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[MR. PICKTHORN.] regard the inhabitants of Eire as being in a different position from normal sub- jects. They may not regard them as being in a different position, but perhaps foreign governments will. Perhaps the International Court at The Hague will.

Has all this been thought out? If it has been thought out, what are the results of the excogitations of the hon. Gentleman the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture? We ought to be told, or he should not be left in charge of the Debate. All these points I have taken are in themselves small instances, but they involve great principles. Any one of them would have been enough to bring down a government in any earlier generation. The Govern- ment's incompetence in the management of foreign policy matters far more than having even a wrong foreign policy, if they had one:

I come now to foreign policy in the more general and ordinary and drawing- room sense, and I want particularly to refer do not think this is odd when I am talking of foreign policy-to Malaya. I want particularly to refer to Malaya because hon. Gentlemen may remember that we made Malaya rather one of the topics of the short Session. [An HON. MEMBER: "It is a colonial topic."] It has a lot to do with foreign policy, as hon. Gentlemen will see in a minute. It also has something to do with agriculture, which may cheer up the hon. Gentleman from that Ministry. We asked what was being done about sending rubber from Singapore to Russia, and there was no reply. Accordingly I wrote to the Foreign Office and asked for the informa- tion, and after some difficulty and letters marked "

confidential" and all that sort

of thing, I got the figures. I said that all this "confidential business seemed slightly absurd and that if I were the sort of chap who was interested in statistics, I could have got the figures out of published statistics. I was told that it was not desired to draw public attention to the matters because might be an embarrassment. What could it embarrass? Apparently commercial negotiations with Russia.

Almost before this correspondence was over, we heard the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He knows about foreign

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policy, too. He knows which concerns abroad are really democratic and ought to receive British money. He is another of these chaps like the Minister of Educa tion and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture to whom foreign policy is not a mystery. We had a speech from him on 1st November, in which he said that everybody knows that the Russians are carrying on a cold war all over the world and using every commercial factor possible in a cold war against us, and against the recovery of civilisation. If hon. Members will refer to HANSARD of 1st November, they will find that I am fair. How can we con- duct foreign policy when the Foreign Office is saying to people, "Look here, old chap. Do be decent. Don't be a cad. The Russians do not like the smell of rubber. Leave rubber out," while the Chancellor of the Exchequer is declaring that a cold war is being fought against us all over the world. The thing is complete nonsense.

The last thing I wish to say is this. I disagree with the hon. Gentleman the Member for Gateshead (Mr. Zilliacus). I agree with the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I think cold war is being fought. I think a 'cold was being fought even before the "hot" war was finished. I think it should have been recognised sooner than it was. The right hon. Gentleman the

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Minister of Defence told us the other day that it was not recognised until last December. I think that was certainly two years too late for any reasonable person to recognise it was being fought.

What is the worst that can happen when a war is fought against you? The worst thing that can happen is that you do not fight back. Of course, there is a kind of schoolboy paradox in suggesting that when an undeclared guerilla which is what a

"cold" war is-is being fought, you should declare an undeclared guerilla back. I fully see the logical difficulty; but I think that the time had come when it was somebody's duty to say that we have very considerable means for fighting a cold

war back, and that we ought long ago to have been using those means. We ought long ago to have been using every conceivable factor within our con- trol-long, long ago.

We ought long,

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long ago to have brought to an end the invasion of Greece, because that is what

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is. The invasion of the Peloponnese, curiously enough, is carried on mainly from Hungary. No doubt the right hon. Gentleman opposite knows that. That is not such an awfully easy thing for us to get at. The land invasion of Greece is carried on mainly from Albania and partly, also, from Yugoslavia and Bul- garia and that we could deal with.

Of all the word's uttered-I will not say "the things he said "this afternoon by the right hon. Gentleman, these are the words with which I have most sym- pathy that the time is beginning to come when we must look even twice at U.N.O. I am not quoting him exactly, but that is what he said-that the time

has come. His Majesty's Government ought now to make plain to the people of this country, on what great affair or what small affair has U.N.O. helped? Have things gone better in Palestine than they would but for U.N.O.? Have they gone better in Greece? In Palestine the women and children, about half a million of them-I do not know what trade unions have asked permission to send money on purely humanitarian grounds to the nearly half million Arab women and children who have just been pushed out of Palestine in a new operation of war-not, as one hon. Gentleman said the other day, "These things happen in war"; this is a new operation of war.

Is my information correct? I do not swear that it is: that the difficulty of providing, somehow, stopgap provision for those women and children is not so much the absence of actual things- blankets, saucepans, potatoes and so on -as the absence of organisation. And will the right hon. Gentleman, or who- ever is to speak for him in reply, tell us: Has U.N.O. been, in their judgment, as helpful in that matter as it could have been, or has it not? I think we ought to know. Similarly, about Greece, I think we ought to know this.

Of course, with a new organisation like U.N.O. there is a sort of benevolent lying which is proper, or at least inevit- able. You have got to pretend that the thing is being useful a little before it is being useful. But if you go on pretend- ing it is being useful long after it is obvious to every one that is it obviously useless, then you are sunk, and then the time has come, in my judgment, when the watchdogs of the public have got

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to say, "Oi!

Has that moment come or has it not? I think it is the duty of right hon. Gentlemen opposite to tell Would it have been possible through or with U.N.O.--and if it is not possible through or with U.N.O. do they not think it necessary, in their duty of trying to stop human unhappiness, that we should persuade the United States Government that jointly between us we should stop Albania being used as a place d'armes for the invasion of Greece? Do they or do they not think it can be done through U.N.O.? If they do not, do they or do they not think that all the lip service they have paid all their lives to their love of peace and to their hatred of human hardship and so on compel them now, with or without U.N.O., to get that thing done?

7.5 p.m.

Mr. Cocks (Broxtowe): I am glad to see that the Foreign Secretary is here. I hope his health is fully restored as a result of his stay in Eastbourne. He made this afternoon what I think-and what I am afraid I must say—was a dis- appointing and depressing speech on a very dreary and confused situation. He stated that he was reporting on European progress, but apart from a statement showing that some advances were being made towards the development of Western Union and the Atlantic Pact. of which I am very glad to hear and to know, it seemed, rather, a report of something which 12 months ago was bogged in the mire and has since sunk into it more deeply.

Worse and worse the position seems to grow. There is no indication, as the right hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. C. Davies) said, as to how we were to get out or how we were to get on to firmer ground. We know, for example, that the airlift is keeping up in Berlin; we were very pleased and encouraged by the result of the elections recently in Berlin; but the situation there cannot possibly go on for ever. It seems to me rather useless to go on repeating the same old if" formula about Berlin currency and the blockade which, we know, will never be translated into concrete results. I will return to this. if I may, in a moment.

I have studied and followed foreign affairs fairly closely for more than 40 years.

I do not think I have known

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