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[Mr. Ede.]
to everyone else concerned with the busi- ness of air raid precautions. As far as the relationships of Government Depart- ments with local authorities depend upon the personality of Ministers in charge of the services, I believe that the hon. Gentleman has built up an amount of good will and belief in his own desire to see the work well done that would have stood the Government in good stead. While it is not for me to assist the Prime Minister in the difficult task of shuffling the pack from time to time, I should have welcomed the hon. Gentleman being given some greater responsibility in the work which he has hitherto had. I hope, for the sake of continuity, that he will not be entirely withdrawn from that work. He has managed to build up relations that are of the very highest value to local authorities and, I imagine, to the Govern- ment.
The Government failed to realise the truth that was so clearly expressed by Milton when he said:
"The fidelity of enemies and allies is frail and perishing unless it be cemented by the principles of justice."
No one pretends that what has hap- pened during the past month has been in any way connected with justice. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition rightly said that there was no triumph for law and order in dealing with this matter at Munich, or for justice. Does anyone pretend that the wretched people who have been lying between the frontiers of Poland and Germany believe that there has been any consideration of justice for them in the talks of statesmen? We have seen the triumph of the threat of force, so complete that the German rulers now do not believe that they will ever have to use force to get what they
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want. I share the view that was pressed by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for East Bristol (Sir S. Cripps) in the Tribune" for the cur- rent week, and in no circumstances would I be a party to handing over one addi- tional person to the terrors of Nazi rule. I believe that this country still has the duty, clearly put forward by the poet to whom I have just referred, of seeing that the oppressed and the persecuted in all quarters of the world have a friend and supporter in this country. To suggest that we ought to hand over in any part of the world even one additional person to
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the terrors of that rule, with its denial of the rights of knowledge, of utterance and of argument, is to suggest complete desertion of everything for which the British people have ever stood.
We are in our present plight because the Government ran away from their own election pledges. In the speech of the Prime Minister this afternoon not a word was said about the League of Nations. I see that the French Radical Socialists have decided that it is dead; I should have thought that so soon after that proclamation of its death, the Prime Minister might have provided a wreath, but there was not a single mention of the League of Nations. In the Government election pledge they said:
"The League of Nations will remain, as heretofore, the keystone of British foreign policy.
We shall, therefore, continue
to do all in our power to uphold the Covenant and to maintain and increase the efficiency of the League.
Our attitude to the League
is dictated by the conviction that collective security by collective action can alone save us from a return to the old system which resulted in the Great War."
It is not as though the Government have sinned in ignorance. Having so clearly proclaimed what was the only possible policy for this country, they have de- liberately turned their back upon it and have spent three years in deserting the principles which they have placed before the electors. To-morrow we are to be faced with another of the surrenders which have made the history of the past three years the most lamentable and de- plorable in the whole history of the British people. There is nothing to compare with it, except the few years of the personal reign of King George III, and, after all, he only lost things that belonged to this nation. We have sheltered ourselves by giving away the liberty, the integrity and the hopes of democracies other than our
Own.
I sincerely hope that the time is not far distant when this Government, pro-
Times claimed this morning by the
"
My
as not too strong, will be replaced by a Government that will enable this country to return to the principles on which the Government secured their election. hon. Friends and myself on this side of this House had great difficulty at the last election in persuading people that we really stood for the League of Nations. I was questioned many times as to whether I could stand for the League of Nations
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than when he said that he would refuse to hand over a single British subject to Nazi rule.
Mr. Ede: I said that I would not be a party to handing over any human being in the world to Nazi rule.
International Situation 1 NOVEMBER 1938 when the Government had proclaimed their faith in it. I suggested then that the proclamation of the Government's faith was a great deal louder than the support which they would give to the League once they had secured election, and I turned out to be a true prophet. We have to get back to the belief that this country, as the leading domocracy in the world, owes to the world leader- ship in the paths of peace, even at the cost of sacrifice, to maintain law and order. Wherever I go in the country I find increasing realisation of the extent to which our prestige has been lowered and our opportunity for good destroyed by the actions which had, not their last but merely their latest, exemplification in the terrible surrender at Munich.
Yet,
as was so rightly said by the hon. Mem- ber for East Aberdeen, the Prime Minister was in a position in which he ought never to have been placed.
The pilots who bring vessels into the Tyne live in my constituency, and a story is told about one of them in the early days of the War. He was asked by a wealthy American to bring a yacht into the Tyne, but when the American saw the somewhat rough and rude-looking man who came on board he was rather perturbed at trusting the vessel to him. The American took him down into the chart room and conducted an examina- tion regarding all the reefs and shoals that make the navigation of the mouth of the Tyne difficult. He asked the old pilot whether he knew, one after the other, where they were, and on each occasion the man said No." Greatly alarmed, the yacht owner turned to him and said: What do you know? Well," said the pilot, I know where the deep water
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is, and that's where I want to be." The Government know where the deep water is and they have known it all these last three years after their election address, and that is where they have consistently refused to be. The condemnation of them is not that they erred because forces were too great for them, but because, knowing the right, they deliberately chose the wrong.
8.15 p.m.
Brigadier-General Spears: I should like at once to say how much there was in the speech of the hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) with which I agreed, but on no point did I agree with him more
Brigadier-General Spears: It may be that there are other people whom it would not be in our power to save from being handed over to Nazi rule, but it certainly is within our power to prevent the hand- ing over of British subjects to Nazi rule, and I think that that might well be taken as one of our standards, something on which we could make a stand such as was After demanded by the hon. Member. all, we shall have to make a stand some- where. It seems to me that, if we give away this and give away that, each time leaving ourselves a little weaker, we may at last find ourselves with nothing to give away but our own liberty. It seems to me that we can make a stand on that point, and that it is a stand to which the whole British Empire would respond.
There are one or two points that were taken up by the Prime Minister in his speech to which I should like to refer He spoke of the census upon which had been based the partition of Czecho- slovakia. The Leader of the Opposition, in his speech, had complained of the fact that the census upon which this partition has been based was that of 1910. On that point I am entirely at one with the Leader of the Opposition. I can see no justifica- tion whatsoever for having given way to the Germans on that point, and it is an extremely important point, because the wretched country of Czechoslovakia has been torn to pieces on the basis of this 1910 census. I think it has already been mentioned in this Debate that in the 1910 census, when those lands were under Austria, the basis was what was called the language of intercourse, that is to say, the common language spoken by people when communicating with one another. But in the house of an Austrian official the Czech servants would be counted as Germans, because they spoke German as the language of intercourse, and, of course, the Austrian officials were counted as Germans, Moreover the Jews were counted as Germans in 1910, and are so counted by the Germans to-day, though we know what they do with them once they have served their purpose.
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