many friends who are civil servants. I have worked with them in a great variety of areas but I cannot for the life of me see why it should be necessary to have a criminal Act to drag somebody into the dock at the Old Bailey because someone else divulges the advice that a civil servant has given. The remedy here is the same as in ordinary private life: when you select your employer, select wisely. When you select your employee, select wisely.
I have spent a lifetime dealing with people's secrets and divulging them to my own employees. I cannot think of a single instance where any has been disclosed, although some of my employees could have made very substantial sums of money by divulging information to improper sources. This is a question of how people behave. If you are unwise enough—if I may say so—to work for anyone as distinguished, amiable, nice and intelligent as Dick Crossman, you should take the precaution of saying nothing until you are out of the room. If you are unwise enough to employ a private secretary on some immensely confidential activity, make sure that he is a gentleman who will not divulge your secrets however much he may disapprove of what you are doing. These are the solutions in this matter. The solution is not to put people into the dock; but the solution is to consider how far this matter can be dealt with by the civil law.
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I believe that a change in the civil law is very necessary. The Law Commission, if they have not already done so—and they work so arduously and assiduously that no-one can say what they may or may not have done at any moment of time—should consider the whole question of the obligations of confidentiality in contractual employment. It is an extremely important question: how far may a bank manager divulge the balance in the bank; how far may a secretary divulge what you have said in a letter? It is not necessary to make use of the appallingly ferocious weapon of criminal prosecution in order to secure an adequacy of protection.
This is obviously a debate in which a number of people want to speak, a debate which we have had interrupted, inevitably, by the awful matters that were discussed previously. I would conclude by saying that I think we are dealing with a matter which is important to the whole tenor and tone of our community at this moment. There is a feeling afoot that governments seek to protect information for the sake of protecting it and for the sake of preventing the embarrassment of individuals rather than for sake of the public good. It will be a very important matter to allay that fear and disabuse people of that idea, and to produce an Act which is in key with our present thinking.
4.25 p.m.
Lord JACOBSON: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, for giving us the opportunity to hold this debate. I can assure him that his speech will be welcomed by all who hold the freedom of the Press and the importance of the free flow of information at heart, and particularly by journalists inside and outside the House. Here perhaps I may declare an interest: I was, until my retirement three years ago, a journalist, mainly with the Daily Mirror group. I receive a pension from them; I am a member of the NUJ; and I still occasionally write some articles.
The Motion calls for the replacement of the Official Secrets Act by a measure to put the burden on public authorities to justify withholding information. This seems to me to be like trying to bell the cat, and it is in line with an undertaking as the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, pointed out, in the Labour Party manifesto of

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October 1974 which has not yet been met. I believe the Motion to be worthy of your Lordships' support. I see it as a step in the right direction. But only as a step. It would do some good if it were to be followed by other steps; but not if it were to obscure the ultimate objective.
That objective, in my opinion, is to secure the freest possible flow of information through an Official Information Act or an Access to Information Act, on the lines of those in Sweden, other Scandinavian countries and the United States. The Swedish freedom of the Press Act goes far beyond anything contemplated by the Government or in the terms of this Motion. It does not, for example, simply limit criminal penalties to disclosures of certain kinds of information. The Swedish Act provides a right which is legally enforceable for anyone to see Government information unless it falls within specific limited categories. The Swedish and American Acts both provide that the decisions as to whether the information falls within the limited exemptions from disclosures have to be made by impartial arbitrators, such as the Swedish Ombudsman or the Supreme Administrative Court.
My Lords, I do not believe that official information is going to be made freely available to the Press and the public simply because it is no offence to release it or because public authorities have to justify withholding it. Established conventions and practices, civil service discipline and secrecy, the desire of governments and Government Departments to withhold politically sensitive information for Party advantages, all these are too deep rooted for that to come about without some more clear-cut and specific legislation. There will always remain in the official mind the temptation to withhold information and try to justify the decision later, or hope that the information will become too out-of-date to be significant, or that the problem will just quietly fade away and be forgotten.
May I give an example of what I mean. Your Lordships may have read or heard about a remarkable book by a former civil servant, Mr. Leslie Chapman, or your Lordships may have seen one of the television programmes based on this book. Mr. Chapman was head of the Southern Region of the Property Services Agency, formerly the Ministry of Works. In this
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job he succeeded in saving the taxpayer many millions of pounds in his region. But when he tried to get his methods adopted elsewhere in the agency, he ran up against a brick wall of indifference or downright hostility. Finally, he became fed up, resigned from the Civil Service and wrote this book.
His economies had come to the notice of the Public Accounts Committee and, in 1975, they called in Sir Robert Cox, the head of the Agency, and asked him why the economies made by Mr. Chapman had not been matched by other regions. Sir Robert's reply, to the effect that there were special factors in the Southern Region, was misleading and is now admitted to have been misleading. But although the Agency knew that they had misled the Public Accounts Committee by early 1977, the Committee were not told so until June 1978, a few days before the publication of Mr. Chapman's book and the subsequent disclosures in the television programmes.
If the question is now asked, "Why was Sir Robert's statement to the Public Accounts Committee incorrect?" it cannot be answered fully because the Official Secrets Act stands in the way. This particular cover-up was not totally successful because of the determination of one man, backed by some newspapers and broadcasters. But how many cover-ups have been successful? This we shall never know.
Before I retired, I was a newspaper executive for many years. I will not pretend that all newspaper editors spend their days in fear of the Official Secrets Act and spend sleepless nights because of the laws of defamation and contempt. But what worries me is that it is precisely those newspapers are that most concerned with thorough investigation, both national and provincial, and those broadcasters, too, who most consistently want to make a thorough job of investigation in the public interest, who encounter most obstruction from public authorities, from bureaucracy and the existing laws of defamation and contempt—particularly the law of contempt. One has only to remember the difficulties encountered by the Sunday Times in a long, brilliantly conducted and ultimately successful campaign on behalf of the thalidomide families to see what can occur in that field.

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We had a debate on 26th January this year on the report of the Royal Commission on the Press, and I should like to say I am delighted that the Chairman of that Commission, my noble friend Lord McGregor of Durris, is speaking later today. That debate was also initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder. Some of us then urged the Government to give further consideration to the question of a freedom of information Act and also to get on with the reform of the laws of contempt and defamation. We were fortified by the fact that the Royal Commission and the Government had pushed in similar directions.
I must confess, with regret, that on that occasion I found the reply from the Government Front Bench disappointing. No blame, of course, attaches to my noble friend Lord Oram, who replied for the Government: he was bound by a negative departmental brief. I am sure he has the freedom of the Press at heart as much as any of us, but he could give no undertakings. That was five months ago and it is now nearly a year since the final report of the Royal Commission was published. All we have had from the Government so far is a discussion paper on contempt. It is more than three years since the reports of the Committees on Contempt and Defamation were published. I hope that my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich will be able to assure us of some progress when he speaks today. He was a journalist before his elevation to ministerial status. I hope he will remain a Minister for a long, long time ahead—certainly after October—but perhaps there will come a day when he wishes to revert to the profession of journalism and he will have made things a little easier for himself by anything that he can tell us today.
These are complex matters; they are both fundamental and urgent. As the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, said, there is a great deal in the mood of the country at the moment, particularly on the part of young people, who have become very impatient about what they regard as the growing secrecy of our public life. These things bear on the very basis of the open society on which we pride ourselves so much. I must confess that I sometimes wonder whether this Government, or any Government in recent years, have really
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taken seriously the need to reduce excessive secrecy in our public, administrative and political life to which the Fulton Committee drew our attention 10 full years ago. Successive Prime Ministers have promised us more open Government. Mr. Heath did so; Sir Harold Wilson did so; and Mr. Callaghan has done so. But when we come to examine the record to date I fear that all we have to look at is a pretty blank sheet. It is therefore with no great optimism that I support the Motion moved by the noble Lord today, but I hope that I may be proved wrong.
4.34 p.m.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, I speak as a scientist rather than a lawyer and I am not going to discuss the legalities of this matter, which are rather outside my competence. However, I should like to tell your Lordships, with permission, how I managed to overcome the obstacles in the way of getting the history of the first computers in this country declassified. It is quite a story. A computer-like object was conceived by Charles Babbage, a Cambridge mathematician, about 150 years ago, but he was unable to reduce it to practice because he had no other means than cog wheels and cams. The bits and pieces of his computing engine can be seen in the Science Musuem at South Kensington. In the early part of the war, Professor Alan Turing, late of Manchester University, actually embodied the Babbage computer in hadware which he used for code-breaking at a secret establishment. Many other people were employed and the thing gradually got more and more electronic, and when the was was over they dispersed themselves and all started building computers.
The first public knowledge of these strange artefacts was in either autumn 1948 or spring 1949; and you award the palm to Cambridge or to Manchester according to whether you think that a tape input is an essential part of a computer, as opposed to manual input. Thereafter, everybody was building computers and I became very closely involved in them at that time. Ten years later there was a computer exhibition at Olympia, and a symposium on computers took place at the same time. I was asked to give an address on "Computing, the first Ten Years". As I was just, as

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I thought, passing out of the subject—this was my sort of apologia pro vita mea over the 10 years of transactions in which I had been involved—I repeated a story which had been told to me 10 years previously, that the most important event in computer history was the meeting of Turing and Von Neumann in America when they were both working on the atomic bomb project. The story was told to me by John Womersley, the director of mathematics at the National Physical Laboratory, and I quoted it in good faith.
Ten years after that, a computer historian at Newcastle University said that he had been studying my paper and could I establish the story of the meeting between Turing and Von Neumann, each of whom had sparked the other off by having half the story in his head. I just quoted John Womersley (who was dead) and said that the only other person who would know about it was Emeritus Professor Max Newman, late of Manchester University and now in retirement. I said: "You had better go and get the history out of him." He did try to do that, but Max Newman was as tight as a clam. He came under the Official Secrets Act and he had been specially warned that this was a very sensitive area so he would not say anything at all. He would not even admit that he had ever been in on the project, although everybody knew that he had been
At this point in time, it just so happened that I was on corresponding terms with the then Prime Minister, Mr. Heath. I told him the whole story and I said: "This is absolutely absurd. We are being done out of the credit of inventing the first computer in world history and Turing's object was a toy compared to anything we have got now and his methods of code breaking are now universally used. There is nothing here that is secret at all. The trouble is that the people who are refusing to declassify this do not know what it is they are refusing to declassify. The only person who knows the whole story from the beginning is Max Newman, in retirement."
I got a very nice letter back from Mr. Heath, saying that he was reluctant to overrule departmental advice but that he had asked that an official history of the matter should be written, to which Professor Newman could make his contribution. That was done, and it was then
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submitted to a proper adjudication. It was decided there was absolutely nothing in it that the world could not know, and the whole thing has been written up recently in some very interesting publications which I can commend to anybody who is interested in this subject. And there was the Official Secrets Act, and the vague, numinous threat it presents, obstructing the credit that ought to go to this country for inventing the first computer. I think that was a very great pity, because by this time everybody thinks that computers were invented in America, although they were not.
If I may, I should like to close on a very brief anecdotal point. I was once let into a secret. It was a very deep secret but I had to know it. It was that there was a body called the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, which was abbreviated to GCHQ. Under no circumstances must I ever refer to it except to other people who, like myself, were in the know. It was necessary for me to go and talk to them because I had to collaborate with them on the design of future computers which they thought they were going to need. I was told I could go by train and I was given a map of how to reach them. I showed it to the taxi driver and he said: "Oh, that's the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ". And I had been carrying that secret under my belt all that time. It is what is sometimes called, I think, a secret de Polichinelle: it is a secret that everbody knows and no one may talk about. My Lords, this has been a somewhat anecdotal contribution to the Motion of the noble Lord, which I support; but it has taken only five minutes and I hope that your Lordships have been interested.
4.40 p.m.
Lord RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I am sure that we are all in complete agreement on the necessity for doing something drastic about Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. Therefore, we are very grateful, once again, to the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, for raising this issue and enabling us who are involved—particularly the Press—to see our way through some of the absurdities and difficulties which have always confronted us. I have been involved in official secrets for quite a while. With colleagues, such as my noble friends Lord

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Leatherland and Lord Jacobson, I have probably been as agile as most people in getting around the D Notices covered by the Official Secrets Act and, as my noble friend Lord Jacobson said, it is not very difficult. We did not stay awake at night worrying about official secrets and how to get away with them. If you were astute I think that you could. What was much more important was that much of this restriction might be counter-productive, because if you found your way through a D Notice you obtained a great many leads into things that you were not supposed to know, or to talk about. Therefore, in many cases, such as scientific matters, from the fact that something was covered by a D Notice you discovered something that you ought to find out about.
During the war, I was an official secret, and for 30 years after the war I was still an official secret. It was a breach of the Official Secrets Act—and, indeed, some people were threatened—to disclose the fact that I was Director of Plans of the Political Warfare Executive. What was the significance of that? During the war, it might have been reasonably doubtful whether I should be known. But, apart from the fact that I might, in general association, be linked up with Dick Crossman and Hugh Gaitskell and a few other people who might have indicated the kind of operation we were on, there was not very much in the way of information to the enemy that could have been disclosed in my case. But that experience in a top secret department during the war gave me—and has left me, from the other side of the fence—an absolute obsession about official secrecy.
While it is true, as has been rightly pointed out, that in the military sphere—and probably as much now as during the war—the giving away of secret information which would involve the lives of millions of people is legitimate official secrecy, I found, as I think is borne out by some of the remarks made here, that, however much we may praise and commend the Secret Service, and say what a wonderful Secret Service we have, a good deal of official secrecy is merely an attempt to cover up, or prevent the proper ventilation of, a mistake by a Department. I mean that quite seriously, and one could document it in a very substantial way. The OSA, or Official Secrets Act, often
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stands for RIP. Blunders are buried, which is reprehensible enough in its intention, but worse still when those blunders can be repeated. This is a real situation. It is not merely the fact that politicians in sensitive areas of politics would gladly not have facts discussed when that would be embarrassing to them, because, at the same time, this official secrecy operates between Departments to the positive disadvantage not only of the public, but even of good and efficient government.
The most desperate 24 hours of my life were spent during the war, when a file marked "Most Secret"—that was before the Americans came in and imposed the term "Top Secret" on us—was lost. The whole of the Foreign Office security service went on red alert and everything was stirring, whirring and raging. It was recovered without harm, but the extraordinary thing about that official file was that it would not have given one piece of information, or even comfort, to the enemy. It was merely a collection of minutes dealing with our criticisms—and our proper criticisms—of a section of the War Office. It was merely something inter-departmental, and the lengths to which my own Department, the Foreign Office, was prepared to go to prevent it getting into the hands of the enemy, the War Office, were quite prodigious. This kind of thing is repeated in peacetime. As has been said, young people have a greater sense of the absurdity of this state of affairs than we, who grew up through a less uninhibited period.
I shall give your Lordships one more example since we are getting anecdotal, following my noble friend Lord Halsbury. During the war, we had a D Notice on the information contained in leaflets dropped on Germany. No one was allowed to print these. There was a D Notice prohibiting newspapers from printing what was contained in those leaflets and, in fact, it was a crime to be in possession of a leaflet or to disclose its contents. As your Lordships will understand, those leaflets were dropped by intrepid bombers which, on many occasions, ran into a solid wall of flak, so they turned back and, very properly, ditched their leaflets in the North Sea. They fell on trawlers or were picked up in trawls, and on one occasion were blown by the wind over Grimsby, but anyone

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in possession of a leaflet could have been tried under the Official Secrets Act. There we were, spending a fantastic amount of money, risking people's lives and risking bombers, trying to get that information through to the Germans, but people could be prosecuted for disclosing it. That is the kind of absurdity which still exists today.
What I am concerned about, since I still believe that journalists are agile enough on their feet to cope with much of what is now in Section 2, is that it is dishonest that we should be put in that position. I have some real misgivings about producing a new Section 2 which would strengthen or redefine the position, because, once again, after it was spelled out and hardened out, it would be another pretext for oppression, for suppression or, in our case, for evasion. I feel that that is not the proper way to approach the matter. We need something, and what we need in a very real way is a restoration of what used to be the ethic of my profession, which included confidentiality—and I am not invoking the act of confidentiality.
The fact is that today there has been a great corruption of human relationships. It is a moral question and not a legal one. How can people—person to person, or corporately—be frank with each other and discuss matters, when there is always the risk that something will appear in the gossip column or be used against you? This was illustrated in America, where they have a Freedom of Information Act, when Daniel Elsberg, on his own initiative, disclosed the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. The Pentagon Papers disclosed the whole verbatim account of a discussion, in the National Security Council of the United States, on the Vietnam war. This is a pretty grim document. I was asked on American television what I thought of it, and I said that I had no doubt about Daniel Elsberg's intentions and motives. He felt very strongly about the Vietnamese war and thought that this was something which ought to be revealed, to show just the kind of things which were going on.
However, as I said on that programme, I find myself in considerable difficulty. How does one conduct any kind of reasonable discussion if one does not have some kind of guarantee of a degree of confidentiality? During the war, people were,
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in many cases, inadequate. Fairly often during my involvement in political warfare I had to argue a proposition and be the devil's advocate as well, merely because other people were not able to deploy the argument. The facts had to be brought out and a dialogue had to be conducted. Again I said on this programme: what would happen in these circumstances if something which I totally deplored but which I was putting forward as the devil's advocate was quoted against me and I looked like an absolute bastard? What could I do about it? This is not fair. I believe that a great deal of this is now happening in public life, and it is a corruption of public life.
Confidentiality surely means that people ought to be on such terms with each other that they can trust each other, to the extent that they realise that they are thinking aloud, in honesty and security. Throughout my life the gossip columns have been chasing after this kind of keyhole or earhole gossip. It is getting worse.
I would ask—and I think my colleagues agree with me—that any consideration of the improvement of the Official Secrets Act, or the removal of Section 2, should include what was asked for by the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder. I now support him in asking for a real consideration of what we mean by these areas about which the public have the right to demand information and about which we have the right to know. I do not believe that we always have the right to know. In fact, in some cases it would be very bad for us if we knew. But there are other areas in which the Press should be free to navigate on the high seas of information. I agree with my noble friend Lord Jacobson that decent, investigative journalism—which is becoming very good in this country to the embarrassment of many people—ought to be encouraged by the availability of and accessibility to facts, but it should be accompanied by something which I want to see restored, at least in journalistic dealings; namely, confidentiality, which gives to people at least the confidence to speak to other people.
4.53 p.m.
Lord FOOT: My Lords, so much has already been said in this debate which impinges upon what I had thought of

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saying this afternoon to the House that I think it would be best if I abandoned my original plans and confined myself to one or two limited observations. The debate has already illustrated that there is a very large measure of agreement in this House and, indeed, among the public generally about the Official Secrets Act, and particularly about Section 2 of that Act. The problem of the dissemination of information in a free, democratic society is one of those problems—they are not infrequent in human affairs—where it is very easy to see what we should like to achieve in general terms, but when we try to work out how to do it we are faced with very considerable problems. I was glad that my noble friend Lord Wigoder began by saying that there could not be any very useful discussion of this matter unless we recognised that here is a very serious clash of interest. That was illustrated by what the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, said just now: that there are very difficult matters which have to be resolved.
If I may put the matter in a slightly different way, there are some problems where it is very easy to see what is wrong but where it is not at all easy very often to find a suitable remedy. In that regard, the problem that we are discussing today concerning the communication of official information bears a striking resemblance to the problem of the reform of this House.
I think everybody is agreed that when we were discussing the Bill for the reform of this House—nearly 10 years ago, I think—there was unanimity that the present constitution of the House will not do: that both its powers and its composition are an anachronism. However, as soon as we started to discuss what to do about it and what to put in its place, the unanimity very rapidly evaporated. Indeed, it led to ructions, particularly in the other place. In this particular case, nobody—and this is not at all surprising—has come forward to defend Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. I foresee that when the Minister of State gets up to reply to this debate he will not pin Section 2 to his helmet as the Oriflamme; he will not go to the barricades in defence of Section 2, whatever Mr. James Callaghan may have said
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when he gave evidence to the Franks Committee.
The second point which has been brought out very clearly is that the reason why the original error was made during the passage of Section 2, in all its comprehensiveness and width, the reason why that piece of legislation, which everybody agrees is ludicrous and absurd in its application, came about, was because the measure was not adequately and properly discussed at the time. I say this, bearing in mind that it must have been a Liberal Government which was responsible for the situation, but however that may be—
Lord BYERS: My Lords, the noble Lord's father was in it!
Lord FOOT: No, my Lords, that is a charge which I immediately refute. My family had nothing to do with it.
Lord WIGODER: My Lords, then it must have been the noble Lord's grandfather!
Lord FOOT: My Lords, according to the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder—and I have no doubt that he has got it right—the Bill passed through the House of Commons in a single afternoon. We do not learn much from experience, do we, because here we are today. It is a common complaint that we are asked to pass a great mass of legislation without any proper opportunity to consider it, in particular in the other place. Great chunks of legislation are forced down the Parliamentary throat, and today we are making the same kind of mistake that was made at the time of the passage of this Act.
The other startling contrast is that when we come to speak about remedying the mistake which was then made, immediately all Governments, of whatever colour and persuasion, are apparently seized by a kind of state of lethargy. What are the facts of this case? The facts of this case are that the Franks Committee was set up in April 1971. It performed its own task with considerable expedition, because it reported in August 1972. Since that time—a period of about six years—nothing whatever has happened except, as my noble friend has pointed out, that a

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promise to do something about it appeared in the Labour Party's Manifesto of October 1974. I am not sure whether that was the second edition of the promise and that it appeared originally in the February 1974 Manifesto.
Now that the new Manifesto is in print—if it is—I suppose that that promise will be repeated. But there is this startling contrast between the speed, the unseemly haste with which we pass bad legislation, and the reluctance and unwillingness of successive Governments to try to remedy what has gone wrong. After all, we have had this Section 2 on the Statute Book for nearly 70 years and during the whole of that period it has been the cause of infinite controversy, trouble and anxiety.
The last thing that I want to say to the House is this: I have been trying to foresee what the Minister will say when he replies and what explanation he will give for the fact that the Government have not been able to introduce the amending legislation which they had undertaken to do. I foresee that the Minister will say, quite rightly underlining what my noble friend said at the conclusion of his speech, that this is an extremely difficult matter; it is very difficult to strike a balance between the security of the State and the right of private individuals to have their privacy respected—which is one aspect of the matter—and on the other hand the right and freedom of a democratic people to have access to Government information.
I entirely agree that that is an extremely difficult matter and my fear is that we shall be told by the Minister that the difficulty of the problem and the fact that there are all the varying alternatives which are being canvassed are the reasons for the delay. My noble friend referred to all sorts of different ways in which one could deal with this problem and we shall be told that such are the difficulties of producing a satisfactory piece of legislation that the thing has had to be put off. If I may say so, that is exactly when the importance of the recent report of Justice called Freedom of Information, comes in.
I do not suppose that many of your Lordships will yet have had an opportunity of seeing anything more of this report than has appeared in the public Press, because it only came into publication last
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week. I should like briefly to tell the House what the substance of the report is, because in my submission it constitutes a way in which we could, tomorrow, make an important contribution to the solution of this difficult problem without the necessity for any legislation. Indeed, the first burden of this report is that we could perhaps go quite a long way towards dealing with the problem of the public being given proper access to official information by purely administrative measures which would not call for any legislation. That is the theme of the report and perhaps I may quote from paragraph 6. It says:
"For these reasons we have reached conclusions which can, we think, be put into effect without legislation. If their implementation proves to be a success, whatever Government is in power will be the more ready to extend t le ambit of their operation by detailed legislation, and it is our hope that there will eventually be such legislation. A small but immediate success, however undramatic, in facilitating access to official information, even on a modest scale, is much to be preferred to a prolonged and indefinite controversy over a statutory right on a larger scale, a controversy which may produce no practical results".
I shall first draw your Lordships' attention to that point because the theme is that perhaps by administrative measures we could make some progress. How will it be done? It is proposed that there should be drawn up a code of practice in the matter of the dissemination of official information. I shall not weary your Lordships with the details but perhaps I may read the first paragraph from the proposed code of practice, which sets out the purposes and the objects:
"It is essential to the effective working of a democratic society that the public should be adequately informed about the actions and decisions taken by the Government and other organs of public administration of the United Kingdom. The paramount criterion should be that the public may, by being adequately informed, have the opportunity of understanding and evaluating the nature of, and the reasons and grounds for, such actions and decisions. Accordingly, with certain necessary exceptions"—
and those exceptions are set out later on and they follow very largely the exceptions which are contained in the Franks Committee Report, dealing with matters of national security, defence, foreign affairs, crime enforcement and the rest—
"all documents containing information on such matters should, so far as is reasonable and practicable, be disclosed within a reasonable time to any person requesting their disclosure"

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Who is to decide what is reasonable and practicable? What can reasonably and practically be disclosed and what should not be disclosed? The proposal in this report is that the job of policing or monitoring the code of practice should be given to the Ombudsman. The way in which it would be given to him is that the code of practice would be laid down; if any individual felt aggrieved that he had been refused access to certain information, he could then make a complaint to the Parliamentary Commissioner according to the present procedure and then the Parliamentary Commissioner, who has a lot of experience of this sort of 'thing could make his judgment as to wher thethe refusal to give the information amounted to maladministration.
That is the substance of the proposal and perhaps I may quote one further passage to your Lordships. It sets out what I think would be the great advantages that this proposal might entail. It says:
"Successive Parliamentary Commissioners have already acquired considerable experience in investigating complaints, and the office is respected by Parliament and the Civil Service as well as by the public. We therefore lay upon the Commissioner the crucial function of determining whether in any given instance insufficient information has been disclosed".
This is the important part:
"A body of precedent will be developed. Guide-lines will emerge. In this way, instead of a rigid system seeking to provide an answer for a multiplicity of circumstances, we should have a flexible Code which leaves room for development by an independent figure in the light of experience".
I should like to conclude by saying that this report is not produced by a lot of fanciful people. It was produced by a number of distinguished legal practitioners and academics, including the former Ombudsman Sir Alan Marre, and it included two former Permanent Secretaries, one of whom was the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. So this was an eminently practical and pragmatic document and I suggest that it ought to receive the most serious consideration by the Government because if they were to adopt it, it would not require any legislation at all, except possibly the total repeal of Section 2, which could be done by a one-clause Bill. It could be introduced, as the Chairman of the Committee said in his article in the Observer yesterday,
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within a matter of weeks. If the Government chose to study this document and if they thought there was value in it, it would give them the opportunity of carrying out the commitment which they made in their last Manifesto, and carrying it out within the remaining period of the Government's life.
5.10 p.m.
Lord McGREGOR of DURRIS: My Lords, it might have been expected that the Royal Commission on the Press would have dealt in detail and at length with the subject matter of the Motion proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder. However, we could not do this because we were faced with four reports which covered ground which was central to our terms of reference. The Younger Committee and the Franks Committee on Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 had both reported in 1972; the Phillimore Committee on Contempt reported in 1974, and the Faulks Committee on Defamation in 1975. We could not sensibly have traversed the same ground as those expert Committees. We did not even have a response from Governments about the conclusions which those Committees had reached. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Jacobson reminded us earlier, the only formal response of Government to date to any of these inquiries has been a discussion paper on contempt, published a short while ago, three and a half years after the Committee reported.
This discussion document runs to some 21 pages, and concludes laconically with a hope on the part of the Government that, "all who feel they can contribute to the discussion of these matters will do so." The Royal Commission defined freedom of the Press as,
"That degree of freedom from restraint which is essential to enable proprietors, editors and journalists to advance the public interest by publishing the facts and opinions without which a democratic electorate cannot make responsible judgments".
In other words, we centred our definition upon the requirement that a free Press must have access to information.
I do not wish to add to the wise commentaries which have been made by earlier speakers. Indeed, I found myself in the unusual situation of having listened to seven speakers and agreed with every

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word they all said. I wish instead to extend the boundaries of our debate to include awareness of an international debate which I think is closely related to our own today; at least, I hope that your Lordships will not feel that this relationship is tenuous. It goes back some seven years to the growing awareness of developing countries that their radios, televisions and newspapers are filled with news which comes from the West, and their televisions with programmes which come largely from the United States. The feeling has grown, and it is very strong now, that efforts should be made to reduce the dependence of Third World countries on Western sources of news and entertainment.
Of course, such dependence is in part a legacy of colonial days. Telephone calls and telegrams have to go from those countries to the old Imperial capitals. You cannot telephone from Lusaka to Nairobi save via London. Satellites, I understand, are rapidly altering that. There is a shortage of trained personnel, whether to produce programmes, or as journalists, and in the particular case of journalists the Commonwealth Press Union is making valiant efforts to provide training facilities on the spot. These are genuine grievances and I do not wish to discuss whether we in the West should be blamed for this situation. I do not think we should. But these anxieties and irritations about the situation have swelled into a campaign which was described in a recent lecture by Doctor Richard Hoggart, who for five years was an Assistant Director General of UNESCO, in the following terms. I quote them because I think what is being said is of significant importance to us, and because an awareness of these attitudes is going to be a very necessary part of our outlook. Doctor Hoggart said:
"Both from politicians in power and from intellectuals not in power, the same cry goes up: this is neo-imperialist aggression; this is cultural imperialism. The West is still dominating and colonising us. They provide the machines; they provide the programmes to fill the machines; they shape our realities day by day.
The 1972 General Conference of UNESCO called on the major communicating countries to recognise their international responsibilities on the grounds that otherwise the mass media could become vehicles for 'the domination of world public opinion or a source of moral and cultural pollution'. It went on to argue that the one-way flow from only a few virtually
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monopolistic countries might seriously harm 'the cutural values of most of the remaining countries'."
Year after year after year at international gatherings that sort of resolution has been passed and that sort of attitude strengthened. Moreover, the Soviet Union has joined in the debate and taken advantage of the multiplicity of opportunities which it offers. Doctor Hoggart continued,
"The Soviet Union has put down resolutions at all the relevant UN Conferences about the dangers of 'uncontrolled' growth in mass media activity. The formulation is usually that, in view of the great power of these media, it is the duty of sovereign States to ensure that they are not used for 'corrupting' ends; and, in particular, that States should agree not to transmit 'undesirable material' across each other's frontiers".
There is a serious risk that developing countries and such organisations as UNESCO will embrace censorship, though it will be called "constructive reporting", and Government control over means of communication, and that will be described as "protection of national soveriegnty and cultural identity". In a move which may point in the direction of control over Press and broadcasting in large areas of the world, UNESCO last year set up a Commission under the chairmanship of Mr. Sean MacBride, the concern of which is to study:
"The totality of communication problems … globally".
It has 15 members, one of whom is Mr. Leonid Zamiatine, lately Director-General of TASS and now a senior ideologue in the Soviet Government. The Commission is to report next year.
Among journalists in this and other Western countries there is great concern about the outcome of this development, the background of which I have tried to sketch. The chairman of the Communications Advisory Committee of the United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO last week called a conference of journalists and others to assist them in the international presentation of British views on freedom of the Press and other means of communication. At that conference, very well-informed people expressed great anxieties.
To be effective in combating this further trend towards totalitarian control of news and opinions, we must be clear about the meaning of the principles which we maintain and about their application at

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home. We cannot preach the virtues of access to information abroad and deny it at home. It would greatly strengthen the hands of those who have to present the democratic case to such bodies if there could be at least a statement of Government response to the issues raised by the motion of the noble Lord, Lord Widoger. Of course, I am not expecting my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich to make such a response today, but a response is necessary because many people when faced with the case for democratic freedom in this area will respond by citing, among other things, the existence of our Official Secrets Act. So, in supporting the Motion, I wish to put the matter in a wider perspective than the particular details of a piece of our own legislation. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, will not feel that I have strayed too far from his Motion.
5.25 p.m.
Viscount COLVILLE of CULROSS: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, invited us all to be constructive and I think that no one for a moment would deny that the noble Lord, Lord McGregor of Durris, from what he has just said, has taken the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, very much at his word. Perhaps it is a feature of this debate that we have carried on from where the recent debate in another place finished, because everyone on all sides of the House has taken it for granted that Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act needs reform, and everyone except the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, at least implicitly seems to accept the broad Franks approach. Certainly the three main political Parties are already on record as doing so and certainly on this side I was very glad to hear my noble friend Lord Windlesham endorse the criticism and, I think, the solution.
The noble Lord, Lord Foot, reminded us that if one takes some of the arguments that have been voiced in the debate any distance at all there are substantial implications for privacy—not least via the computers mentioned by the noble and learned Earl, Lord Halsbury—in a large number of cases. However, although that is an important part of the argument, perhaps I might be forgiven if I stick to the main stream of what has been discussed this afternoon.
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As I thought about this matter, it seemed to me that there were two main problems confronting those who wished to make decisions. First, does one merely legislate so as to prohibit, on some sanction or another—whether it is criminal or civil—the disclosure of such necessarily secret or confidential information as one may choose to define? Or does one, in addition, and perhaps separately, go further and positively enact that there shall be a right of access by the public to certain documents or, indeed all documents, save those which are specifically exempted? Those are two separate issues which it seems to me do not necessarily have to be solved at the same time or in the same way. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Foot, has reminded us that Justice sees the second half of this as being able to be implemented in part by administrative means without legislation at all.
However, the other problem—and I should be grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, was able to say a word about this—lies in the difficulty that always arises over any individual document. If it is withheld or if someone seeks to obtain access to it and is refused, under either the replacement of the Official Secrets Act or under the more general freedom of information type of legislation, who decides whether it is within the class that is to be disclosed or is undisclosable, and in particular who decides—even if it used not to be able to be disclosed—whether that restriction is still valid?
I strongly suspect, in view of the statement made by the right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary on 22nd November 1976—where the ambit of the reform was clearly set out and the Government said what they thought—that it is the question of who is to deal with the problem of identification of what may be disclosed at a given moment that is causing difficulty. Certainly, different solutions have been put forward and, as has already been mentioned, my right honourable friend the Member for Wimbledon said what he thought my Party would do about this matter.
I should be very grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Harris, could say whether that is the sticking point and if so whether the Government have any further thoughts on it. However, I thought that, as we had delivered ourselves of our view upon

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that matter, I might, with advantage, look a little further at the Swedish and the other Scandinavian and American precedents for the second type of legislation—that is, the freedom of information type of approach which the noble Lord, Lord Jacobson, mentioned. As I have attempted to do so I have been particularly struck, as indeed was the Franks Committee, by the care that one must take before one can assume that any overseas arrangement or solution is readily transportable into the United Kingdom system of law and governmental procedure. It seems to me that it is at least as relevant to consider the attitudes of the courts and of the Civil Service—and perhaps, indeed, the size of the country because that has a bearing upon the amount of information that any system might throw up—as it is to consider the actual terms of the legislative solutions that other countries have adopted.
I would say in passing that the terms of the Manifesto, which forms the basis of the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, are not really very adventurous; because in the civil sphere of a replacement of the Official Secrets Act all one has to do is to adopt the Franks Committee recommendation. It is very plain that in the criminal sanction in paragraph 221a of the report the burden is, indeed, on the prosecution—as one would expect—to show that the information should not have been disclosed. In the civil field we already have a situation where the courts themselves, in considering claims of Crown privilege, have produced this very rule as well. In the case of Conway v. Rimmer this House laid down the rule that it was for the courts to consider whether the Crown was justified in seeking to withhold documents in a civil case. Certainly, when one is dealing with a claim of privilege for a class of documents, the courts have said that there is a very heavy burden on the Minister seeking to withhold which they will certainly seek to consider and where they are unlikely to be persuaded.
It is a little different when it is the contents of an individual document that are at stake. But in the Conway v. Rimmer case, which related to a police cadet and the records of his service in the police force, eventually the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, looked at the five documents concerned
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and pronounced himself of the view that there was no earthly reason why they should not be disclosed, and the case went on with them in public.
I do not think that it was that rather simplistic version of the debate that the Liberal Party and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Jacobson, wanted solely to discuss. I agree with both that a mere reform of the Official Secrets Act will not by any means necessarily of itself lead to any great change in the availability of documents for the public. After all, the terminology of Section 2 at the moment deals in terms of authority. If a document, or whatever it is, is authorised to be communicated, then no charge lies. What happens at the moment is that the Civil Service and Ministers authorise themselves to release whatever it is they think fit and refrain from authorising themselves where they do not. In practice, the choice of what to publish and what to withhold would be exactly the same under the formula adopted by the Franks Committee as it is now.
Therefore, the mere reform of that sort will not necessarily lead to any greater disclosure at all. Indeed, as one would expect, in paragraph 81 the Franks Committee points this out and reminds us that it is the differences in constitutional and governmental conventions, practices and arrangements across the different countries that were studied that are at least as important as legislation that has been passed in achieving the greater disclosure and freedom of information that has in some places been achieved. In the United States and in Scandinavia, particularly in Sweden, positive legislation has evolved which grants a right of access to the citizenry, although in both cases—and, indeed, elsewhere as well—I suspect that there are still many more restrictions than people have realised.
If we wanted to pass similar legislation in this country, I see no reason to suppose that we could not do so; but we could do so whether or not we had already put on the Statute Book a comparatively simple Act along the lines of Franks. Certainly to do that would not rule out a further step forward later on if that was what Parliament wished. In fact, all we have done, or would have done, in the Official Secrets Act repeal and reform would be

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to set out the list of exceptions from what may be disclosed, which are built into the Swedish code in the Secrecy Act, and in Section 552B of the United States Code of Law. Those are the restrictive parts of both those systems and we would similarly provide in English law for something that looks to me remarkably similar in the territory that it covers.
What we would not have done is to provide for the other positive rights of access. Here what seems to me to be of great significance is that this is a subject that has never been fully researched. The Franks Committee forswore the task expressly, and we can see the reasons on paragraph 85 of its report. I do not believe that the public has ever considered in full the implications of what is suggested. Let me give your Lordships one example. In Sweden I believe that there is a book in which any member of the public can look up and find out the exact income of any citizen of Sweden in the previous year, as disclosed to the income tax authorities. There are certain young ladies, or parents of young ladies, who, when marriage is contemplated, make good use of this. But it is a far cry, (is it not) from the Statutory Declaration of Secrecy by all Inland Revenue personnel and people associated with the tax world?—which has been imposed for a long time in this country and which is now found in Schedule 1 to the Taxes Management Act 1970. There would have to be a marked change in public attitudes before one went that far.
I suppose that to some extent the reason such a thing is tolerated—or even possibly enjoyed in Sweden—is because of the very long custom of openness of information in that country, which goes back about 225 years. Therefore, they have had time to get used to it. It would, indeed, be a novel suggestion to some of the members of the public here. The United States also gives us an example of something that we might need to bear in mind ourselves when working in this comparatively unexplored field. Even before the Freedom of Information Act was passed in America, in the course of deciding cases the judges had drawn up a list whereby they would permit the establishment, the agencies of Government, to withhold information relating to certain broad classes; it was very much the
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same as was finally incorporated in the exceptions to the Freedom of Information Act.
So there was a background against which the courts were prepared to provide for restrictive interpretations of what could be disclosed. Then the Freedom of Information Act itself was passed with the list of exceptions. It is interesting to note that a learned author, writing very soon after the Act came on to the Statute Book, said that the exception which related to the existence of statutes, which allowed the agencies to withhold information, in his view might prove the largest loophole in the whole scheme. He pointed out that, at that time, there were nearly 100 statutes treating disclosures in force at that time, and that while many of them were specific, other applied only through the discretion of the Government officials. So it turned out in practice.
First, the Government officials interpreted their discretion so that, on the whole, they refused to produce information that was sought and they used their statutory powers to do so; and, secondly, the courts—I think, at least, in part because of their history—tended to uphold this restrictive view. I found, for instance, that a file 23 years old which had at one time been said to have been top secret was simply ruled out by one of the courts on the basis of an affidavit by a Minister that it was still top secret. Equally, there were civil servants who were prepared to withhold files 20 years old relating to violations of Department of Labour Regulations, simply on the grounds that they were investigations into law and order. Those are the sort of things that happen.
So it was that certain amendments had to be made. First of all, the civil service in America had been extremely dilatory, and that was one of the methods whereby they managed to avoid producing the information that was sought. Secondly, they tended to interpret against the right to inspect any discretion that they had. I suppose the reason why the Act fell upon such barren ground was at least in part because of the constitutional arrangement in America whereby there is a specific separation of functions, so that when Congress passed the Act it did not need to have the support of the Executive, or indeed of the courts. It certainly did not have the support of the Executive in 1974

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because they passed one of the amendments in the teeth of the Presidential veto, which is a pretty severe thing to do.
This leads me to the suggestion that if one is liable to have, in a country which I should have supposed is as civilised in these respect as we are, as much obstruction as that, we ought to go carefully before we, in Parliament, simply decide that we should like to legislate. I suggest that before we go very far on the freedom of information road, we ought to take certain steps something like these: first of all, we ought to ask what is the total body of information publicly collected and publicly assembled which might be the subject of disclosure. I do not know whether anybody knows the answer to that, and there is certainly no record that I have been able to find listing such things for the public to consider. Then one would need to decide whether it was the sort of information that would be susceptible of being dealt with generically or only in terms of specific requests for a given document, and, if the latter, how would one catalogue it.
Then, perhaps having discovered what there is available, one ought to assess the impact of the suggestion of making it available upon the Civil Service itself and also upon the public. Here is the area where privacy comes in, because if personal records are to be made available to everybody else as well as to the person concerned, that person may very likely object. Perhaps just as importantly there should be public discussion of the whole idea. This, again, is something that has never taken place. Perhaps there should be issued a Green Paper with fairly specific proposals which people inside and outside Parliament could consider and talk about.
Unless we end up with a broad area of consent about what is to be disclosed and how the exercise is to be carried out, and who is to decide which documents may be seen and which may not, we shall run into difficulties of the same sort that seem to have beset America in the last ten years. That is why I should prefer to see something done now about the Official Secrets Act, Section 2. I should like to know why it is that we cannot have the promised reform and re-enactment in the shape suggested by Lord Franks. Why is it that this Government have had to
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wait such a long time without doing anything? But, that having been done, then I should be happy indeed to go further down the path along the field of information trail to see what would be acceptable. But we do not need to do that before we have the Franks reform.
5.45 p.m.
The MINISTER of STATE, HOME OFFICE (Lord Harris of Greenwich): My Lords, we are all indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, for having put this subject down for debate today. This has been a most valuable debate. Virtually all those who have spoken have done so with some degree of specialist knowledge, be it the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, or my noble friend Lord Ritchie-Calder, talking about their experiences in the war, and a number of others who have had a great deal of experience with the professions of journalism or the law.
There has been one common theme running through nearly all the speeches and it is one with which I would in no way dissent, and that is that there has been in this country an altogether unreasonable level and unnecessary degree of secrecy. It is necessary to do something about this. That is a general view on all sides of the House, and it is certainly not one with which I would be disposed to quarrel this evening. As the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, indicated, this is the second debate on this matter in the last eleven days, because eleven days ago there was a debate in another place on precisely the same subject. Whatever may have or indeed has been said about lack of debate on these particular issues in the past, that charge can hardly be made now, given that situation.
There have been two entirely different strands of thought in this debate. First, there has been the specific question of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911, and then there is the much wider question of "open government" touched on by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, in, if I may say so, a characteristically thoughtful speech, and by a number of my noble friends and noble Lords on other sides of the House.
It is of course Section 2 that we are talking about. I agreed with what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman,

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that it is a question of Section 2 and definitely not a question of Section 1. This country has secrets, and it is desirable to keep them. That being so, there can be no doubt that we require on the Statute Book official secrets legislation that is going to be effective. What we are talking about today is the much narrower question of Section 2, though undoubtedly, as has been made clear by virtually all who have spoken, it is an important matter. Certainly the whole question of Section 2 is a long-standing problem. Governments of all complexions have found its resolution particularly difficult. For the last ten years at least it has been a matter of debate. That being so, we are in no danger of repeating the mistakes made, as the noble Lord, Lord Foot, said, of undue haste in 1911. Whatever else may be said we can hardly have that charge made against us.
As the House will recall, the Fulton Report in 1968 proposed that:
"the Government should set up an inquiry to make recommendations for getting rid of unnecessary secrecy in this country. Clearly, the Official Secrets Act would need to be included in such a review".
That was the statement in the Fulton Report. In April 1971 the then Home Secretary, Mr. Maulding, set up the Franks Committee,
"to review the operation of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 and to make recommendations".
That Committee reported in August 1972.
There was hardly a Party element in anything that the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said, subject to one or two little asides in his peroration. I therefore feel it necessary, as I am sure he would agree it is desirable for me to do, to say that when the present Opposition left office in 1974, despite the fact that these recommendations had been made in August 1972, no proposals had seen the light of day, not was anything said on this particular subject in The Right Approach. Nevertheless, in the debate on 15th June we had an interesting speech by Sir Michael Havers, and certainly we shall take close account of what he has said in our own discussions of this matter.
No similar criticism could be made of the Liberal Party, who have devoted a great deal of time and attention to this matter in the recent past. The noble
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Lord, Lord Wigoder, raised the matter in the debate on the Address last November and indeed has initiated today's debate. If I may say with respect, the speech he made last November and the statement which was subsequently made by the Liberal Party illustrate some of the problems about changing Section 2.
Lord Wigoder will recall that in the debate last November he contemplated criminal sanctions being applied to the unauthorised disclosure of Budget information but not to law and order information; that, broadly speaking, was the thrust of his argument last November. But the Liberal Party, who came out with this very interesting statement of their position on this matter, said they wanted to see the protection of criminal sanctions for law and order information but not for budgetary information: exactly the other way round. This is not simply to make a debating point; it illustrates part of the problem which was referred to in the quotation given by the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, when he quoted some words of the present Prime Minister on this matter. It is one of great difficulty, if one is talking about invoking a criminal sanction, and it is well that we should recognise that.
I accept at once that the Government have been unable to make progress on this matter as fast as they would wish. That is undoubtedly true. Before going further, I will deal with a few slightly similar criticisms which were made by my noble friends Lord McGregor and Lord Jacobson when they referred to other reports on not unadjacent matters, but first let me say I recognise entirely the strength of Lord Jacobson's view that the Official Secrets Act does not normally worry editors. Though I did not have the good fortune to occupy as senior a position on a newspaper as my noble friend, it is undoubtedly the case that this is not the central issue so far as most editors are concerned in their day-to-day activities, and I very much agree with him.
With his substantial recent experience as chairman of the Royal Commission, Lord McGregor referred to a number of other reports—the Phillimore Committee on Contempt of Court, Faulks and Younger—and I will briefly say what the position is on each. So far as the Phillimore Report on Contempt of Court

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is concerned, as has been pointed out a Green Paper was published in March 1978 and we are now expecting reactions to it. However, the House can have it one way but noble Lords cannot possibly have it both. I think it was Lord Wigoder who said—if it was not Lord Wigoder I apologise, but I suspect he would not hesitate to adopt this argument, if I am misrepresenting him—that once a Government have a fixed position on a matter, it is extremely difficult to get them to change it. That essentially is the argument for publishing Green Papers; it is so that the public should be made aware of what the facts are, the general range of possibilities so far as the Government are concerned, and then the public are in a position to make comments before the Government have reached a settled conclusion. That is exactly what has happened so far as the Phillimore Committee on Contempt of Court is concerned.
I am well aware of this so far as the profession of journalism is concerned. Of course, a large number of journalists would like to have this matter cleared up as speedily as possible, but it seems to me that if the Government had come forward with clear-cut proposals, the other criticism would then have been made: "Why did you not set out the issues in Green Paper form rather than coming to us with a clearly defined position on this particular matter?" That illustrates one of the problems that arise in matters of this kind. The fact is that if you are going to consult people and give them the opportunity to put their case forward, undoubtedly this will be a factor which will delay ultimate decision on policy, and we must recognise that.
Lord WINDLESHAM: My Lords, would the noble Lord not accept that there is a distinction between circumstances, as has applied throughout this whole field; not just on official secrets, but also on the other reports to which he referred? A Departmental Committee has already been into the subject matter exhaustively, people have had an opportunity to give evidence; a report is then published, as the Franks Report was, and a public debate follows on that. So to that extent the public debate can take place on the basis of the report of the Departmental Committee rather than on the basis of a Green Paper.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I am not sure I would altogether agree with the noble Lord on that. After all, as I have indicated, we have had this particular matter before us for some considerable time—this question of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act—based, as it is, on the report of a very high level committee, and I can say that without fear of contradiction because my right honourable friend the Home Secretary was one of its members. Nevertheless, there is still a substantial area of disagreement, as had been made clear in this debate and in some of the comments which have been made in the last few weeks, so far as the Conservative Party and statements by the Liberal Party are concerned, and a number of people who have spoken outside the ranks of one of the established political Parties. That being so, it seems not unreasonable that in matters of this sort, notwithstanding the fact that there has been a committee of inquiry, the Government should state their position in the form of a Green Paper, making it clear that people have the opportunity to make their position known before the Government come to a settled conclusion on the matter. It seems to me not at all unreasonable to proceed in that way and, as I have indicated, that is what we have done so far as the Phillimore Committee is concerned.
As for Faulks, this matter is still under consideration by my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor. As for the Younger Report, the Lindop Committee, as I suspect Lord McGregor is aware, is at the moment considering the question of data protection which arose directly from the report of the Younger Committee, and the Law Commission is now considering the civil law on breach of confidence, which again is a matter of considerable importance, and I hope we shall have their conclusions before long.
I return to the narrower question of the Official Secrets Act, and I will give as briefly as possible a summary of the recent history and the present position. On 22nd November 1976 in a Statement to which the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, referred, the Home Secretary reported in another place on the conclusions which the Government had reached so far; it was, one might say, a sort of interim Green Paper put in the form of an oral statement. He was pressed,

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following his Statement, to produce a White Paper. In the gracious Speech on the opening of the present Session we said we would introduce legislative proposals for the reform of Section 2 and, as has been made clear many times, the Government have promised a White Paper in the present Session of Parliament, and we shall keep that promise. Lord Wigoder asked whether I could be more precise on the timing of that White Paper. It will be out before the Summer Recess.
So much for the background. I think it is fairly common ground that Section 2 is unsatisfactory because of what Franks, and indeed Lord Wigoder, called its "catch-all quality". As Franks said:
"The section makes no distinction of kind, no distinctions of degree. All information which a Crown servant learns in the course of his duty is 'official' for the purposes of Section 2, whatever its nature, whatever its importance, whatever its original source. A blanket is thrown over everything; nothing escapes".
That is indeed precisely the position. In practice, of course, things do not work quite like that, and Lord Wigoder emphasised that in his speech. A great deal of official information is revealed by the Government without contravening Section 2 in any way because its disclosure is authorised. Section 2 is concerned only with unauthorised disclosure. As Franks explained—
"Actual practice within the Government rests heavily on a doctrine of implied authorisation, flowing from the nature of each Crown Servant's job".
Of course, Government Ministers can sanction their own disclosure. Again, if I may quote—
"Ministers are, in effect, self-authorising. They decide for themselves what to reveal".
As has been made clear in a number of speeches, not least that of the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, prosecutions can only be brought by or with the consent of the Attorney General, or, in Scotland, the consent of the Lord Advocate. As Franks said, this particular sanction
"is saved from absurdity in operation only by the sparing exercise of the Attorney General's discretion to prosecute",
and, if I may deal with the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, no doubt to some extent is affected by jurists' previous decisions in indidual cases.
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The main conclusion reached by the Franks Committee was:
"that the present law is unsatisfactory, and that it should be changed so that criminal sanctions are retained only to protect what is of real importance".
The Committee's first major proposal for improving the law was:
"that Section 2 should be repealed and replaced by narrower and more specific provisons".
The Government accept that conclusion. The Government have also been devoting a great deal of thought to the central issue of which information needs the protection of the criminal law. The Franks Report sets out the Committee's recommendations on this question in some detail but I do not intend this afternoon to pursue any detailed analysis of what the Government have in mind. As I have indicated, the Government's views on this matter will be contained in a White Paper which will be out in the near future.
Briefly, then, Franks recommended that the criminal law should apply to the disclosure of information in a strictly limited number of categories. These, broadly speaking, were foreign affairs, defence and internal security, currency or the reserves, Cabinet documents, law and order (where the information concerned would facilitate crime) and confidences of the citizen. The Government have accepted the general scheme of these particular recommendations but, as my right honourable friend, the Home Secretary said in his Statement on 22nd November 1976, there are two areas in which the Government propose to curtail Franks' recommendations on matters to be protected by the sanction of the criminal law. My right honourable friend stated that the disclosure of information about currency and the reserves should not attract criminal sanctions. He also said that Cabinet documents should be protected by the criminal law only when, by their content and security classification they fall into one of the other categories so protected. The Government intend to stick to these conclusions.
Franks further recommended that, in some of the categories, disclosure of information should attract criminal sanctions only if it satisfied a test of damage to the national interest. The ways in which such tests might be incorporated into any new statutory provisions, and the method of proving in any

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proceedings that the disclosure in question had involved the specified degree of risk to the national interest, are certainly not simple to resolve. For obvious reasons, I do not propose to embark on discussion of this question today. There are equally technical questions relating to the types of defence that should be available to an accused depending on his status and in particular whether or not he is a Crown servant. The Government's conclusions on points such as these will be spelled out in detail in the White Paper and this will provide the basis for further debate on this matter.
I take another point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham: that is, that the point to which I think he referred as having been made in another place about rather surprising people being in some circumstances required to sign a form that the contents of the Official Secrets Act had been brought to their attention. I am well aware of this point. Only a relatively short time ago I learned that some members of Boards of Visitors at prisons had been required to sign forms of this sort, which seemed wholly unnecessary. This requirement has now been withdrawn. I take the general question and I shall gladly draw the matter to the attention of my right honourable friend who has day-to-day responsibility for the Civil Service Department.
May I now turn to the second element of this debate; that is, open government. The essential point here is that the reform of Section 2, can by its nature, deal only with the limited point of what disclosure of information should be prohibited on pain of criminal sanctions. Once we have got the criminal sanctions for unauthorised disclosure right, we can sensibly turn to consider this wider issue. Before reaching any conclusions on whether a comparable arrangement would be appropriate in this country, I think we should need to look carefully at the experience of other countries whose legislation places an obligation on Government agencies to disclose official information. The noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, and indeed the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, referred to the American experience of their Freedom of Information Act. I think the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, urged upon us some degree of caution in approaching this matter because we would
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not necessarily be considering an altogether comparable situation.
I can understand clearly those who favour a Freedom of Information Act. Certainly, in the light of some developments in the United States over the last 10 years or so, one can understand why there has been pressure in Congress to have legislation on these lines. I can understand the people saying, "Why do we not have something on these lines in this country"? We will obviously examine this question in the light of the general debate which will arise following the publication of the White Paper. I hope we will not always assume that other countries necessarily have the perfect answer to this question. My recent experience of visits to the United States, and talking there to representatives of the law enforcement agencies, would indicate that some of the law enforcement agencies undoubtedly have a special interest in defending this debate. One was fairly surprised—and I use rather moderate language—when one discovered what the resource implications were to the Freedom of Information Act legislation.
If I may say this, it is all very well to say, "Let us immediately do something precisely on the same lines as the Americans". But we have to recognise that there will be a public expenditure cost. Will we put this in front of housing expenditure, or education expenditure, or are we cheerfully going to agree to an overall increase in the level of public expenditure? We have to be very clear on this. There is no point in imagining that reforms of this character can be done without any Government expenditure. The expenditure can be quite considerable and we should have that in mind when we discuss this general range of issues.
As I have indicated, the reform of Section 2 is in no way holding up administrative action to make more information available. Indeed some action has already been taken. There has been a steadily increasing flow of consultative papers, including Green Papers. Let me give a few examples. We have had Green Papers on housing, on education in schools, and on British nationality law, a matter now of some considerable interest. That was the situation last year. This year—again to take one example—there has been a Green Paper on energy policy.

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As the noble Lord, Lord Wigoder, said, it was announced in July of last year that it would be the Government's policy in future to publish as much as possible of the factual and analytical material used as a background to major policy studies. The working assumption which is now to be used is that once Ministers have reached their conclusion on a particular major policy study, associated factual and analytical material will be published unless Ministers have good reason for deciding otherwise. That is the current situation. Obviously this was last July. The results of this initiative are naturally only beginning to be seen, but I could reaffirm that we are determined to see that the citizens in our democracy are kept better informed of the reasons behind Government proposals and decisions.
If I may conclude with these words, certainly, as part of our continuing examination of these issues, we shall take account of what has been said in this debate, Many of those who have spoken, as I indicated at the outset of my speech, did so on the basis of a wealth of personal experience in this area. Therefore, I think that this debate has been of great benefit not only to this House, and I hope to a wider public outside, but also to the Government themselves. However, as I indicated, the first and crucial point is to get right an amendment to Section 2 of the 1911 Act. As I have indicated, we shall be publishing our detailed proposals on this in the very near future.
6.12 p.m.
Lord WIGODER: My Lords, it would not be right for me to seek to prolong this debate. We on these Benches regard it as an urgent problem that there should be a statutory right of access to public information. Having listened with great care to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, I am left in some doubt as to whether it will be a Conservative Government or a Labour Government that will proceed the more slowly.
I must thank all of your Lordships who have taken part in, and indeed who have stayed to listen to, this debate. I hope and believe it has been a constructive contribution to a problem which I accept
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is not only important but difficult. I believe that I have the opportunity of moving for Papers, but I am told that they are all stamped "Top Secret", and that I should be committing a criminal offence if they came into my possession! In those circumstances, I beg to ask your Lordships' leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

EEC: MONETARY UNION
6.14 p.m.
The Earl of BESSBOROUGH The Earl of BESSBOROUGH rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will give their views on the need for monetary union within the European Community. The noble Earl said: My Lords, let me say at the outset that I am no economist. Some of what I have to say may perhaps be considered simplistic, although I have had some experience in a bank and have tried to master some of the intricacies of this question. Then, as a Member of the European Parliament Budgets Committee, I have also in recent years become accustomed to thinking in terms of units of account and baskets of currencies. However, after five and a half years in that Parliament I think I can say that some of us, who would like to see a greater convergence and integration of policies within the Community, have been much concerned that the people in each Member State should more readily be able to identify themselves with Europe and have more of a sense of belonging to it than they do at present. I feel, in particular, that many British electors do not yet feel that they are Europeans.
Of course, direct elections to the European Parliament will certainly make an important contribution to their sense of involvement as they will have elected specific Members to represent them. Then I think that the introduction of a common passport, on which I hope the Council of Ministers will soon come to agreement, will also help to make the increasing number of travellers conscious of the fact that they are citizens of Europe as well as of their own country, as indeed the present Members of the European Parliament are when showing their Community laisser-passers. A common currency, which I hope will ultimately be attainable, would I believe give an even greater sense of belonging.
It was, therefore, a great disappointment to some of us to learn that the target date for economic and monetary union—the target date of 1980, which was agreed at the 1972 Summit—was abandoned. However, the question was recently revived by Mr. Roy Jenkins, President of the European Commission, and indeed by Vice-President Ortoli, Commissioner responsible for economic affairs, who has spoken about it in somewhat different, perhaps, but none the less realistic terms. These two departures have been widely welcomed in European circles. I think that we should congratulate President Jenkins and Vice-President Ortoli on the work which they have done on this subject.
Mr. Jenkins' re-statement of the arguments is, in my view, largely cogent and convincing, as are the recently published proposals of the European League for Economic Co-operation for a parallel currency. But I feel at the outset that I should summarise some of Mr. Jenkins' arguments briefly, and also add some comments of my own, taking into account particularly the Commission's communication of November last year, on the prospect of economic and monetary union, which is I think beginning to be more widely accepted. I refer particularly to the Action Programme on Convergence, which, I would guess, was largely the work of M. Ortoli.
First, to summarise some of Mr. Jenkins' points, monetary union would favour a more efficient expansion of industry and commerce in Europe. As Mr. Jenkins said, there are few businessmen, whatever their doubts about the political will—and I think that the political will is beginning to develop and the need for this union is more widely recognised—who do not believe that the removal of exchange risks and inflation uncertainties between Member States would have a major confidence effect. For instance, trade can be fostered with greater confidence if British firms can make quotations for business in other Member States so that the currency risk is removed from any given transaction. At the moment firms normally tend to quote in a harder currency. I need hardly tell your Lordships that.
Monetary union would also bring all the advantages to Europe of a major international currency backed by sufficient
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economic diversity and strength to make it an asset and not a burden. The United States, with a weak balance of payments, derives advantages from that position. For the first time Europeans would be freed from excessive dependence upon the dollar, which is still the only effective international medium of exchange, although not an entirely satisfactory one. I know from personal discussions with certain members of OPEC that they might well welcome an alternative currency for quoting oil prices even if, as I am sure they would, they continued using the dollar as well. But I recognise that it may well be wise in the first instance to use the proposed unit of account only within the Community; that is between the European central banks and not, at the outset, outside as well. It is, of course, already being used in respect of the so-called Ortoli loans, and in that sense the Commission's November proposals are already being implemented to some extent.
Then, as Mr. Jenkins says, monetary union would help us in Europe to control inflation and provide us with the means to recover control over prices and demand, which most individual Governments have lost. Such a union could also give a major new stimulus for growth and employment. By lowering barriers and giving a greater sense of assurance and opportunity to our people, it could, in Mr. Jenkins' view and, if I may modestly say so, in mine, constitute the means for the unleashing of energies on a major scale. This is greatly needed today if we are to restore the employment levels and even the confident growth of the' sixties. I agree, too, that monetary union must be combined with moves to promote better regional distribution of work and wealth in Europe through measures to accelerate the flow of private, as well as public, finance. The poorer regions of the Community will need assurance that their economic difficulties will not be aggravated, and the richer regions would know that they would have more stable and secure markets.
Economic and monetary union would also be part of the process in which we seek to balance the need for decisions to be taken at a level higher than the national one, with those in favour of decentralisation. I agree that there is no contradiction here. From long experience of the European Commission I am quite

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certain that it would in this case propose to give the Community only those functions which can best be performed by it. In present circumstances we have to manage a floating rate system with one group of countries grouped around the currency that happens at present to be strongest in the Community. In my view there must now be a different approach.
Bretton Woods may have served well for a generation, but, as Mr. Jenkins said, in 1968 it cracked; in 1971 it broke. Since then there has been no real system. Here, as elsewhere, without a system—and sometimes with one, too—the power, as has been said, goes to the big battalions. But we also in Europe have the big battalions, and we must now organise them. Without such re-ordering of the European monetary system, Member States will continue to be subject to all the short-term hazards.
I have no time this evening to follow all Mr. Jenkins' thoughts, or even all those of M. Ortoli, but I am mainly in agreement with them, and I beieve that the two have now come very close together in what they are proposing to the Council. I hope that those of your Lordships who are interested have read what they have written in their own words, as well as the Commission's official communications.
However, there are one or two further points which I should like to mention, particularly the point that much of the additional expenditure incurred in the Community budget will be redistributed, and as a Member of the Parliament's Budget Committee I should like to stress this point. Indeed, the purpose of this expenditure would be to direct it into the poorer parts of the Community so as to ensure a reasonable share-out of the greatly increased wealth which monetary union should make available as a result of increased investment.
As to the kind of institutions required, there could be various alternatives, including something similar to a European reserve bank, responsible, as in the United States, perhaps to Parliament rather than to the Executive. I should be interested to hear what other speakers have to say on this point. I am very glad that my noble kinsman Lord Cromer is to speak, as well as the noble Lords,
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Lord George-Brown, Lord Roberthall (who is, I think, chairman of a working party on this subject) and Lord Banks; and of course my noble friend Lady Elles. I regret that the noble Lord, Lord Ardwick, is not here, for he is a rapporteur on this subject in the European Parliament. However, I have no doubt that there will be other occasions on which your Lordships will be able to hear him, too.
As I see it, the basic first step should be vastly to strengthen the European Monetary Co-operation Fund by increasing its resources. As has been suggested, Member States would deposit in the Fund a portion of their gold and/or foreign exchange reserves, and against that deposit receive an equivalent amount of units of account. I rather like that concept. This would thus constitute something similar to European special drawing rights. As your Lordships know, there are several different units of account at present used by Community institutions which might be considered in this connection.
I should be grateful for the Government's views, as well as those of other noble Lords, as to whether before or at the same time as increasing the European Monetary Corporation Fund's resources, we should re-enter a larger Snake, or boa, as it has been described, or a Snake within a Snake—a Snake with a kind of double skin. These are thoughts which are being considered at the moment. Personally, I consider that the two steps—increasing the resources of the Fund and the introduction of the new snake—could well be taken simultaneously. That is not only my own view, but also the view of those who can speak much more authoritatively than I on this subject.
The new Snake would, I hope, be followed eventually by fixed parities, and then by a Europa bank note, which in the first instance would give the national currency, as well as the European, on its face. Each country could have its own design of notes in the same way as Bank of England, Bank of Scotland and Bank of Ireland notes; and Belgian and Luxembourg notes differ in design, although their parities are fixed. Therefore in Britain we should continue to have a portrait of the Queen, with a designation of £1 sterling and, underneath, the Europa equivalent.
Travelling, as my friends and I do, almost every week to the Continent, I cannot tell your Lordships how much this would simplify our lives, as well as, much more importantly, the conduct of business generally within the Community. It would also simplify life for millons of our electorates, particularly British tourists who are, as I have said, continually increasing in numbers. One of my colleagues in another place asked me the other day whether I thought that this whole concept of a single currency was a vote-catcher. He rather thought that it was not. I replied that for those increasing numbers in this country who travel on the Continent it could certainly be an electoral winner—not that I should wish in any way to turn the question into a Party political issue.
I know that it took the United States of America a long time to achieve monetary union after the Declaration of Independence. I hope that it will take Western Europe less long, for I believe that Europe now needs it even more urgently than the United States did then. I sincerely hope that the Bremen Summit will take a decisive step towards the creation of a zone of monetary stability in Western Europe. I believe there is some hope that it may.
6.30 p.m.
Lord BANKS: My Lords, the House will be very grateful indeed to the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, for asking this important Question this evening; and he has chosen a very opportune moment to do so because, as he has himself told us, the whole question has been forced to the front of public attention recently by the speeches of Mr. Roy Jenkins. It was also the subject of Governmental discussion at the EEC Copenhagen summit in April, and aspects of the problem are bound to be discussed, as he has just said, at the Bremen meeting of the EEC Council. Then, ten days after that, there will be the further summit at Bonn of the seven leading industrial nations, when world currency problems are bound to be discussed and when the position of the dollar and the weakness of the dollar owing to the US deficit will undoubtedly be on the agenda.
The noble Earl has given us a clear summary of the views of Mr. Jenkins
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and the case for economic and monetary union as he has presented it—a case which he has presented under the seven heads which the noble Earl elaborated. The argument is that economic and monetary union would provide more efficient expansion of industry and commerce in Europe; bring the advantage to Europe of a major international currency with freedom from excessive dependence on the dollar; help in controlling inflation; provide a major new stimulus for growth and employment; lead to better distribution of wealth because of the shift of resources which would inevitably be a condition of economic and monetary union; allow a balance of decision-making at European national and regional levels; and provide the essential means of underpinning political union. I merely state the headings; the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, summarised the arguments, and Mr. Jenkins has set them forth in detail.
I can say for myself, for my noble friends on these Benches, for my right honourable and honourable friends in another place and for my Party outside Parliament that we wholeheartedly accept the case as summarised by the noble Earl today for economic and monetary union. In what I now want to say, however, I shall be speaking for only myself, and I do so with diffidence in view of the expert speakers who are to follow; but I should like to discuss for a moment or two what we do once we have accepted the case for economic and monetary union as it has been outlined to us tonight. How do we progress towards it?
Various solutions have been put forward. M. Tindemans, in his report on European Union published a year or two ago, said that the Community should maintain the Snake linking the currencies of some EEC countries; should gradually abolish the remaining obstacles to the free movement of capital between the countries in the Snake; should place obligations on these countries with regard to domestic economic policies; should discuss all decisions with the EEC countries outside the Snake; and, finally, should devise ways of enabling those outside to join, although this was not to be automatic and was to be dealt with case by case.
The House may remember that that gave rise to the objection that this two-tier

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system would mean first-class and second-class members of the Community. M. Tindemans replied very strongly that that was certainly not his intention, but that what he wanted to do was to see that all the nations in the EEC were involved in making the decisions even although not all were initially in the Snake. Nevertheless, I think the objections to the two-tier concept were substantial: that inevitably there would be some feeling of first-class and second-class nations, and that politically, whatever the economic arguments might be, that particular solution was not "on". In the main, what we should have been doing if, in Europe, we had implemented that solution on its own, would simply be, so far as I can see, to institutionalise what already existed, and it would not have provided anything new to solve the problem of how we advance from the present situation to greater integration.
Following the Copenhagen summit of the EEC in April, three schemes appear to have been discussed which were summarised by Melvyn Westlake in The Times on 19th June. One, called the "boa", to which the noble Earl referred, would effectively build on the present snake arrangements but allow some currencies to move within a wider band of fluctuation than others. A second, less rigorous, scheme envisages target zones within which currencies would normally be held. The margin of fluctuation, however, would be quite wide. A third scheme would keep exchange rates within certain margins of the weighted average of all the other currencies in the operation. It seems to me that all these schemes are open to the objection that it is unlikey that the transfer of resources which is necessary to sustain them would be achieved so long as they are purely experimental with an escape route out which can be taken at any time. I should have thought that monetary union must be fixed and permanent. Surely, monetary union has to be entered as we entered the EEC itself—without thought of withdrawal. Otherwise, will not the pressures be too great, so that it will fall apart again, as it has in the past?
Then there are the ideas which might be summed up in the word "convergence". The Commission's report, to which the noble Earl has referred, dated 17th
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November 1977, contains many useful proposals for a five-year plan preparing the way for economic and monetary union. It has proposals with regard to the transfer of resources; proposals with regard to improving the single market; proposals for improving the Customs arrangements; proposals allowing for free movement of capital; proposals for abolishing monetary compensatory amounts and proposals for establishing an energy policy. Also, it proposes a parallel currency for Europe, and we know that recently, as the noble Earl said, the European League for Economic Co-operation have published a most interesting paper on this subject suggesting the creation of such a currency, to be called "Europa". The Federation of Liberal and Democratic Parties of the European Communities, with which we on these Benches are associated, in a recent declaration put forward a similar list of proposals: a pooling of currencies; a parallel currency (although they want to call it a florin); limits on exchange rate variations; a co-ordination of budgets and economic policies, and the hope that the Community would speak with one voice to the rest of the world on monetary matters.
I agree with these proposals in general, put forward by the Commission and by others. I am sure that the Community should attempt to do these things, whether or not we have monetary union. Nevertheless, they are all associated in the way in which they are put forward with the idea of convergence: with the idea of a planned programme leading up to economic and monetary union. It is rather like attempting to transfer men at sea from one warship to another by overhead cable: you have to wait until the ships are moving at the same speed and in the same direction. But I doubt whether the achievement of convergence should be made the condition for monetary union. I doubt whether it should be made the condition: I am not saying it should not be attempted.
Your Lordships may remember that there is a scene in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Pirates of Penzance, where the policemen are being inspected by the major-general before they go off to deal with the pirates. "We go, we go", they sing as they march round the stage, postponing the dreaded encounter. "Yes,

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but you don't go" complains the major-general in exasperation. "We converge, we converge", sing the nations of the EEC as they march round the European stage, to which one is entitled to reply, "Yes, but you don't converge". I wonder whether the economies ever will converge so long as there are variable exchange rates, so long as there are loopholes or so long as there is an escape route out of monetary unity. After all, if we could converge at will, there would surely be no need for economic and monetary union. "Ah, but", it would be said, "we can manage to converge for a very short period of time". Rather like lining up horses at the start of a race. At the crucial psychological moment, we will transfix everybody in a locked embrace—if I may be permitted to choose a metaphor which does not mix very well with my simile.
That argument seems rather fanciful to me. Is it, perhaps, true to say that what is important is what happens after economic and monetary union rather than before? What happens after would certainly have to be very carefully planned: the institutions set up, the method of control clearly determined, the immediate policies prepared, contingencies prepared for, long-term policies developed and the transfer of resources provided for. It would all need very careful planning. It would be a complex and highly sophisticated D-Day operation. I am inclined to think that once that is thoroughly worked out and prepared the Governments of the Nine—if it is nine at that time—must take an unannounced and, in relation to the progress achieved towards convergence, purely arbitrary decision to link. It must be well understood in advance that that is the agreed aim.
It would be a great economic and monetary leap; it would be a great institutional leap; but, above all, it would be a great political leap for it would provide the cement for political union, not merely making it possible but making it essential. The political will would have to be there on the part of both Governments and people. I shall listen with interest to the noble and learned Lord, Lord McCluskey, to assess how much, if any, of that political will the Government have at this moment.
6.43 p.m.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Bessborough could not have introduced into your Lordships' House a subject of discussion more timely, more appropriate or, indeed, more relevant to our economy as a whole than the question of economic and monetary union within the EEC. I know that noble Lords on these Benches, at any rate, will wish to express their gratitude to him for his most clear exposition of the problems which are involved with this question. We have had over the years a succession of reports, studies and committees which have concentrated on the matter beginning with the Weiner Report in 1971, reviewed by M. Tindemans and his Report, then the All Saints' Manifesto, published, naturally and appropriately, on 1st November 1975 in The Economist, and other committees including, I understand, one recently chaired by my noble friend Lord Cromer from whose experience and opinions we shall be able to benefit this evening. I look forward to hearing him later in the debate.
All these reports have set out considerations involving very many alternative approaches. Perhaps one of the most interesting reports recently has been the up-to-date review which M. Pierre Weiner himself published at the end of 1977 on how he considers the situation on EMU to be to date. I think it makes rewarding reading. But the revival of the subject in the political sphere by Mr. Jenkins recently, and his views which have been ably explained and put forward to your Lordships by my noble friend Lord Bessborough and touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Banks, ate elements for debate this evening.
The Government have had the benefit of the recent discussions in both Copenhagen and Hamburg, and now, within a few days, there will be discussions both in Bremen and, later, in Bonn. So EMU has become a subject of major political debate at supra-national level. It is therefore right that a subject of such major importance, which could well have considerable effect on the economy, on the financial measures to be taken by the Government and on our political co-operation within the European Community as a whole, should be debated. I think that it is perhaps, in hindsight, a pity that

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this debate has taken the form of an Unstarred Question and has come at the end of the day. It could have been a subject of major debate in this House. Even so, I am grateful to my noble friend for having initiated even an Unstarred Question which he has put to the Government this evening.
It is true that perhaps we should not have had many partakers even in a major debate because of the complexity, the technical aspects; and the fear of having to take any step forward in any political co-operation outside the boundaries of the United Kingdom and of losing some national control over decisions of national interest, has mitigated against any kind of discussion or debate either in Parliament or outside it. EMU remains one of those subjects which you do not talk about too much, and nobody quite knows the answer to it. It is a very complex subject with endless ramifications. We have already had two speeches which have covered different aspects, and undoubtedly we shall be hearing more speeches this evening looking at the problems of EMU from expert viewpoints possibly even unrelated to each other. The one thing that one learns about economists and experts in economics is that the only single factor which unites them is that they always disagree and that probably their forecasts are nearly always wrong. That is probably the one common factor between the economic experts and their forecasts; so that when we discuss a subject like EMU it is largely theoretical and I suppose that anybody's guess is as good as anybody else's.
I think, however, that there are certain facts we can go on. The first is that we have to accept that in the period since the war there has been a radical change both in our own international economic relations and among international economic relations as a whole. That is the first fact that everybody could accept. The bulk of our trade was with the Commonwealth countries, and despite wide geographical disparities, it was conducted in the same currency; that is, the pound sterling. One has only to think of our trade with South Africa, Canada and Australia, and the stability of the currency at the time and the identical unit as a measure of trade were undoubtedly a potent contribution to the
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reliability and trust on which long-term commercial relationships must be based to be successful.
For the United Kingdom, the European Community has become the group of countries with whom we have our largest trading activities. The Community itself as a whole is the world's largest trading bloc and the second strongest economy in the world taken as a whole. There has been another change in international commercial and financial relations to which my noble friend has already referred. That is, that following the collapse of Bretton Woods, we have noticed a steady decline of the rôle of the dollar as a reserve currency for the rest of the world, so that we are now faced with looking for some form of order and regulation which gradually could be recognised as being beneficial to international commercial relations. It is only necessary to think of the devastating effects of wide disparities in the exchange rates of currencies and their fluctuations over short periods and of the effect that they have on the economies of the less developed countries—countries, incidentally, to whose improved economies we are morally committed to contribute. The increasing trade between the European Community and third countries demands some stability for our currency for the benefit of both the European Community and others.
I should like to say a word on the currency in relation to monetary union. It is true European Community trade and finance are dependent on payments in national currencies. They are also subject to disruption by financial difficulties of individual currencies. It is not evident, however, that the adoption of a single currency would necessarily resolve these financial and economic difficulties. I think that this must be said. There may be some obvious benefits from the adoption of a currency such as is proposed possibly to be called a Europa. It must also be said that national economic improvement must depend on economic and fiscal policies which are pursued by a or any national government. The adoption of a single currency across Europe will not resolve even our own economic difficulties or the economic difficulties of any other individual nation, and it must be remembered that international co-operation, however close and

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integrated, is no panacea for bad national government.
The adoption of a single currency has been recommended. But it must also be faced that it would raise concomitant difficulties of a political nature: the establishing, for instance, of a European central bank; the question of the control of the money supply. These are all obvious matters for doubt and discussion and it would need, as the noble Lord, Lord Banks, said, political will of a high order to accept changes in our national financial institutions. Where I believe we are in agreement is on the need for a stabilisation programme, an exchange rate contained within some kind of limits, not necessarily confined, but nevertheless some kind of contained limit and, at the same time, allowing sufficient flexibility for national governments to respond to market forces.
I should be grateful if the noble and learned Lord, when he is replying, will set out the options for the Government before the discussions in Bremen, and what kind of results he is expecting from the summit meeting later on in July. The noble Lord, Lord Banks, has set out the three alternatives which were published in various newspapers, both daily and weekly. I shall therefore not take up the time of your Lordships in repeating those. Nevertheless, these three options are obviously ones for discussion and it would be helpful to the House if we might have some indication of the thinking of the Government on this particular aspect of monetary union. I should like to ask the noble and learned Lord whether he considers that the creation of a monetary zone on the basis of one of the three options would be a contribution to monetary stability and consequently of great benefit to the commercial relations of the United Kingdom and therefore of course to our economy as a whole.
It must surely be clear, however, that no monetary zone will solve our own problems in this country, as I have already indicated earlier, unless we in this country are willing to take the measures necessary to put our own house in order: cuts in public expenditure; reduction of the PSBR; tighter control of the money supply; cuts in taxation. All these are measures which would not only be of benefit to our own economy, but would
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draw our economic policies closer to those being followed by our major partners in the European community.
For myself—speaking purely personally and not on behalf of my Party, though I believe that it is an opinion which is shared by my Party—I do not believe convergence ipso facto to be a cure for our economy. Co-operation in economic affairs with our partners, yes; but convergence at this stage of the game is too early. While not necessarily advocating any form of monetary union, we have to ask, not to propose, that it should not be forgotten that contributions to decision making in co-operation among fellow Member States sharing the same overall objectives implies considerably less interference in our internal affairs than control by the IMF in exchange for massive loans to prop up a declining economy. It has often been said that EMU will lake away sovereignty in our economic affairs, but one must really ask how much sovereignty we have at the moment.
Certain actions have of course already been undertaken to ensure some small measure of unity in the financial and fiscal fields. We only have to think of the changes and modifications in relation to VAT on a Community basis: the formation of the Customs union itself is already a major contribution towards an eventual economic and monetary union, if that is indeed the objective of the Community.
The Commission's document which sets out an action programme contains a whole series of proposals. I do not think that anybody will say that these must be rigidly followed in the time-scale laid down in that programme. This would be unreasonable and nobody would expect that to be accepted by any national government. But I believe that there are some aspects of it which would be welcomed by sectors of our society in the United Kingdom. Traders would welcome increased freedom of movement of goods and services. Farmers would most certainly not object to the disappearance of monetary compensation amounts. Certainly, if a single currency—even for limited use—were to be introduced, it would be of benefit to those carrying on commercial contracts within the European Community and of course, as my noble friend has mentioned, to the many millions

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of tourists both from Britain and from other members of the European Community.
I do not think that this is the time to embark on a major discussion of the benefits or failures of EMU; but I believe that a full debate on this subject would be very welcome, perhaps after the noble and learned Lord has told us what are the views of the Government, and after some considerations have been taken in Bremen and Bonn which, as I have said, will undoubtedly affect the economic and financial policies of this country.
Our own approach to this question—which is a complex one—has been summed up clearly by my right honourable friend Geoffrey Rippon in a speech in October of last year, when he said:
"What is required—and possible—is a series of specific initiatives within the framework of a broadly agreed strategy".
This view, while not accepting ipso facto the rigid timetable set out in the European Community document to which I have already referred, does not close the door to progress in monetary and economic co-operation for mutual benefit of Member States. Indeed, there are some initiatives which have already taken place and others which we would welcome.
It is fair to say that whatever quid pro quo is demanded by this country from other Community countries if we are to accept any creation of a monetary zone creating stability in the European Community, it must also be matched by members of our Government who go to Brussels, who must show that they are prepared to work with other Member States of the Community for the benefit of the Community as a whole. I should like to add my voice to that of my noble friend Lord Bessborough in putting this question to the Government: What is their view of economic and monetary union?
6.58 p.m.
Lord GEORGE-BROWN: My Lords, before I begin my speech, may I say that I find a certain piquancy in the fact that immediately after I sit down I shall be followed by the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, and, after him, the noble Earl, Lord Cromer. That brings back to me some exciting days during the latter part of
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1964, throughout 1965 and early 1966 when I was receiving papers—most of which I found agreeable—from the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, containing economic advice for the carrying forward of our country's affairs.
We spent pretty well every morning in the economic committee of the Cabinet waiting for the Chancellor of those days to come in and tell us what "Rowley" had said: It became a touchstone to open that meeting by saying to the then Chancellor: "Well, what has Rowley said to you today?". I must say I did not find all that "Rowley" then had to say as agreeable as I used to find the advice I received from the noble Lord. I have a feeling that the position may be wholly reversed tonight. It is, as I say, one of the piquant and amusing sides of it.
One needs to find some amusement: I find this discussion—not because of the quality of the speeches—a frightfully depressing occasion. It is depressing because one has only to look round the House to see the vast amount of enthusiasm the subject raises; it is depressing because the Minister who is to reply to us, if he has any distinguished views on Europe at all, could hardly be described as passionately in favour of European integration of any kind. It is depressing because I have a feeling that everybody is feeling a sense of disappointment about the developments in Europe. Yet nobody is willing to confess that it is almost wholly because of us and partly because of our long absence from the European scene—the years from The Hague right down to just a few years ago when we stayed away and things had to develop in ways they would not otherwise have done because we were away, and because of the attitude we have taken there since we joined. We have gone there. We have sent Ministers there who are either openly-confessed non-believers or who, at best, have gone there to make the best of a bad job and do what they could with the details that arose. Therefore, we have produced the situation which we now affect to be disappointed with.
I think the value of the raising of the standard for the development of European economic and monetary union lies in the fact that, because of circumstances which have arisen, we now have the possibility to take some concrete, positive action

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which will make the whole idea of European integration mean something to people in circumstances where they need something to believe in and where there is a need for something to happen. I do not think the attempt to create a political union of Europe—which is my reason for interest—can be made out of an economic approach. I think the attempt to do that is, to some extent, responsible for what has happened in the last few years. I must say, by the way, that if I did not have the conviction that we need politically to integrate our Continent, I would not be involved at all in any of these side issues, as it were. I simply do not understand Ministers and other representatives who bother to go to the European Council of Ministers, to any of the ministerial meetings or to the Parliament, if in fact they do not have the conviction that they wish to create a political union of Europe. That is all it is about and that is the only reason for being there. I have that conviction and I confess it. It is the basis of what I want to say to your Lordships tonight.
The political development of Europe seems to me, therefore, the only valid purpose and the only valid cause for which we should now be fighting, partly because we need to create a European external policy towards the problems of the world. We were talking earlier today about an equally depressing situation; the situation in Central and Southern Africa, where there is no European external effective policy—the French made their own effort—but where there should be a European external policy and activity, because the matter is of critical importance to us.
We need a European external policy, with America, in my opinion, in a situation where it can give no leadership and where it will be unable to give any for quite a while ahead because of its recent past experiences. We need European integration in order to have a defence policy; and it is ridiculous that at the moment there is no European defence policy in a situation in which we are all talking about Russian aggressiveness and about our lack of faith at the moment in the American will or ability—and, of course, the neutron bomb hassle did not encourage any of us to feel very much different. Thirdly, we need European integration in order to get a common economic
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policy. The economic and industrial condition of Europe at the moment surely not only provides the occasion for having our present debate and for Mr Jenkins, Commissioner Ortoli and the others to raise the issue; it provides the reason why our people should be—I admit they are not, but they should be—so concerned about its achievement.
We have all over Europe at the moment—happily, in some countries not nearly as badly as in this country—a state of economic stagnation which, compared with what is going on in other parts of the world, is quite staggeringly depressing. We are thinking and talking about only achieving a growth of 2 per cent. or 3 per cent., and some of us doubt very much whether that will be achieved. This country, at the present rate of progress, will not achieve anything like that and, in a state of economic stagnation and almost nil growth, there is no hope of providing the standard of hung that our people talk about or that our trade union leaders spend their time demanding. All they can achieve is switching it from here to there. There is no way by which you can make a quart of anything, if all you have to fill is a pint pot and you are barely doing that. We have unemployment all over Europe —I forget the figure: somewhere about 9 million, is that right?
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, 6 million
Lord GEORGE-BROWN: My Lords, 6 million throughout Western Europe as a whole. We have a figure here that we do not really understand at all, but it is somewhere around 1½ million to 2 million. We have a trade situation in which we are greatly under pressure and in which we are finding it difficult to get our exports out or to stop other people filling our own market. Therefore, the whole economic situation of our Continent is one of the deepest possible depression and gloom—and with no prospects of coming cut of it.
All this, I think, is concentrating our minds rather wonderfully and is the reason behind the Question which the noble Earl has raised tonight, because possibly this may be just the moment when we could get something moving again. It is, after all, no use Ministers continually badgering Germany to take risks and chances with its own situation. It is no

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use badgering the United States to do things which, if one goes to the United States, one sees all the reasons why they cannot do them. It is no use calling on the Japanese to keep their exports at home. Why the hell should they!
Always, when we are told we should not have so many Japanese cars coming in here because we should be looking after our workers at Leyland, I say to myself: "What about looking after the other workers in this country who want to get a new car? If they cannot get a new car from Leyland, why should they be prevented from getting one from Japan or anywhere else who can supply it?" I never do understand the arguments of the trade unions on this point. These kind of arguments, which are the only ones which are put up, seem to me to have no particular virtue; and as for the general argument on protectionism, despite what the two noble Lords, economists, who are going to follow me later may say, I simply do not understand it. It seems to me quite impossible that there is any future at all for these islands, with this population, with or without any European integration, if there is a protectionist policy seeking to shut out other people's goods and inviting them to take retaliatory action against us.
For progress in any direction to deal with the major matters to which I referred just now, we need the creation of a common economic strategy and a common economic policy for the Continent. I agree entirely with the noble Baroness, and it must be repeated and repeated, that that does not excuse the non-existence of sound economic strategy and sound economic policies here at home. Just as our failure to make use of the domestic market which joining the EEC provided for us, because we could not become efficient enough to make use of it, has meant that the benefits which entry made available have not come to us, so, as the noble Baroness said, if we have a common economic policy and strategy and are in no condition to fulfil our part in it we shall still suffer very much. But that is not to say that there should not be one. Indeed, unless the countries of Europe fit their own economic policies and their own economic actions into a common strategy, then they will simply defeat themselves and export their troubles to each other, and the more successful
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ones at home will be the ones who export most of them to the weaker ones, such as ourselves.
I shall not go into all the questions of the technical monetary arrangements. Incidentally, the monetary arrangements, the common currency which is necessary and essential, are, in my view, only one part of this and are not a replacement for the rest, which basically has to be the economic strategy that we adopt. But on the kind of monetary devices that we use, the kind of arrangements that we make to keep stability between the various currencies, in order to stop us from adding to our other problems the one which flows from currency fluctuations, there are many possibilities, as has been said and as will be said again in a moment. I wish that we could stop using reptilian names by which to describe them; there must be something nicer than "Snakes" and "boa constrictors". But there are many ways by which we can provide for stable relationships between our currencies, and there must be a way—indeed, there is a way—by which we can fit national currencies into a scheme where they can work for quite a long time ahead, side by side with a common currency which can be used for other purposes, and, again, can cut down the instability with outside countries. I shall not go into all those details; it is not a major theme. We can solve the problem if we can get a determined will that the problem exists and must be solved.
I think that for economic improvement in this Contenent we must first look within this Continent. It is an absolute dream to think that there is any way by which we can solve anybody's problems, if we, ourselves, go it alone in the world outside. It is also an absolute dream to think that the Europeans nation, as a whole, could serve in that way. After all, half of our exports in this Continent go to each other, and it seems to me that the European dimension is the one that we must make the most of.
But this need, which is imperative today, will become so much greater when the other three nations which are immediately being considered for membership of the EEC—that is, Greece, Spain and Portugal—themselves join. We shall need to have some way of increasing our total available goods and services if we are to be able to do any element of social readjustment

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which will take care of the poorer of the territories—and the three incoming ones are, after all, among those—without pulling down the rest of us.
The main features were set out earlier, and perhaps I may briefly restate them. We must try to get a single market within Western Europe, with a minimum of harriers to movement of trade, of people and of finance among us. We must have a centralisation of major macro-economic policy decisions within the Continent, just as I have always thought we should have here at home. Alongside those, we must aim, as quickly as possible, for the adoption of a single currency. We must make sure that that currency, and whatever schemes we adopt to back it, are provided with adequate financial resources to enable it to stand up to the pressures. Finally, may I repeat my conviction that it is the political purpose of European integration which really matters; and that that political purpose, in turn, depends upon underpinning with a sound economic base and policy in our Continent to get it.
I believe that at this moment, because of the conditions of Europe, recent sceptics, such as the Chancellor of Germany, and even more, I gather, our own Prime Minister, have been brought to move towards a certain willingness to accept what yesterday they would have rejected in this field of economic integration. It also explains the change which I noted when I was in America only a few weeks ago, in that it is no longer seen as a ganging-up against the United States, which is what they used to say, but is now seen as a way by which Europe can cease being a drain, a heavy stone on progress in the world outside.
The only worry which they raised with me, both the economic people in the present Administration and those I knew in the last Administration when I used to have to deal with them, was whether we ourselves intended to do it. They were no longer telling us that we ought not to and giving us all the arguments against it. There has been a great change, which I believe is due to the economic conditions in the Continent. I believe that if we could produce some belief—what has been called some political will—we could give back to our people some degree of hope, imagination and drive.
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One of the things missing in the wretched state of our nation at the moment is any positive will, belief or drive for anything. Part of the reason is in this place tonight. Part of the reason is with out political Parties. Nobody ever wants to commit any more. There is always the saving, qualifying clause. We are never committed to the actual details, even if we can get so far as to say that something sounds a rather nice, broad idea. We need some political will, some belief, some idealism, if you like.
I believe that it can only be within the terms of our Continent, because there is no other grouping available to us. I believe that a political Europe provides Britain with its role as leader, and provides Europe with its role in the world. I also believe that an integrated economic policy, which will necessarily involve a common currency and an integrated monetary policy, is the essential underpinning for that political Europe which I want to see. If anybody following me does not accept the basic premise then of course there is really no point in the argument. If there are those who do accept the basic premise or pretend to, as do Her Majesty's Government, then they have to come forward and say why my way is the wrong way, and put up some other way of their own.
7.20 p.m.
Lord BALOGH: My Lords, it is always very difficult to follow the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown. I have always admired his capacity for enthusiasm, and he has shown tonight that this capacity has not diminished with age. The noble Earl phrased his Question in a very reticent, restrained and discreet manner, totally in accordance with the traditions of this House. However, he obviously shares the view expressed so forcefully by my old pupil and friend, Roy Jenkins, that the establishment of a complete monetary union in the European Community is likely to help in diminishing unemployment which, as the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, has just said, is at a frightening level. It results in a loss of something like £600 billion to £700 billion per annum in world production and income.
I must say to your Lordships that the noble Earl could not have bun more

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mistaken. He not only put the cart before the horse but he left them in a position where the cart is liable to roll backwards, crushing, or at least maiming, the horse. Monetary union results from a successful alignment of social, financial and economic policies and, provided that the participant who is entering into it does so from strength rather than weakness, might be beneficial. I do not doubt that; nobody does. For a weaker partner to mingle so intimately with the strong, without the assurance of help in the readjustment which will be periodically required from him, might prove to be fatal. Already the tariff union in manufactures and fisheries as against the violent protectionism of the Common Agricultural Policy has done, and does, enormous harm to this country. Monetary union at the present time would expose us to an extreme degree to the aggressive superiority of German competitive power without any means at all for self-defence. This does not mean that I share the views of conventional economists who for a long time, and with the stout support of The Times and the Economist, held that changes in parity—indeed, the floating of the currency—represented the panacea for all ills.
For us to succeed, as was made quite clear in the excellent debate that we had on the initiative of Professor Lord Baker, we need to find a more resolute attack on the structural shortcomings which have caused our relative decline since at least 1873 and which I tried to put before your Lordships' House last week. To go into the turbulent seas of the coming economic fluctuations in a small and fragile boat, shackled to the Teutonic elephant which obviously repudiates all accommodation, would be folly. It is the refusal of the monetarists to inquire into and take serious note of the realities of our problems, a refusal shared by a large part of our Civil Service and the Bank of England, which is so very disturbing. In 1967 and early 1968, when entry into the Common Market was being deliberated, the official as against the temporary advisers of the then Labour Government wrote their report about the probable consequences of our entry, on the basis of an assumption—I emphasise, assumption—that we were going to enter from strength rather than from weakness. That assumption was not
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proven then and has not been proven to be correct since. We have suffered from a relative decline in manufacturing, almost equal to a de-industrialisation. This has not been mentioned by any of the previous speakers. It is very important.
Nor is the second condition of a successful unification of currencies at all in sight. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister has fought a valiant battle for the enlightenment of the so-called Social Democratic German Chancellor, whose economic knowledge and co-operative spirit can be likened only to the most primitive, classical economist, bent on economic conquest after the failure of his nation to achieve military victory. The devoted effort of the Prime Minister, however excellent in conception, has failed. The Germans refused to initiate a sizeable expansion in their country, yet they suffer from grave unemployment even though they have repatriated hundreds of thousands of so-called guest workers and exported unemployment through a vast excess of exports over imports. Even the German Government's independent experts agreed that such expansion was bitterly needed, but some of our noble colleagues here do not seem to have noticed that. I fear that the guardians of our currency have succumbed to the monetarist tantrums dictated, at their own peril, by the Americans. Instead of analysing the real problems and discussing the modalities and requirements of full employment and full production, the irrelevancies of monetary controls are given official recognition by our Government.
I do not, as I said, believe in the "all-cure" effect of a floating exchange rate or repeated devaluations. This does not mean, however, that I am in favour of a total monetary union in a situation in which the basic trends in the participating countries are not aligned and cannot be aligned. As it is likely that our weakness does not entirely originate in existing costs and prices but results from non-price weaknesses, the irrevocable joining of our currency to that of Germany might have the most catastrophic consequences on the export of capital, general industrial decline and unemployment.
This danger is the greater as we have come to a point at which even the Bank of England, not to say those of the United

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States and Germany, have fallen into the Chicago trap and regard the supply of money, or money stock, as the main, if not decisive or sole criterion of monetary management. This surrender to a witches' brew would, like the insensate policy of credit control through competition (which, having done immense harm to the economy, had to he given up), undoubtedly increase the direct pressures emanating from a common central bank in charge of the common currency and in which the creditors will undoubtedly have a decisive voice. It would, like the colonial currency boards of old, rob us of a vital part of sovereignty even if, joined in the boa-constrictor of the European Snake, or, even more, a common currency area, we surrendered to the untutored dogmatic frenzy of the Germans. This choice of a policy indicator shows not only a regrettable ignorance of the complexity of the monetary system but shackles Governmental action to the market forces.
What are these market forces? Are they the result of basic economic factors? Do they reflect the balancing strength of a well-functioning, self-balancing economic system? Not a bit of it. As one of the monetarists authors, Mr. Congden, admitted in The Times the other day, these market forces represent nothing more than the views of
"many economic commentators principally but not exclusively City financial analysts"
whose ignorance of Keynes and the functioning of a modern monetary system is remarkable. In the inter-war period, their predecessors presided over the decline of Britain. Now their absurd notions about the money supply dominate our continued malaise. This is quite arbitrary and has undergone startling changes and can be influenced by completely irrelevant influences. I will not demonstrate to your Lordships the absurdity of this policy because there is not time.
The statistic of monetary supply or money stock cannot rationally be used for policy making because it disregards the possibility of non-income transactions which are totally excluded from the conventional concept of the velocity of circulation. Sadly enough we are here confronted with phenomena which are self-validating. The insistence of the Chancellor and the Governor on being
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strictly guided by that useless fetish has delivered us to the mercy of the financial analysts and other speculators who merely need to withhold the purchase of Government securities in order to push up the rate of interest and to make illicit profits instead of concentrating on maximising production.
If the danger of these delusions is ugly to contemplate how much more exposed we should be, shackled into monetary union, the central bank of which would necessarily be dominated by the main creditor country, Germany; unwilling to follow the rules of the game enunciated by the British philosopher Hume two centuries ago, which prescribed expansion for the creditor country helping the contraction in the debtor country to restore equilibrium. As the valiant but unsuccessful efforts of the Prime Minister show, even a so-called social democrat German Government is unwilling to give up this indirect dominance over our economic fate. What would happen should the Conservatives win in Germany?
We have already suffered from the invasion of German manufacturers into our markets and the turning of our deficit from a trivial amount in 1970 to over £2 billion last year. If the Americans give in to the false advice delivered by the 19th century notions of the Governor of the German Federal Bank and support the dollar instead of letting it press on German exports, the present economic hesitancy might be turned into a rout through the American defensive monetary restriction. Herr Schmidt, totally ignoring the grave dangers of such a financial crisis, is reported as saying,
"I understand that some participants want to talk about growth and unemployment. I want to talk about a better balance in t le energy equations of the world. I want to talk about a better balance in the network of payments, at least among the rich industrial countries".
This means that he wants us to be dominated by a hopeless quest of shifting the desert Arab surplus from oil exports from country to country, each time adding a further twist to the pressure on employment and production. I very much hope that the Minister replying to this Question will give a firm and unmistakable negative to the suggestion implied by it, and will not contemplate being swallowed either by the monetary union or even a boa constrictor.
7.33 p.m.
The Earl of CROMER: My Lords, I should like to join with the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, in her words of thanks on the timeliness in tabling this Question on the part of the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough. I thought this was starting off rather well because I found myself agreeing with practically every word that the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, said and right at the beginning of the speech that we have just heard by the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, I thought I caught a sentence that I agreed with, but as his speech continued I became more and more doubtful on that score. We tend to look at things from rather a different point of view.
Although it is late I feel that it is important to look at the question of monetary evolution in the context in which we are living and it seems to me that the politico-social challenge of the next quarter of a century will be that of providing a sufficiency of jobs so that the numbers of unemployed do not rise to intolerable levels. This is a problem that faces the whole of the industrialised world, not just the United Kingdom. It arises in large part from improving technological efficiency and other progress that is coming about at a rapid rate in such things as micro-processors. Here the Prime Minister is to be commended on commissioning those extraordinary brains in the "think tank" to examine this matter. I should be even more impressed if he had commissioned them 18 months ago when the French Government set up a similar study, instead of a week after the French study was reported.
Whether we like it or not, countless existing tasks in many fields, particularly in the clerical fields, are likely to disappear over the next quarter of a century and it will be the clerical field and not just the factory floor where the problems of redundancy will apply. It seems to me that efforts to mitigate this redundancy merely by protecting existing jobs are likely to prove wholly self-defeating and to lead to a rapidly spiralling decline in the standard of living of those countries which choose the road of protectionism rather than the road of moving with the times. It so happens that in this country and in Western Europe, and to a smaller degree in the United States, we have
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currently a high percentage of redundant industry. It is the same throughout most of the Continent, certainly in France, the Benelux countries, Italy, and only to a lesser degree in Germany. These redundant industries will have to be restructured. At the same time, we have too high a proportion of our economies depending upon what one might describe as non-market influenced activities.
Perhaps I may cite the example that in the years 1971 to 1976 public sector employment in Britain grew by 845,000 while manufacturing employment in Britain fell by 774,000. It has been estimated that each 5 per cent. increase in the share of national income going to the non-market sector activities will typically lead to a fall of one per cent. in the rate of growth of the GNP. So the crying need will be for the creation of new jobs deriving from new innovative activities and new industries.
An interesting study recently carried out in the United States on this subject showed that of new jobs created in an area where the study took place some 60 per cent. of the new jobs were created by new industries and only 40 per cent. were created by the growth of existing industries. In America a remarkable job has been done in job creation: some 3.7 million jobs have been created in the last 12 months. In Britain and in France particularly, very many large businesses are by general consent still over-manned.
This points to the urgent need for a higher rate of growth of new firms and new enterprises and the greater part of our energies being applied to the creation of wealth and less to the distribution of wealth. The birth rate of new firms and enterprises in Britain and in the EEC is generally much too low for our future good. But what clearly stands out as being self-evident is that if we are to seek our way through this difficult evolutionary process in the whole of the industrial world especially, then we shall have to do it in co-operation with our EEC partners facing the same problems. To seek solutions on a narrow nation state basis with the devil taking the hindmost can only end in disaster. Hence-and perhaps I have taken rather a long time to get there—there is a powerful need for an EEC integrated payments system to support the enterprising young people

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that I am sure we do not lack. It is the creation of new jobs in new industries and new productive pursuits that will be paramount.
Unfortunately, the current course of deterioration in the world international payments system is leading us in exactly the wrong direction. The decline in the rate of growth of international trade since the demise of Bretton Woods is a very worrying factor in its own right, since so much of the prosperity of the 'sixties was predicated on the growth of world trade, depending at that time very largely on the influence of the International Monetary Fund and the GATT in the removal of barriers to trade and in providing for the greatest freedom of movement of funds. We in this country, depending so heavily on international trading and manufacturing of raw materials imported, are perhaps more vulnerable than most countries to the demise of this old system. Only the other day I was talking to a man who was the buyer of one of our larger milling firms. He told me that today the erratic movement of exchange rates was a far greater hazard to him than the movement of the prices of the commodities that he was dealing in if he was to achieve the lowest possible costs to our consumers and obviously to optimise his own profits.
The disarray in the international payments system is a very serious affair. I think it is fair to claim that the highly volatile exchange rates that we have seen over the last year or so are inevitably leading to higher prices for the consumer as traders are driven to widen their margins to cover the wider risks, and this, of course, in turn feeds inflation. Now we have the looming fear of protectionism. The fact is that the Free World floating of all currencies has not worked out in the way that some thought it would. The random volatility of exchange rates which has built up since 1971 has led to all kinds of arbitrary fluctuations over and above the more fundamental movements between one country and another. Of course, the major influence in this has been the divergent inflation rates in the different countries: United Kingdom manufactured prices rose by 135 per cent., United States prices some 56 per cent. and Swiss prices only 21 per cent. But, even when these fundamental facts are taken into account,
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the highly volatile movements superimposed alongside the basic ones have caused tremendous instability of business.
I believe that what has gone wrong in the international payments system is the lack of any medium of constant value against which relative measurement can be made, and hence the absence of any unit which provides any tolerably constant store of value of monetary wealth. The pound sterling, of course, provided this under the gold standard up to 1914 in its own particular way. In the inter-war years the pound and the dollar provided a barely adequate successor up to 1931 when we went off the gold standard and a great deal of chaos and fluctuation occurred until the tripartite agreement in 1936 restored an element of stability. Post-World War Two, the Bretton Woods system, based on the US dollar, somewhat arbitrarily tied to the value of gold, served the purpose as a pivot for other currencies.
However, then the Americans discovered, as we had previously discovered, and the Germans were wise enough not to put to the test, that policies appropriate to the international reserve states of a national currency did not seem necessarily to meet the internal growth and employment objectives of the Government, and domestic politics naturally held the field. We are thus left with a situation in the international state in which currencies are relatively and randomly changing; against each other and there is no point of reference in the whole system. It is rather like trying to navigate by the sun, the moon and the stars, with each of these points of reference on a random, uncharted, erratic course. There is no single point of reference. In these circumstances a weathervane such as the dollar is no substitute for a compass aligned of a fixed point of reference. We are all floating incontrollably.
There cannot be any question of' any attempt to return to fixed exchange rates, even of the Bretton Woods type. I myself have the gravest possible doubt; about attempts to revive the original larger European currency Snake, although I would not deprecate it for those who happen to be in it at the present time. Similarly, I do not see a great deal of future for the boa. The disparity in inflation rates and the lack of harmonisation in monetary management and in fiscal approach in the

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Member countries, I think, make any kind of development along this road premature. There is, as we have heard from noble Lords, an alternative system of moving towards target zones for exchange rates. This, I think, is innocuous because I have had sufficient experience of public life to know that Governments have no shame in either missing the target or changing the aim if it suits them. So I think this is merely futile, but harmless. The SDR, similarly, suffers from the defect of the instability of its ingredients.
Nonetheless, against the background of my opening words, there is, I think, a crying and urgent need for some stabilising element in the world monetary regime, an element which will command confidence as a measure of store of wealth, something that is trustworthy, available, usable and used by international traders and by the international capital markets of the world, perhaps starting in the Community. Without this, I am convinced, we will not support the investment nor the trade that is needed to provide employment that we know that we need to provide. For the reasons I have stated, no national currency is likely to provide what is necessary in this respect. This is becoming more and more recognised by world traders, and in particular, of course, by the OPEC countries, who do not take great joy in having priced their oil in dollars; nor does that act beneficially to other countries, such as ourselves, whose rate may not improve against the dollar when it should, with the result that we may be paying more for our oil because it is priced in dollars than we would if it was in some more constant unit.
This distortion in the rates between one country and another is a very harmful affair for all the world trading countries. Neither the producer nor the consumer is, I think, well served or well satisfied. It is perhaps not surprising—and I say this with some diffidence with the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, sitting just in front of me—that finance Ministries and central banks are the most reluctant to admit the inadequacy of a national currency to serve adequately as the ideal medium for international payment and investment as this tends to impugn sovereign monetary virility. There is, of course, an element of irony in this, as it is the policies of the
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central banks in fulfilling the requirements of their Governments that lead to this instability.
There was, of course, a world currency proposed by Lord Keynes at Bretton Woods, shot down by the Americans, and I think any idea of a world currency today is wholly too ambitious. The composition of the IMF is such that agreement would be interminable if not impossible. There is, however, in Europe a realisation that our nation-States are too small, that limitation of movement of funds in order to protect local employment levels creates a downward spiral in activity and employment, and there is in Europe certainly the technical expertise to set up, first, a European unit of account imbued with the essential qualities of constancy and continuing value which could, in due course, develop when the time is ripe, into a European parallel currency to be used alongside existing national currencies. It would be a mistake to try to elide those two processes too closely together. I think that it should be taken step by step. If that is the way that Mr. Jenkins's mind is directed—and I hope that it is, but he has been so far rather unspecific in his ideas—I think that he deserves all our support. That is the only way in which I see practical proposals coming forward.
The other matter that I would suggest to Mr. Jenkins from your Lordships' House with all due diffidence, is that as he will not get ideas welling up on to his desk from Ministries of Finance or central banks, he should convene a small group of experts—and God knows there are plenty of experts in this field!—who could work around him and see whether they can make any real progress, unencumbered by institutionalised postures of Ministries and central banks. I do not see any reason why discussion should be limited, as has been suggested, to the wholly unnatural phenomena such as Snakes bursting out of tunnels, nor even currency baskets containing withering aspirations and writhing currencies. Similarly, crawling pegs and SDRs seem to me signally lacking in market appeal.
Being the heretic that I am in these matters, I would suggest that, in an age when the synthetic is often superior to the traditional material, a synthetic inconvertible gold monetary unit might form the basis that would command respect in

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all the markets of the world and be highly usable. But here we get into the rather deeper esoterics. European monetary rationalisation to my mind is the only road that we can follow if we are to avoid a serious decline in our way of life accompanied by desperately rising unemployment. It is, curiously enough, only the European Community that is in a position to offer this opportunity to the world, as it is only that group of States that is in a position to create with credibility an element of monetary stability that could give light in a world that is steadily growing darker.
7.54 p.m.
Lord MORRIS: My Lords, I believe, with respect, that any discussion of European monetary union must surely begin by looking to it in the context of the European Economic Community as it has unfolded since the Treaty of Rome and the direction in which it is supposed to be heading. Whether the EEC was formed to re-accommodate Western Germany into the international fold; whether to provide balance to the free-world hegemony of the United States of America; whether to strengthen European defence policy with respect to the Socialist Republics; whether to provide the means towards longer term political union, the way it has evolved since 1958 is reasonably clear.
The European Economic Community is first and foremost a customs union—a Zollverein; that is, as I understand it, a group of countries that exchange their manufactured goods free of duty and agree common tariffs for goods traded into the bloc from outside. To that can be added, as adjuncts, the Common Agricultural Policy and the Regional Fund, which fund has grown markedly in importance since 1975. Peripheral to these aspects are a horde of harmonisation issues—exhaust emissions, regulation of lorry drivers' hours et cetera. However, those issues do not change an initial judgment of the European Economic Community over the past 20 years. It is a customs union.
It is at this stage that I must try to make the point that the Zollverein, the German customs union of the 1820s—developed through the century until full German unification in 1871—provides a vital historical example of how, I would
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humbly submit, we should be thinking today. For it is fundamental that we bear in mind that the economic unification of Germany, over some 50 years at a time of sublime trading and industrial simplicity compared to our own times, came about not as a result of the customs union. The customs union was the result of urgent economic necessity. In other words, customs union, and thus monetary union, is a symptom of political will for union and not its cause.
Thus, in the context of what we are discussing today, we must be mindful of the fact that there are still a number of statesmen today—for instance, Mr. Roy Jenkins—who are not totally forgetful of the original concepts of Schuman. The fulcrum of the concept of European monetary union is that, for the European Economic Community to present a true bloc policy to external countries or groups of countries, it must itself show itself to be internally unified. To disbelieve that concept in the European context is to come to a sudden halt.
Noble Lords will recall that a group under Pierre Weiner presented a report on the subject of European monetary union in October 1970 which stated that European monetary union was possible, given the necessary political will and means, and that:
"the principal decisions of economic policy will be taken at Community level".
Furthermore, the report added That:
"A monetary union implies, internally, the total and irreversible convertibility of currencies, the elimination of margins of fluctuation in rates of exchange, the irrevocable fixing of parity ratios and the total liberation of movements of capital". Needless to say, in spite of the affirmation of the idea of common economic and monetary policy at the Paris Conference in 1972, nothing happened as the world moved into a period of acute economic problems. Your Lordships will recall that the establishment of the Snake did not last too long as the French were obliged to move out and the British continued to assert the impossibility of joining.
In 1975, the Marjolin study group reported to the Commission recommending:
"the establishment of a Community system of internal and external monetary policies, accompanied by medium-term guidelines with respect

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to the movement of exchange rates, a broadening of the possibility of borrowing at Community level and the development of a European unit of account determined in relation to a basket of European currencies".
Finally, the much acclaimed but little implemented Tindemans Report of December 1975 reiterated that the Council should:
"revise discussions within the institutions on the manner in which a common economic and monetary policy can be achieved and its role in the European Union".
At least the Tindemans Report added that:
"During this policy discussion no proposals should be set aside a priori".
Tindemans' recommendation was that since it was impossible that all States should reach the same state of harmonisation at the same time:
"those States which are able to progress have a duty to forge ahead. The others had to catch up".
In other words, his recommendation was centred on the consolidation of the Snake, which, as he said,
"lies at the heart of monetary stability".
But, as we know in so many walks of life, union springs from the heart and not from the mind. As with the Zollverein, there must be, from the first, an urgent necessity for union. For example, if one's exchange rate is fixed to the Snake and one's productivity growth is less than that of one's fellow Snake members, one's exports will decline as one's goods are over-priced, with consequent effects on employment. You cannot harmonise where there is no harmony. Hence, the United Kingdom's reluctance to join the Snake and France's exit from it.
However, as noble Lords are aware, full European monetary union would entail one European currency, the supply of which would be regulated by a central European body, like the "Fed" in the United States of America. To this extent individual States would suffer a loss of sovereignty in that individually they could less easily boost their Government spending by deficit finance, in that it was no longer the component Governments which controlled the money supply. Nor could they devalue. The State of Michigan cannot devalue its dollar. It is, of course, important to bear in mind that depriving
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States of the power to control the money supply removes from them the control of the level of economic activity.
European monetary union as proposed under Tindemans, with so much emphasis on a central body laying down restraints on Member countries' internal monetary and budgetary policies, must to some extent transfer sovereignty to that body and attempt to harmonise the policies of countries that are in very different stages of development. To this extent European monetary union is absurd. You cannot put the cart before the horse.
Before even attempting to harmonise the structure of European currencies in the Snake, or to create a new European unit of account, thus giving a man in Brussels the power to lend this new money to, say, Italy and the United Kingdom it is much more important that European Economic Community States should carefully examine why the discord exists. Why does productivity grow so slowly in the United Kingdom? Why does the United Kingdom have such a high rate of inflation? What of differing wage levels? What of deficit financing? Once these problems have been sorted out, then—and only then—can Europe move towards fuller economic and, hence, monetary union. This suggests what can and should be done to facilitate a gradual movement towards fuller economic and thus monetary union.
It must be right that the Europeans Economic Community Member countries do not pursue policies that are openly against the interests of the bloc. A country such as West Germany, enjoying a large external surplus to the detriment of its partners, should be encouraged to pursue measures to inflate its own demand for imports. Countries that are flagrantly incapable of satisfying that demand—like the United Kingdom—should be obliged to pursue policies that improve their level of production for export rather than for internal consumption.
Thus, by planning internal policies together, the EEC could prevent a period where all countries inflated together, causing wild commodity prices and ultimately high domestic inflation. When the movement between Member countries' exchange rates has been reduced to a more stable level, by eliminating differences in productivity growth rates, inflation rates

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and to some extent, taxation—which causes capital flows out of high-taxation countries—then the bloc as a whole can fix its currencies against a new European currency to be used for external trading.
At this moment the liberalisation of internal capital movements would provide a more satisfactory means of allocating resources than any Regional Fund. European monetary union, therefore, in my layman's view, is not even desirable without the provision of the correct groundwork. The Snake is viable as it stands for only a very few countries. The European unit of account could be a dangerously inflationary weapon, providing borrowings for overheated economies. When the European Economic Community countries have harmonised their budgets and have harmonised their taxation and domestic economic policies, then and only then is the time to think in terms of monetary union in full.
8.5 p.m.
Lord ROBERTHALL: My Lords, like most noble Lords who have spoken I welcome the opportunity given to us to debate this important question. As the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, reminded us, it has come to the fore again recently, so that it has become topical. I am looking forward to hearing what light the noble and learned Lord, Lord McCluskey, will cast on present Government thought. I had hoped to get a little light from the other Front Bench speakers on the subject, but when both the noble Lord, Lord Banks and the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, arrived at what we were going to do, they were careful to say that they were speaking for themselves alone. However, I think that in both cases their counsel could be summed up as "Make haste very, very slowly". I do not think that they would be far out of line even if they were speaking more for themselves.
To me, this is a painful subject. As a convinced supporter of European economic union for a long time, it is painful because we are now further away from monetary union than we have ever been since we began to think about it. As this was to he the crown of the co-operative structure, it is to me—and I am sure to many others—a very melancholy situation.
I ought to begin by informing your Lordships' House that the Sub-Committee
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of the Select Committee on Community Affairs—the Scrutiny Committee—has considered various recent statements in Brussels and elsewhere which deal with the subject. Although I do not feel that its consideration has gone far enough to justify detailed examination and report to the House, it has appointed a working group, of which I am acting as chairman, to follow developments and to report to the Committee as and when any concrete proposals come forward. But as no concrete proposals have yet come forward and the group has, therefore, not had anything to get its teeth into, I must make it clear in the remarks that I shall mike that I am speaking purely for myself and not in any way for this Committee.
I do not want to range as widely as many speakers have. I want to talk manly about what I consider to be the main obstacle before us in this area. I have said that we are further away than we have been since we first began to talk about this We are a good deal further away than vie were in 1958, 20 years ago. At that time, most of the European currencies were becoming convertible. They were all declaring a fixed gold price and, as the noble Earl, Lord Cromer, has reminded t s, it was really a dollar gold parity. So the main requirements for monetary union that exchanges should all be fixed in relation to one another, were already present at that time and any monetary union could only hope to be a smoother and more efficient system than the one which the world used to have before 1914 and to which it was returning after 1958. Broadly speaking, the 1960s were a quite favourable period, and it is not surprising that at the end of that time great hopes were raised in Community circles of moving towards monetary union. I suppose they reached their height in 1972 when the Snake was formed, which was to have a narrower range of fluctuation than the Smithsonian range which had been reached before, when the United States, as we can now see, torpedoed the whole system by cutting the gold/dollar link.
What happened, as several noble Lords have reminded us, is that the United Kingdom only stayed in the Snake for I think seven weeks; they were followed out by Italy in the following year, and France the year after that. Although, the French made an attempt to came back in it did not last long. Now what has

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happened? We just have a small deutschemark group, and even some members of that have changed their parities within it. If you look at what has happened, the outlook, is extremely depressing.
Why is this? It is basically because the world has entered a different phase, in which, rightly or wrongly, it is much more preoccupied with the problems of inflation than with the other problems. Every country is now struggling with inflation, but, as the noble Earl, Lord Cromer, pointed out in his interesting speech, the rates of inflation that countries have are different from one another, and the rates themselves change. In 1976 the German annual rate was about 4 per cent.; the American rate, 7 per cent.; the French about 9 per cent.; we were up near 20 per cent., and the Italians beyond that. The Germans are now down a little, the Americans have gone up a little, and we are down to about 8 per cent., with a great deal of doubt in the minds of a great many people as to whether we are going to stick at that. It is a creditable rate compared to what we had.
Monetary union means that you have all got to be tied closely together. We are all struggling with the problem of inflation and no country has been able to solve it in a satisfactory way, and that is the problem about getting into a monetary union. Just imagine trying to get in when you have these different rates. First, you have to settle your monetary policy, and you cannot do that with a veto. The central bank must have an instruction. It cannot have 12 different countries vetoing it. Suppose that we and the Germans discussed having a monetary union now, with them having 3 per cent. inflation and our rate of inflation at 8 per cent. and rising. Who is going to work whom? They would never settle. The central bank would never get off the ground because it never got any instructions.
Suppose for a moment that they made this great act of will and agreed: then what happens to the Member countries at this point will depend on how their current rate depends on the chosen rate. Suppose we settled for 7 per cent. or 8 per cent. inflation a year, we would put a most violent inflation into the German system. Meanwhile, if we were up where we were a few years ago, we
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would get a violent deflation here. Political problems would arise if we tried to get a monetary union before we had not only control of inflation but control at more or less the same rate. There are all kinds of other things that we have to do in the way of convergence and harmonisation before we can get to a working union. But, dealing with what is to be the crown of the whole business, my view is that we are getting further away now because of this inability, one way or another, to deal with inflation.
I expect that your Lordships are frightfully bored at hearing that there are two main schools on how to deal with this: there is the monetary school, and the incomes policy school. I have long been a supporter of the incomes policy school of thought. I suppose we ought to judge the hope of progress towards monetary union by the progress we arc making in this way. Monetarists ought to be in favour of going to a monetary union as soon as possible, because, as I understand them, they want a particular monetary policy to be adopted willy-nilly, and everybody would have to adjust themselves to it. They are rather like the school of European thought at present which thinks that we should take a great dive forward; do it first, and then deal with the difficulties. I have always thought that you can only control this by some kind of agreement.
Therefore, as I say, I am an incomes policy man. From my point of view, the people who are doing the most to get us towards monetary union are Mr. Callaghan and Mr. Healey, because they are doing their utmost to get us to have a permanent incomes policy. I am not sure what the policy of a possible alternative Government will be on this. I think that the right honourable lady who leads the Opposition is right not to spell out in detail what she is going to do until she comes to power. Some of her pronouncements suggest that she leans rather more towards the monetary school, so I suppose those convinced Europeans who are monetarists would put it the other way round.
As I remarked in passing, a great deal has to be done before we can get to economic and monetary union. Under harmonisation we have to harmonise our tax system; we have made a start with

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VAT; and on convergence, which means convergence of policies, we still have a long way to go. But, in my view, however successful you may become in this field, until you have learned to deal with inflation and have a recipe you can all apply at the same time, you will not be able to get to a monetary union.
8.18 p.m.
Lord KALDOR: My Lords, I have listened to all the speeches in this debate. As I expected, I did not hear any new argument that would have caused me to change my views on the merits of the issue of monetary union which I am going to expound. I was glad to learn, however, that I was not alone in this House, and not even on this side of the House, in thinking such a move would entail great dangers and disadvantages. In particular I was glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Morris, say many of the things that I would wish to emphasise, and I hope that he will forgive me if I sound somewhat repetitious in what I am going to say. I can think of few things that could be more inimical to the national interest of Britian and, in the longer run, even to the interests of a united and strong Europe, than the creation of a monetary union of Europe in present circumstances—on the lines on which it was recently advocated by my able and misguided friend, Mr. Roy Jenkins.
I cannot help feeling that those, like him, who urge this step have little understanding of the significance of a separate national currency under the direction of a national central bank from the point of view of the power of a country to direct its own affairs in accordance with its own interests—or else they have reached the stage, as I believe at least one noble Lord to whom we listened this evening has reached, that they regard this matter of the national interest as of little importance in itself. To deprive a country of the power to issue currency or create credit is the equivalent in the economic filed of an ultimate surrender of sovereignty in the political field. It is the economic equivalent of surrendering a nation's own defence force in order to merge it into a European defence force with a European commander-in-chief who would not be responsible to any particular Government. In the same way, a European currency would be directed by a
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European governor of a central bank who would not be responsible to the Government or Parliament of any particular Member country.
To create such vast power; without responsibility would in itself be irresponsible to the highest degree and it would be an understatement to say, as my noble friend Lord Balogh said, that creating a single European currency or a single European army in advance of political union would by putting the cart before the horse. Monetary union—I believe this was also said by Lord Morris—is a consequence of political union, but it cannot be its cause. Those who think that be creating complete monetary and economic integration they bring about political union—I feel I detected a note of this in at least one of the speeches in this debate—precisely because they create conditions that make life intolerable without political union, are not only disingenuous but, in my view, are in the highest degree misguided.
It is a naïvety to think that creating the stresses and strains which full economic and monetary integration would involve would strengthen the forces making for political union. They are more likely to have the very opposite effect; they are far more likely to strengthen the forces of disruption, to strengthen the centrifugal forces, which would make the ultimate creation of a united Europe far more difficult or possibly altogether impossible.
It would be a different matter from our own point of view if Britain were the strongest, richest and the economically dominant partner of this union, so that any act of integration—and monetary union is only one particular form of integration—would be bound to enlarge Britain's power and benefit her interests, even when, by so doing, she acted against the interests of the other countries. This may well have been the case in the first part of the 19th century. British industry no doubt benefited greatly from the opening up of Continental markets for British goods after Waterloo. We might have benefited even more if we had then been able to create a full economic union with Europe and impose on all the other European countries our own currency as the sole medium of payment.
But those days are long past. Germany emerged as by far the strongest European

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Power in Europe by the end of the 19th century. She surpassed Britain in her industrial capacity, in trade and in competitive power. After defeat in two world wars, Germany emerged divided into two parts, but the Western part by itself has, in a matter of two decades, achieved the same, or even greater, predominance among the Western European countries than that which imperial Germany possessed before the first world war. I am not saying anything against the Germans; they did it by sheer hard work, by ability and so on; but we are not talking about cricket or about who deserves to win the world cup or to win Wimbledon. We are talking about the life and the future of the nation.
We entered the Common Market with high expectations of mutual benefit in the matter of trade, on account of the disappearance of Customs barriers, in the hope that these benefits would more than offset the cost of membership in terms both of the large net contribution to the Community and of an agricultural policy which admittedly did not suit our interests. Some of us voiced fears at the time that the so-called "dynamic benefits" of membership flowing from the disappearance of Customs barriers would redound, not to our advantage, but to our disadvantage, because they would cause a further loss of market share to our Continental competitors, mainly to Germany but also perhaps to Italy and France, both inside and outside Britain.
The five years that have elapsed since our joining have done nothing to disprove such fears. Our trade balance, particularly the balance in our trade in manufactures, has deteriorated to the tune of £2,000 million a year in relation to the other countries of the Common Market. Although our exports to the other EEC countries have increased, our imports of manufactures have increased far more, and British industry is today in a relatively much weaker position in relation to the other industrial Powers of the EEC than it was when we entered the Community.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, as the noble Lord mentioned our trade figures with the EEC, may I ask him whether it would not be fair to compare them with the trade figures of the other parts of the world?
Lord KALDOR: Our trade figures with the other parts of the world show in fact a surplus, my Lords. That our industrial position is so much weaker today ill relation to the other Members of the EEC than it was five years ago is best shown by the fact that our manufacturing production is hardly any higher than it was in 1970, whereas in the case of all the other countries, despite the unique, prolonged and deep economic recession that occurred in the course of this decade, current production levels are 20 per cent. to 25 per cent. higher than they were in 1970.
It is difficult to see in what way we should benefit from the creation of a European monetary union, if one ignores such trivia as the convenience of tourists in entering Europe and not worrying about changes in the exchange rates. On the other hand, it is difficult to exaggerate the disadvantages inherent in the loss of power that any sovereign state possesses for the protection of its own interests.
The Earl of BESSBOROUGH: My Lords, on this question of the surrender of sovereignty—because he has started talking about it again—would the noble Lord agree that we have surrendered sovereignty to the IMF?
Lord KALDOR: My Lords, I was just about to expound on this very point if the noble Earl will allow me to do it at rather more length. We shall lose our freedom to pursue independent fiscal and monetary policies and our ability to take specific measures in a national emergency, at least in certain fields such as exchange control, which in national emergencies are very important. We shall lose rights which any sovereign country can claim for the protection of its vital national interests.
It is possible that some people take the view, as perhaps does the noble Earl, who initiated this debate, that our record in the matter of economic management has been such a poor one since the second world war that nothing can he lost by losing this power or handing it over to someone else. This is saying, in fact, that we would be better off without the sovereignty of Parliament, just as it is said of some of the British ex-colonies, justly or unjustly, that they have become

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worse off as a result of gaining their own sovereignty and that they were better off when they had no sovereignty.
This would be a more arguable case if in fact a central authority existed which was capable, through adequate fiscal powers, of enforcing the maintenance of equal standards in different parts of the Community, in the same way as our own Government in Westminster enforces equal standards in different parts of Britain in the matter of equal pensions, of social services, of the Health Service and of educational facilities. Through this, a large and invisible transfer takes place, or rather flows all the time from the richer to the poorer areas of the country. The central Government at Westminster, by collecting taxes on uniform criteria based on income or on expenditure, automatically takes more from the rich areas than from the poor areas, and, by giving the same benefits to the different areas in the field of social and welfare services of all kinds, automatically pays out more to the poorer areas than to the richer areas. An enormous transfer occurs the whole time from one part of the country to another, but it takes place invisibly. It is an automatic consequence of having a central Exchequer through which all money flows, of collecting the money on principles of taxation applied equally to everybody, and of providing services of the same standard irrespective of the riches or poverty of the particular area. The achievement of this end pre-supposes a strong central Government with wide powers of taxation and charged with responsibility not only for matters like defence but also over a large part of the field of social and economic expenditure, which, in the 20th century as against the 19th century, takes up the greatest part of total Government expenditure.
There is no prospect of anything like this emerging in the near future and there is no prospect of having a political union which will have a strong central government of the kind which exists in the United States today but which was not in existence for a long time after the American colonies had become independent. It would he foolish in the extreme, in the absence of such political institutions, to rely on the present methods and organisation of the Community to receive adequate compensation for economic losses in the form of regional subsidies and their like. We
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should in effect become part of the German Lebensraum or Wirtschaftsraum, but we should have no political say, no political power to ensure that our interests were protected in the same way as, for example, they are in the case of a poorer Land within the present German Federal Republic.
Many noble Lords spoke about the regrettable state of economic stagnation in Europe at present and answered without any argument that the creation of a monetary union would be an effective way of overcoming this stagnation. I would say it was just the opposite. As some noble Lords have mentioned, Germany is a country which is in the strongest economic position from the point of view of taking steps to secure a policy of economic expansion. She fps a large surplus in her balance of payments, yet for reasons which we may consider good or bad and which may be due to Philosophy or prejudice—who are we to teach the Germans economics, or how they should conduct their policy when they have done so much better than we have? —they are not prepared to take steps to ensure full employment for their own citizens. How, therefore, can we expect them—if we put them in the dominant position in which they would be bound to be put through the very fact of a monetary and economic union—to take more effective steps than the Government in Westminster do to protect the economic livelihood of the people of these Islands? The people of these Islands, particularly those in the outlying areas such as the North of England or Scotland, are already in a very poor condition. Any country which maintains achronic surplus in her balance of payments does in fact follow what used to be called before the war a "beggar-my-neighbour" economic policy. It gains employment, it gains prosperity, it gains wealth, at the expense of other people. It draws wealth to itself. It pursues therefore a form of predatory behaviour and any step towards integration enlarges the scope and importance of this type of behaviour.
As I said, without the monetary union the Germans have succeeded in maintaining a large surplus and have thereby increased employment within their borders and increased production to a level which is far higher than that of the less, fortunate partners of the Common Market. This process would be greatly enhanced, not diminished, if we followed the present

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customs union with more fundamental steps towards full economic and monetary integration.
Since the war, we have taken many foolish decisions from the point of view of our national interest. In the light of all this, I would not by any means rule out our taking even more foolish decisions in the future. Fortunately, not all the members of the European Community are equally foolish. I must confess that I would not trust my own Government not to resist the temptations of the German Government, and not to accept some modest step which gradually eased the way into something which is completely contrary to our national interest.
However, I would far rather trust other people such as the French or the Italians to look after their interests. Italy benefited enormously by having her currency tied to the dollar at a time when we had foolishly cut loose from the dollar in the mistaken belief that this would improve out economic situation. I cannot see Italy lightly entering into any such step. Despite the declarations of some of the French leaders in the past, I cannot see France doing so. France's remarkable economic prosperity since the Second World War could certainly not have been realised without frequent devaluations of the French franc in relation to the German mark. I think that since the 1950s the franc has been devalued in terms of the German mark at least eight times. The franc value of the mark is today two and a half times what it was in the 1950s. The noble Lord, Lord Roberthall, referred to this when he said that if different inflation rates persisted—and certainly differences in inflation rates have persisted for 20 or 30 years between France and Germany—then monetary union can spell disaster. I cannot see these countries lightly entering into commitments which would so seriously compromise their ability to pursue the best economic policies from their own point of view.
Some people, including I fear, some noble Lords in this House, have become so European that they have ceased to be patriots. However, I was relieved from the tone of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, that this view is not
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shared by her. And though as she said she spoke only for herself, possibly this is not a policy that animates her Party. I think that is far from true of the people of Britain at large.
8.45 p.m.
The SOLICITOR-GENERAL FOR SCOTLAND (Lord McCluskey): My Lords, may I begin by joining other noble Lords in thanking the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, for raising this matter and giving the House the opportunity to discuss it. May I offer him my personal thanks for his kindness in giving me advance notice of what he intended to say in order that I might better prepare my reply to this debate. Other noble Lords, in addressing themselves to this Question, have considerably widened the debate. The noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, did so after complaining how thinly attended was the House. One notable Lord has left. The attendance is thinner because it is the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, himself who has left.
I do not propose to follow him into the general debate about the European Economic Community. Nor dare I enter the arguments to which we have just listened, whether about the position of the cart and the horse or about monetarism, or about the other matters that have been spoken about with such expertise and differences by the various noble Lords. That is not because I disagree with all the points that have been made. I could pick out a number of points from the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Morris, my noble friend Lord Kaldor and the noble Lord, Lord Roberthall, with which I would agree. However, I do not myself want to widen the debate. I hope that your Lordships will understand if I attempt to take the question narrowly and therefore not indicate particular points of difference from what has been said.
As has been pointed out in this debate, discussion of economic and monetary union has a long history in the European Community although it is not referred to in the Treaty of Rome itself. It is indeed a later idea. In 1969 the Summit Meeting of the original Six at The Hague announced that plans would be worked out
"with a view to the creation of an economic and monetary union".

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By 1971 the European Council resolved to make the Community a single economy by 1980 with, in effect, a single currency and a single authority for domestic and external monetary management. That is a very far-reaching concept and it promotes diametrically different reactions, as we have seen in the course of this debate. A common Community currency would mean the elimination of exchange rate changes between member countries. A central monetary authority for the Community would remove much of the freedom that Member States have at the moment to determine their own fiscal policy, as the noble Lord, Lord Kaldor, has just been reminding us. It would, in short, involve very substantial transfers of economic sovereignty to the Community.
Since 1971 world conditions have changed radically. In particular the strong inflationary pressures of the 1970s, the upsurge in commodity prices, and the abrupt oil price rise at the end of 1973, have all had profound effects. The countries developed different policies in reaction to the crisis, and progress towards economic and monetary union was effectively halted. I would remind your Lordships of the White Paper on renegotiation in 1975 which stated bluntly, but I believe truthfully, that:
"events have shown that the programme of movement towards full economic and monetary union by 1980 was over-ambitious and unattainable".
This does not mean that the objective of economic and monetary union has been formally abandoned. Indeed, as late as December 1977 the European Council reaffirmed its attachment to the objective of economic and monetary union. But all Member States now accept that it has become a more distant goal.
Against this background the Community has had to try to combat the recession of the middle 1970s with more pragmatic and less idealistic policies. The Commission is now broadly in accord with this way of approaching problems and looks at economic and monetary union less as a matter of ideology than in terms of the contribution it can make to solving the present problems of unemployment, low growth and inflation in the Community. This line of argument is shown in the most recent Commission paper (to which reference has already
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been made), on the prospect of economic and monetary union which was presented to the European Council last December (COM(77)620). This paper laid emphasis on a gradual approach to economic and monetary union, an important part of which was to make progress towards the convergence of economic performance in Europe. At the same time, however, the President of the Commission, Mr. Jenkins, was advocating in his speeches what might perhaps be described as a more idealistic approach. His arguments h we been summarised by the noble Earl, Lord Bessborough, but I think that it is important to reiterate that Mr. Jenkins' bold proposals would involve very far-reaching transfers of economic sovereignty. The Government feel that the Commission are right in arguing in the paper to which I have referred that the Community is not yet politically prepared For these transfers, and that a gradual move towards economic and monetary union is therefore preferable. Her Majesty's Government, and other Governments in the Community, have been readier to build on the essentially practical approach of the Commission to stress the importance of ensuring, by concerted action among the Member States, that the economies of the EEC should grow more rapidly And more harmoniously.
Several noble Lords have, in their speeches, recognised the absolute importance of such harmony. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have been advocating, and working for, policies of concerted action for growth to be worked out at the European Summit in Bremen, and the World Economic Summit in Bonn in July. Her Majesty's Government very much hope that these meetings will have positive results.
I have explained to your Lordships that the Government have in recent weeks and months thought it best to lay the greatest emphasis on co-operation among the Member countries of the Comrmnity to secure growth and to reduce unemployment. In the Government's view, the best way of promoting the European idea is to convince the peoples of the Community that Member Governments concentrate and co-operate on real issues, and that membership is going to promote welfare.

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It is certainly true, as noble Lords have suggested, that the instability of currencies can be inimical to confidence among businessmen. That was graphically illustrated by the noble Earl, Lord Cromer. Instability of currencies can also stand in the way of the kind of growth we want to see. This is one reason why there has been renewed interest in the possibility of new currency arrangements in Europe. Your Lordships will all have seen—and some have mentioned—quite extensive Press comment about this. The noble Baroness, Lady Elles, asked me to say something about this. But your Lordships will not, I hope, press me for a detailed or definitive statement. It would be premature and necessarily incomplete.
This matter was one of those discussed at a meeting of the EEC's Finance Council in Luxembourg a week ago. My right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer was present, and there was a valuable exchange of views; not about the mechanics for a scheme, but about the principles on which a new scheme would have to be based if it were to be durable, and to serve the general interest. The Finance Ministers were generally agreed, for example, that a durable system would need to be founded on continued progress towards the convergence of economic performance. This is in line with the approach that I was mentioning earlier in my speech. A report of the Finance Council's discussion will be placed before the meeting of the European Council—the so-called European Summit—at Bremen next week. What the outcome of that further discussion may be, we must wait and see; but I can assure your Lordships that the discussion so far has been interesting and constructive, and I can at least venture to say that it will continue.
I was asked by the noble Baroness about the opportunities for debate. It may be that after the Bremen or the Bonn discussions noble Lords will, if they wish, find an opportunity to debate what emerges; but there will have to be much more discussion of, and indeed study of, the detailed mechanisms before the question arises of a choice of the precise way to seek and achieve currency stability in Europe—
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, will the noble and learned Lord allow me to intervene? Is any consideration being given to the publishing of some form of Green Paper or other Government document, which would set out the benefits or the alternatives on EMU? —because this is obviously a vital subject which will have to be discussed by the public at some time.
Lord McCLUSKEY: My Lords, I cannot positively say that that will be done, but certainly I take that as a suggestion from the noble Baroness, and I shall draw the attention of my right honourable friends to it.
We accept what several noble Lords have stressed; namely, that currency stability is obviously desirable, and would lead to the benefit of the economy and of trade. Indeed, it is for that very reason that Ministers are discussing it.
Reference was made to the role of the European Monetary Co-operation Fund. This is at present only embryonic, and carries out certain functions relating to the working of the present European currency margins agreement—the so-called Snake. If Community Governments so wished, this fund could be developed and built upon in quite ambitious ways, with functions relating to intervention in the foreign exchange markets, and to the provision and receipt of credit. I cannot say whether the European Council will wish further studies to be carried out of these quite complex and far-reaching ideas, but the Government would certainly be ready to join such further examination.
I do not know what comfort the noble Lord, Lord Banks, can take from the little that I have to say—perhaps not very much if he is looking for a resounding declaration of immediate and overriding political will. But, of course, I do not offer the resounding negative which my noble friend Lord Balogh sought. I can say that we agree that some progress on currency arrangements can take place before convergence is complete.
To summarise, I should say that the Government wish to continue to approach the question of achieving economic and monetary union in a pragmatic way with the fullest regard to what is practicable in a reasonable time-scale, and what is

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most helpful to the people of the Community. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Roberthall, that the Government are alert to the significance of the present disparities in economic performance, including inflation, to which he drew our attention. The Government's approach has led to emphasis on co-operation at the levels of economic policy making, and this is, we believe, the crucial element in the way forward in present circumstances. But alongside economic convergence, so long as this is clearly seen to be something which Governments are joining together to work for as a continuing process, it is also right that the Community should be discussing whether there could be durable and sustainable currency arrangements within the Community, which many would see as further evidence of progress towards economic and monetary union.