I remind the House that I have set out a timetable for today's debate. We must stick to that timetable to protect hon. Members who are initiating the later debates.

I want to raise the question of whether we are doing all that we should be doing by way of guidance in schools about dangerous drugs.

I accept at once that there are some difficult judgments to be made here. It is possible to argue various propositions. It is arguable whether information, particularly wrong information, stimulates curiosity; it is arguable whether it is better to guide teachers and leave them to guide children or better to attempt direct communication with the children; and it is arguable whether guidance given should be limited to areas where drugs are known to be a problem or whether preventive education should be extended to all areas.

All these are matters that we have argued about for a long time, and perhaps it is time to reach decisions. My main purpose today is to suggest that the time has come for some firm conclusions and some action on them.

I think it beyond argument that there is already a very serious problem here. We are not simply talking about young people of under the age of 21 in terms of criminal statistics. A number of the young involved here are of school age— between 13, or occasionally even lower, and 16. It is very difficult to quantify, but we are not without some evidence of the extent of the problem in the schools. Quite apart from the impression that one gets talking to people, certain amount of solid evidence is coming in from the results of a survey carried out last year in 65 districts all outside Central London. It was very thorough, and its findings were very disturbing. As the Minister will probably know, it was a survey undertaken by the Women's Group on Public Welfare associated with the National Council of Social Services.

It is important to stress the responsible status of the group. It consists of representatives of some 50 national women's organisations and other voluntary organisations. It was founded by Miss Margaret Bondfield in 1939. In this instance the inquiry was conducted through the Standing Conferences of Women's Organisations, of which there are 111 in England and Wales. Sixty-five of these conferences took part in the inquiry. They conducted it very thoroughly. They consulted medical officers of health, doctors, police, probation officers, and so on, in their localities. One conclusion that they reached was that drug taking among young people is already a serious problem in this country, and is on the increase.

I have always felt that drug taking among school children is by far the grimmest feature of this epidemic. I have come to learn a little about the whole field and now accept that over much of it we have to reconcile ourselves to a policy of containing the spread as far as we can and maintaining the victims, or at least some of them. Creators and enforcers of the law here have to realise their limitations. But children stand at risk and I think that even the most permissive members of our society would accept that there are clear obligations towards them which we are failing to discharge.

I assume that the hon. Gentleman has had a chance to see the report. It was thorough and disciplined. It is never satisfactory to have to try to convey to the House the contents of a thorough and disciplined report. But I will give the salient facts objectively.

Out of the 65 districts investigated, 37 offered no concrete evidence of drug taking—the survey was completed about nine months ago—while 20 districts submitted positive evidence of drug taking in local schools, which is a proportion of almost one-third. Drug taking by school children was described as not very widespread in nine districts; in 11 districts it was a serious problem. Thus, in one district in six of those investigated, drug taking among children was shown to be a serious problem. If London had been included, I fear that the result proportionately would have been a good deal worse.

Between the lines of the report, there is a good deal of other disturbing evidence. What are we to make of the unnamed county where the head of the drugs squad reported that, after a case involving the death of a girl from drug taking, the incidence of drug offences in her town rose. I quote one main conc-clusion from the report:

"Four things stand out from the inquiry. The acquiescence of too many parents to teenagers being out all night; the strange anomaly, in a country where premises selling liquor are strictly controlled, that coffee clubs and bars are allowed to stay open all night; the extent to which school teachers have tried to help by learning what they should be on the look out for—symptoms, vulnerable personalities, the dangerous social activities of their pupils out of school hours, and so on."

The fourth is not relative to the debate, by the third takes us to the heart of the subject. I am convinced that school teachers are only too anxious to make a contribution here. I hear from many of them that they want to help, but some of them are desperately in need of better informed guidance than they are getting now.

I have come to the conclusion that the right approach is, "Trust the teachers". Give the teachers the facts and the guidance and leave the rest to their discretion. That is the right answer to what I know has been a burning question in the Department, and which is discussed in the report, of how far preventive education should go. I say that we should leave it to the teachers. I am supported in this view by Dr. Anthony Wood, of Bristol, with whom I discussed this and whose booklet, "Drug Dependance", has deservedly become a best seller among organisations and teachers and others concerned with this matter and who want to be informed.

When we settle for teachers' discretion we answer another question widely discussed. This is how wide the instruction should go. Few districts can consider themselves totally immune from the problem and, therefore, ignore it. None can be omitted. All are to a greater or lesser degree at risk. It is the natural inclination to suppose that the districts closest to London or the big conurbations are the greatest risk, but surprisingly enough, the evidence shows that the problem arises even in predominantly rural areas, where one might have expected not to find this sort of trouble.

I think that teachers everywhere have to accept that, for the time being—and they already do accept it—this form of instruction has to be added to their burden, for how long we do not know. It is no secret that a sub-committee of the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Drugs has considered this matter and has made certain recommendations. There is a view, which must be weighed, that, as well as anything else that may be done, teachers' information should be conveyed direct to the young people in some form. I think that this view feels that young people who are not consulted about these things become resentful.

There is more than one way of dealing with the matter. Some of the independent schools have gone about it in this way. They have sessions between the headmaster or master or mistress responsible and perhaps a dozen or 20 leaders of the school, leaving it to those school leaders to do a good deal of the surveillance and help by example. That is quite a good approach.

It is also questionable whether this should be done within the general context of health education, or whether it should be confined to the particular subject. I believe that this, again, could be left to head teachers or teachers themselves. If need be, we could provide material and they could decide whether it should be read by the children direct or not. I recognise and acknowledge one particular difficulty in that Ministers are still awaiting the report, which will come from another subcommittee of the Advisory Committee, about this difficulty in relation to canabis and L.S.D. The hon. Gentleman probably knows the stage which has been reached.

The argument is that, if we mislead the young people now with incomplete information, we shall lose their confidence, and therefore we must wait until we can give full guidance to those responsible. That is not an insuperable barrier to providing some guidance now. It would be more convincing if one big authority, the Inner London Education Authority, had not already demonstrated sensible limited action as being possible. It has given a disguised lead.

I have a copy of the advice it sent out to head teachers at the beginning of last year in a circular with an appendix. What is important about it is that it has since been followed up. In February this year, there were two whole day conferences for heads and other teachers, one for each side of the river in London. These conferences ostensibly were on health education and covered the whole subject but in the morning session half the time was devoted to drugs and the other half to sex.

I understand from the authority that these sensible conferences are to be followed up by divisional conferences. Surely this is a wise approach. If it is, ought not other local education authorities to be doing more and should they not be encouraged to do the same? Perhaps some are. I know of one which is. But what advice are they getting about this from the Department? Ought not conferences on health education, with drugs as an essential feature, to be now part of a national programme?

I am not suggesting that local education authorities all need prodding by the Department but it should by now have acquired a great deal of information as to the right way to set about this. There must be in the Department the experiences of a great many local education authorities and a diversity of means by which the job could be done. I read the role of the Department as being to assimilate all this and to offer guidance in accordance with, as it seems to the Department, the best practices. There are damaging consequences of not offering sensibls guidance. Without it, there is not only a tendency to neglect through ignorance what may be the beginning of an epidemic in the school, or even a developing epidemic, which sometimes has been overlooked. There is also a tendency to panic and do the wrong thing when suddenly taken by surprise.

We had an example of that the other day in Welwyn Garden City. I will not go into the details, because they are not very relevant to what we are talking about. It was serious, because it revealed something that we have been very slow to comprehend. Incidentally, the Welwyn Garden City incident, as the Minister knows, was not about amphetamines or "blues" or "purple hearts". It was about heroin. It emerged that not all young people who destroy themselves with heroin are defective personalities or innocent victims. There was a suggestion of rebellion here, part of a much wider complex, among a tiny minority, but one which we cannot ignore.

This can become a grisly form of protest. It is quite well known; it is recognised by psychiatrists working in this field. As one put it after the Welwyn Garden City episode

"they are cocking a snook at respectable values—at trying to keep healthy and alive."

That is an aspect of the matter which we must not dismiss as nonsense; because it is not. This tiny minority enjoys, in a wider, if somewhat narrow, circle, something akin to hero worship in some places. This is a situation which must be taken in hand. It carries very great dangers indeed. This minority, though it is tiny, is thoroughly dangerous, and it can be infectious. We must treat it as such.

The sequel to all this, as the Minister knows, was a letter sent to 2,000 parents of teenagers in Hertfordshire by six well-intentioned headmasters in Welwyn Garden City. This letter, naturally achieved some prominence in the national Press. I have no doubt that the motives of the head teachers were of the highest. Of course, they were. However, I am not sure whether the methods they adopted were altogether prudent. They acted in default of action by anybody else. They took the initiative because, as it seemed to them, no one else had taken it.

This is something which the Government cannot shrug off. I know all about proper relationships between the Department and local education authorities. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Handsworth (Sir E. Boyle), who, I hope, will say a few words, knows much more about it. I know the Whitehall distinctions between guidance, instructions and advice. I know the very delicate balance which must be maintained between Whitehall Departments and authorities such as local education authorities.

However, the time for semantics is over. The Government have a duty first to make up their mind what the right courses of action might be and, given that—I have suggested what courses of action might be followed—then to get on with it. There must be no delay. I hope that the Under-Secretary will not talk today about bringing Pamphlet No. 49 on health education up to date. That was the last offering we had from the Department on this. I think that does not meet the case.

We are not talking here about hundreds of children. We are now talking about thousands. I am afraid that the number involved must be reckoned —I am weighing my words carefully— in thousands; that is to say, those with access to or some experience of "pep" pills and/or "reefers", which means cannabis. The teaching profession, many of whom are deeply troubled by this, has been ready to do what is required, but it is a much more complex business than many of them have yet been able to understand.

When we talk about children who take drugs, we do not talk entirely in terms of miscreants. I wish that we were talking only in terms of miscreants. It would be easy if all those involved were doing it simply for kicks or giggles. A proportion, which is again impossible to quantify, are taking pills because they are under stress at home, under stress from examinations, under stress in some emotional situation, under the sort of stress which is inseparable from certain stages of maturity. Indeed—I know this from the medical profession—there is a small minority who are doing so licitly. Some youngsters at school are having certain drugs prescribed for them.

We ought to try to discover more about this. The Department should discover more. There is no doubt that it could. We should know the relationship between examinations and pills. We have discussed this in terms of the universities. We must realise, too, that O and A levels can lead to this kind of thing.

Whether it is licit or illicit, I do not think that we can treat lightly resort to habit-forming, mind-changing drugs by schoolchildren; because for a proportion, albeit still mercifully a very small one, this is the brink of tragedy. Once they are over the brink, there is rarely a successful recall.

Therefore, I think that we must move into action. I think we ought to move more quickly than we have been doing. There is no doubt about the evidence; that cannot be disputed. In my view, there is no dispute now about what the right course of action is. I ask the Department to act.

The whole House is grateful to the right hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes), not only for initiating this debate, but also for the action he has been taking over a number of months on this acute problem. The contribution the right hon. Gentleman made this morning is one of the most useful he has made on this subject, because he has tried to get at the start of the problem—what is to to be done for younger people, how they can be educated at school before a habit may be acquired later.

The right hon. Gentleman said that there is a serious increase in this problem among schoolchildren. The various reports he mentioned give chapter and verse of how this is occurring. This is an acute problem. It is not only a problem for schoolchildren. It is one for society as a whole. This is where we are trying to take our responsibility. At the same time as we direct our attention to the problem, we must put it into perspective, because there is a tendency for everybody to believe that every youngster—every teenager, etc.—is a drug addict.

In fact, a greater number of youngsters today are involved in constructive leisure activities than was ever the case. Recently, I went to the Royal Festival Hall for a Bach recital. About 2,000 teenagers were there listening to the music, which is not exactly what one would expect from the "pop" group type of personality.

Having said that the problem must be put into perspective, we must do something to tackle it. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I am very much in the position of asking the questions rather than having many of the answers. There is basically a problem of research. I ask my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary to have a further look at the way in which, if we are to have effective influence on children at school, the background of research can be undertaken by those qualified to undertake it.

I was involved a little while ago with the excellent work of Dr. P. A. L. Chappie, who has taken special notice of the way in which one can stop addiction from starting. The difficulty which arose when it came to teaching in schools was that, the moment a research project was started, if care was not taken the school was labelled—"There is a research project going on here into addiction. Therefore, this school is for drug addicts". The Department must examine the way in which the necessary background can be obtained and facilities given without at the same time denigrating a school or raising genuine fears in a neighbourhood.

This is also a problem involving parents. Because of its high publicity value, because it is the kind of thing which excites newspaper headlines, practically every parent, especially of the teenage generation, is in a state of fairly constant anxiety. Whatever education can be carried out in the schools, there must be some follow-through. That which is done in the home must follow on what is done at school.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to the problem in Welwyn Garden City. We have had to provide special hospital facilities to cater for what is going on in that area. I wonder what effect the large factory in that area which is producing amphetamines has had on the teenage group in the area, as well as on other sections.

I visited the factory a few years ago and was satisfied about the precautions taken to prevent a release of "purple hearts". Despite those precautions there is now an increasing problem of addition in the area. The process of teaching has to get away from moral attitudes. We cannot preach to youngsters about this. One of the tragedies about the youngsters who are "hooked" —whether upon amphetamines or on the hard drugs—is that they are usually the best of our community, the nonconformists, someone trying to think for themselves, a little bit different. Usually they are something of a rebel against authority.

This House has a long history of men, who in their youth were rebels, and who later rose to greatness. A lad may start cigarette smoking at 7, 8, or 9, and is the class hero. Soon that becomes stale, and he goes on to the "pep" pills to impress his colleagues, the soft drugs, smoking of "pot," and that becomes part of the classroom mythology.

It is necessary that action should be taken to give teachers the right kind of refresher course, enabling them to diagnose problems among their students. It is one thing to find where the problem is and quite another, having found it, to understand the therapeutic treatment necessary in order to prevent the spreading of this infection. The tragedy about this revolt of the young is that we, their elders, are impotent. One "Rolling Stone" is the equivalent of about 100 Malcolm Muggeridges in his effect on the school generation. From our situation, we can try to be understanding, to put ourselves in the shoes of these youngsters; what we cannot do is to understand the whole of their emotional backgrounds and their developing period, and communicate with them.

In politics, we frequently talk about our failure to communicate. The big barrier, which has found expression in the violent forms of student behaviour here and elsewhere, is the inability to communicate. This debate is about a specific area where communication is of more importance than any other. We have to undertake research to discover how we can prevent youngsters from beginning the habit which will in some way be injurious to themselves and the community. I am sure that this problem can be tackled, and that we will come to think of it as the madnesses of the late 1960s and early 1970s. We must pay more attention to this, and get away from the headline approach. Youngsters have a very real problem. They are meeting a very difficult world. Whether the sins of the fathers are eternally to be visited on the children, I do not know. Once one begins to tackle one part of society which has got out of gear, one is then criticising the whole of society. It is not just the "pushers" who are responsible—we all have a responsibility for the kind of world we have built.

I join with my hon. Friend the Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt), in thanking the right hon. Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes), for giving us the opportunity to discuss this problem rationally. One has to keep an extremely delicate balance here.

I entirely agree with the philosophy of the right hon. Gentleman, which was to be found in the phrase, "Trust the teachers". The whole of curricular studies, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Handsworth (Sir E. Boyle), whom I am glad to see here, will know, is based on the premise that one should trust the teachers to teach what they feel to be necessary in the way they wish to do so.

The rôle of central Government and my Department is to stimulate, coordinate and co-operate with teachers to help them by providing thoughts, ideas and pamphlets for discussion, together with teaching techniques. The difficulties of maintaining a balance came out in the right hon. Gentleman's speech. I agree about trusting the teacher, but he went on to ask for a rather more authoritarian approach from my Department than the policy of trusting teachers would allow. He particularly asked me not to spend a lot of time talking about pamphlets which the Department intended to publish.

I am sorry if he does not want to hear about this, but if his philosophy is correct most of our influence must arise from the publication of pamphlets, and through the rôles of the medical officers and H.M. Inspectors in the schools. This comes down to issuing guidance and advice in conjunction with educationalists, doctors and others. The school curricula is a very sacred thing, and once a headmaster has been appointed no one can interfere with what he does. One can try to influence him, and bring good things to his attention, but at the end of the day that is as far as one can go.

It is on that basis that my Department issues its pamphlets. One of the criticisms that the right hon. Gentleman might have had is that we have been a long time revising our health education pamphlet, No. 31. I have some sympathy with that point of view and was prepared to admit it to the House. If one is to treat health education as a whole and drug-taking by young people or school children as part of that whole, then it does a good deal of damage to single these things out for special treatment. It is extremely important, having regard to the whole of the school population, to keep the thing in proportion. This may best be done if I tell the House that as far as we know, out of a school population of 7 million there are only two known heroin addicts.

It is not so much the size of the problem which is the concern at the moment, but the rate of increase that is worrying us, and the educational authorities and doctors. I would like to talk about the figures for heroin addicts as known to the Home Office until 1966, to show the growth.

In 1960, there was one such known addict. In 1961 there were two, then three, then 17, then 40, and in 1965 there was a great jump to 145. The last known figure, that for 1966, is 329. Those figures are for the under-20s, which age includes both the school and the youth populations. That figure of 329 out of the whole of the youth population is an insignificant one, but the point made by the right hon. Gentleman is well taken, that the rate of growth is worrying.

It is not that which bothers me. The hon. Gentleman is dealing with figures for narcotics. I was talking about those who took "pep" pills, smoked "reefers", and were on a wide range of what are miscalled "soft" drugs.

I shall come to soft drugs in a few moments. I am not basing all my arguments on the taking of heroin. Cannabis does not come into either category. It is an intoxicant rather than a narcotic. One of the difficulties, particularly in respect of the controversy about cannabis, is that we are awaiting the advice of people who are considering the matter. I think that the right hon. Gentleman has a more intimate knowledge of what they are doing than I have, because he is a member of the appropriate committee.

We ought to do all that we can to make the dangers of each of these drugs and addiction to them known throughout the country, because there is clear evidence that the first stage, which might be thought to be caused through experimentation, and which some people say is not dangerous, can lead people on to the harder drugs. That is the danger, and it was to get the figures in proportion that I listed the number of heroin addicts among children under 20.

The pamphlet "Health Education" which the Department publishes, is designed specifically to show teachers the whole range of health education subjects which ought to be tackled in a healthy school curriculum, and drug taking and the dangers of drugs are one part of the whole. It is my view, that of my advisors, and of the inspectorate, that it is of the utmost importance, when talking about drug taking, to keep it as part of the whole of health education. Many local education authorities feel that there is a considerable danger in omitting drug taking from a comprehensive book on health education and concentrating special attention on it in a separate pamphlet. I think that the figures which I have given, and the other figures for soft drugs, bear out that contention.

We started to revise the pamphlet on health education about two or three years ago, but, because it covers every subject, and because it is written by a joint panel of Her Majesty's Inspectorate, school medical officers and other medical advisers, it has largely been rewritten. There has been a much greater delay than I should have liked, but I am sure that our advisers were right to try to get it accurate and to settle the various degrees of emphasis which should be placed on various problems and not concentrate entirely on drugs. The pamphlet is now at the printers, and will be avail- able for publication in July, that is, in a month's time.

Can one produce a pamphlet such as that which will be the last word for any length of time? Surely this kind of thing has to be revised fairly constantly? What has been the difficulty about the revision over the last three years?

It is not only drug-taking which has caused the delay. It deals with all aspects of health education, with everything from the toes to the head. It represents a fundamental rethink, which I consider is necessary from time to time. The difficulty about the drug-taking section is that certain drugs become fashionable at different times. If one waits too long to make sure that one has all the right answers to one set of drug-taking habits, one is overtaken by events. A new drug becomes the "in" thing and the pamphlet is never sent out.

How far has the experience of the I.L.E.A., to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) referred, been taken into account in the new edition of the pamphlet?

That is a fair question, with which I shall deal later.

I cannot read to the House the chapter on drugs, but perhaps I might list the headings with which it deals. First, there is the nature and extent of the drug abuse. Secondly, there is the problem of definition, an attempt to define the terms, including addiction, so that we can help teachers to meet the problems.

Next, there is an attempt to summarise the properties of all the drugs which are being misused, and especially to define the symptoms produced. This is what most education authorities are concerned about. They want to give teachers practical help in the classroom so that, at an early stage, they can detect the symptoms and call in help from school medical officers and others.

Next, it tries to give general advice to authorities and teachers about what has been done, and what can be done. Finally, it tries to encourage a sympathetic but clear-sighted view of the problem as a whole. I believe that this new thinking and new look will be of great value to teachers who are likely to be confronted with the problems of drug-taking, and will help them to deal with the problems in the context of health education.

When Questions first started to be asked in the House by the right hon. Gentleman and others, we gave a good deal of thought to what we in the Department ought to do to gain as much information as possible about the problem The right hon. Gentleman is right in saying that one of our difficulties is a lack of information about its extent. We contacted every local education authority in the country, all 162 of them, something which the Department rarely does, and asked for specific information about the taking of both hard and soft drugs in their areas. I am glad to tell the House that 156 of the 162 authorities have replied. We also wrote to each school medical officer for those authorities. I think, therefore, that the last charge which can be made against the Department is one of complacency.

Simultaneously with that action we appointed within the Department a medical officer with special responsibility for dealing with this problem of drug-taking. This meant within the school medical service the Government had one officer with special responsibility for coordinating arrangements with school medical officers, to work in close relationship with the Home Office, the police, and so on. I think that that happy arrangement largely meets the fears expressed by the right hon. Gentleman.

Although the right hon. Gentleman is right in saying that more concern is expressed about hard drugs than about soft ones, taking the two categories together, an extremely small number of education authorities and school medical officers thought that they had much of a problem in their areas. A few thought that there could be more of a problem than they were able to substantiate in writing. Lancashire, for example, in a survey which we took in July, 1967, reported a few cases but added the view that the size of the problem was unknown. Seven education authorities thought that they had a slight problem in their areas.

Therefore, certainly less than 10 per cent. of the education authorities thought that they had a problem of any magnitude, although it is true to say that most of them really did not know but had done their best to find out in reply to the Department's circulars.

I am, however, glad to say that although the local education authorities thought that they did not have much of a problem, they did not regard this as a reason for complacency. A great number of them, on the instigation of the Department's circular, at once undertook to give specific attention to the problem. Sixty-two such education authorities, for example, have organised special conferences of head teachers, past teachers, principals of further education colleges, youth club leaders, health service staff, parent-teacher associations and the like. Fifty-eight education authorities have made use of film materials and circulars to ensure that these responsible bodies give some of their attention to the matter.

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman was kind enough to draw attention to the excellent pamphlet "Drug Dependence" issued by the Bristol education authority. The right hon. Gentleman described it as a best-seller. Twenty thousand copies have already been sold and it has gone to four issues. It is a pamphlet for which my advisers have nothing but the highest praise. They feel that in the absence of more specific guidance, it provided extremely helpful advice to local authorities and my Department commended it to all the education authorities.

In addition, we drew upon the experience of I.L.E.A., which was another specific question I was asked. One of the medical officers in my Department has attended meetings of teachers from I.L.E.A. and has kept in close co-operation with head teachers.

The policy of the Department as a whole can, therefore, be best summed up by my saying that we now have a medical officer specially charged with this question. We have revised the whole of our health education pamphlet and, in addition, we have commended the Bristol and other pamphlets to the education authorities. Over 140,000 leaflets and 4,000 posters have been issued throughout the country as a result of this activity.

We are working in the closest cooperation with the Home Office and other authorities, the Ministry of Health and the hospitals We are ready at a moment's notice, whenever a problem arises, to take the initiative within the Department. This is most important. We are trying to keep our finger on the pulse. This was specifically true of the Welwyn Garden City case, of which the right hon. Gentleman spoke and which, as he said, is mainly a problem of soft drugs.

It is rather difficult, for reasons which the House will understand, for me to go too closely—

They were not only soft drugs at Welwyn. There was heroin among them.

Yes—there were soft drugs in parts of Surrey and elsewhere.

The House may like to know that at Welwyn Garden City there seems to be a much greater problem than has emerged elsewhere. In the whole of Hertfordshire, 137 cases have been uncovered, of which 71 are in the Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield areas. These are extremely disturbing figures although I am glad to say that only three of the 137 cases concern schoolchildren. All the rest are in the youth age range between 16 and 20.

One of the reasons why such numbers have been uncovered at Welwyn Garden City is that the new co-operative machine between the police in particular, the local authority and the local education authority, with the consequent concentration of attention, has produced this information. It would be quite wrong, particularly today, in view of what we have read in the papers, for us to go into the special reasons except to say that the source of the drugs supplied in Hertfordshire was always thought to be in London. This is a matter which has considerably engaged the attention of the appropriate authorities.

The final thing I wish to say is again to make a plea that this is a matter which we should keep in proportion and on which, to use the right hon. Gentleman's words, we should maintain a sense of balance. There is no doubt that even when one considers the amount of experimentation that is going on in soft drugs, which is, perhaps, a matter of greater concern than the hard drug addiction, although that position is bad enough, it is extremely important to get the matter in proportion.

The mass of the young people, certainly the overwhelming mass of the school population, are good, wholesome youngsters who are not taking drugs, are not thinking of taking them and are not experimenting with them. One of the aims of our policy—and this is why it is so difficult to discuss these matters fully in debate—is not to put ideas into the heads of youngsters where these evil ideas are not at present to be found. The majority of people are good and wholesome.

It is extremely interesting to note the reaction of some schoolchildren at Welwyn, in Hertfordshire. I have a cutting from the Welwyn Times of 17th May this year showing that the over-concentration of attention, as the schoolchildren see it, on the problem in their town caused them, and particularly the schoolgirls, to hit back at the slur of having their town called a "junkie-town".

The problem in Welwyn is difficult and serious and it should not be underestimated, but once dramatic publicity of this sort has inevitably concentrated attention on a town and its schools the great danger is that the 99 per cent. of good, wholesome youngsters in the town will all be labelled in the same category as the 1 per cent. who are the legitimate object of our concern.

I hope very much that the right hon. Gentleman and the House will at least acquit the Department of Education and Science of any complacency in this matter. The last thing we wish to be is complacent. We have taken the steps which we see to be desirable. We have the matter constantly under attention. We work in close co-operation with the Ministries, the teaching profession and the medical profession.

The right hon. Gentleman has done a service by enabling the House to discuss this matter and by enabling the teaching profession, as a result of this debate, to understand the problem perhaps a little more readily than in the past and, above all, to get the right balance, which, as he rightly said, is the key to any sensible discussion of the problem.

I, too, would like to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Deedes) on raising this topic today, and I am sure that the whole House appreciates the amount of work which my right hon. Friend has done on this subject, on which he is particularly well informed.

I thought that my right hon. Friend made two points of particular importance. He said that the teachers need facts and guidance on this subject and I think that this is appreciated particularly by anyone who has read the report, to which my right hon. Friend referred, by the Women's Group on Public Welfare.

One point I do not think that my right hon. Friend specifically mentioned, and which struck me when looking at that report, is that although a number of teachers are alert to the problems involved, a number, as they are quite ready to admit, are not as well informed as they would like to be on this subject —and for one perfectly simple reason. I always think that it is easy when we discuss any topic such as this to forget the fact that the overwhelming majority of the children are at day schools, and that drug-taking takes place at weekend parties—that is to say, outside normal school hours. I think that is a very special reason for teachers to be well informed.

My right hon. Friend's second point which I want specifically to refer to concerns the guidance which local authorities are receiving from the Department of Education and Science. Here I must say I do agree with one basic point which my right hon. Friend made when he said that the D.E.S. will surely have a great deal of information on this topic, a great deal of information about the diversity of means whereby local authorities can tackle this problem. I find myself a little bit doubtful whether it is quite right for Ministers of the Department solely to be confined to successive editions of the General Document on Health Education. I have always believed that, over a wide range of problems, one of the most valuable things the Department can do is to pool-together all the experience of individual and particularly of the most progressive local authorities, to find the best way to promote progress by spreading around knowledge of the best existing ideas which are already being carried out.

The Under-Secretary of State, in his helpful speech, pointed out that it does take a long time to revise the General Document on Health Education, and I would ask the hon. Gentleman to consider, on this important subject of drugs, on which new evidence is coming forward all the time, that it may be possible at rather more frequent intervals to make the experience of the I.L.E.A.s and some of the largest authorities as widely available as possible to other local authorities. After all, as he will well know, this is the way we got progress in school building. It was not just the result of the work of architects, whose work was outstanding, and personal ideas, but the result of spreading around knowledge of existing practices.

Local authorities are not, as it were, all equal all over the country; they have not equal experience, resources and population. It is certainly true—I shall not name any names, although we know that London is always one—that there is a certain number of pace-setting authorities which do the important job of path-finding and testing and applying new ideas. I would not, if I were the Under-Secretary, set too much store by the number of very small authorities which think they have not much of a problem, because, after all, as we all know, there is a certain number—I would say, too many—of small education authorities which really have not got the resources to tackle or even to identify the problem.

To my certain knowledge one authority —I shall not name it, though its future existence was at one time a matter of controversy—has never identified a single educationally subnormal child. I do not want to make too much of this, but I think that it is common ground in the House, wherever we stand in relation to the impending Maude Report, that we do not expect in future to have 162 local authorities indefinitely and, of course, there are a number of authorities who will not have much of a problem because they are not capable of identifying it. I think that this emphasises the importance of spreading around as quickly as possible knowledge of the best existing practices.

I would mention two other matters in this connection to which my right hon. Friend did not refer. The first is the importance of in-service training of teachers. Opportunity should be given by in-service courses for teachers to be brought into touch with the most recent developments. On such matters as the problem of drug-taking and of secondary school reorganisation the teachers want to know what developments there are, where they are working successfully, and they would welcome being brought into touch with experiments which are working successfully and into touch with teachers who have had experience of them and with the best existing practices.

I was a little surprised that my right hon. Friend did not, I think, mention parents at all, because surely that is at the heart of the problem of co-operation. The co-operation of parents is of the very highest importance. I was greatly impressed by what one heard at the youth conference in Birmingham which bore out the point which I think is sometimes made by Lady Wootton, in another place, that in large families it can happen that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. The co-operation of parents is one very important aspect of this problem and one which we should never forget.

I agree with those who have said that we must put this problem into perspective. I agree with the approach of wanting to define drugs by summarising their properties. I have always believed that it is specially important not just to generalise and to lay down the law for young people, but to try to understand sympathetically what are the strains and particular problems which young people face at the present time. I hope that no one in the House is less inclined than I am to, as it were, beat the young over the head, and to generalise. I agree that the overwhelming majority of the young people are very sound indeed. We ought not to blame them for faults which are really the faults of society.

It seems to me that there are several reasons why this problem of drugs is greater today than it used to be in the old days. I am afraid that what my right hon. Friend said, to use his own phrase, that drug-taking has become a grisly form of protest, is true. The hon. Gentleman the Member for Willesden, West (Mr. Pavitt), in his speech, referred to nonconformists, and how, conspicuously, children are attracted to courses which may prove dangerous. I was struck rather particularly by a comment of the Women's Group on Public Welfare which talked of the prevalence amongst the young of talking and boasting of drug-taking as being the in thing to do. I think that is true.

One of the main reasons young people are genuinely attracted to the idea of meditation, to the idea of searching for religion by unorthodox means, is that they perhaps have not been brought up in orthodox religious opinions or orthodox non-religious opinions. My right hon. Friend referred to the young taking drugs because they are under stress, but it is not only those taking examinations who genuinely feel under strong emotional strain in the modern world. I think anyone who has read the life of Vicki and its tragic end must have been struck by the fact that throughout his life he seemed to find life literally almost intolerable.

This is a mood that with a minority of people can start at an earlier age than we sometimes realise. Here we are dealing with a subject where critical and sympathetic thinking is of the greatest importance. At the same time, it is a very real problem; we should not underrate it and we should not underrate the teachers. There is a responsibility on the Department for the sake of teachers, parents, the school and all those concerned in the education service, to spread as widely as possible information on the best existing practice.

I ask the hon. Gentleman whether he would consider that this matter should not just be confined to successive issues of the Department's well-known pamphlet on health education. I have the greatest admiration for the work of the medical advisers of the Department. I once had the pleasure of defending in the House my Chief Medical Adviser. I had every satisfaction in doing so because he had a knowledgeable, informed and sympathetic approach to these matters. I am the last person to cast doubt on the value of the work of medical advisers in the past.

A great deal of new evidence is coming forward which will prove to be important. The professionalism, skill and experience of the large local authorities with the most resources are becoming more relevant all the time. I ask the hon. Gentleman to take note of what has been said in the debate by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford, and to do his best to see that the experience gained by new discoveries and approaches is made as widely available as possible to teachers at the earliest possible moment.

rose—

The hon. Gentleman needs the leave of the House to speak a second time.

I had hoped that during my speech I had said that this was a matter of continuing examination within the Department. I entirely agree with what the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Birmingham, Handsworth (Sir E. Boyle) has just said. I can assure him that the pamphlets which are sent out and the new thinking which goes on continually, and needs to go on continually, will be a matter of concern to the Minister as well as to the administrators within the Department.

We shall take all possible steps to promote this thinking and to make the knowledge as widely available as possible throughout the country. I am happy to give that assurance.

Might I remind the House that we are keeping close to a timetable. The debate which is about to begin will end at 1.15 p.m. It is starting a little early so there is some extra time, but a number of hon. Members wish to speak.

Between the Baltic and the Black Seas lie "the eastern marchlands of Europe", where for centuries the frontiers have responded to the pressures of national animosity.

In the north, a thousand years ago, first emerged the ancestors of the modern nations of the West Slavs, but the shape of those nations has been re-moulded time and again by the constraints of formidable neighbours to east and west. Historical atlases of the political geography of east-central Europe show a colourful pattern of movement and flux, but it is well to remember that beneath the eventful changes lies the tragedy of generations which have never known security.

But if the history of past centuries has not been kind to the Pole, the Czech and the Slovak, the history of thepasthalf-century has seen the extremes of hope and horror, with national resurgence savagely interrupted by the nightmare of the Nazi occupation. In 1945, nevertheless, the mood of hope was regained, and, in Poland, was epitomised by the recovery of territories which had once lain within the frontiers of the first Polish kingdom of the tenth century exactly 1,000 years ago.

I want to devote my remarks to the present legal status of those German frontiers with Poland and Czechoslovakia, as seen by Her Majesty's Government 23 years—nearly a quarter of a century— after the ending of hostilities in Europe. The very first Question I tabled as a Member of Parliament, with some trepidation, concerned the British Government's attitude to the Oder-Neisse frontier, and the Answer I then received was based upon that familiar formula in the Potsdam Agreement of August, 1945, which stated that:

"the final delimitation of the western frontier of Poland should await the peace settlement"

with Germany.

It will be my argument today that this formula is both ambiguous and misleading; that it is both sterile and meaningless; and that it is a source of mischief and suspicion in the present conditions of central Europe. Let me pursue these charges, which I make with the utmost seriousness, against the historical back-cloth of the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements.

The Russian armies had, by the middle of 1944, already rolled westwards to the Vistula, and we can appreciate the military and political—apart from ethnic —necessities which led Mr. Churchill to proclaim in this House on the 15 th December, 1944:

"that the Russians are justly treated, and rightly treated, in being granted the claim thef make to the Eastern frontiers along the Curzon Line …"

But it was also accepted1 by the Allies that this drastic geographical surgery upon Poland demanded some major compensatory graft of territory to the North and West, and in that same speech the Prime Minister discussed such plans to ensure Poland an "abiding home" in Europe. His speech left no doubt of the magnitude of the changes he felt appropriate. An advance to the mouth of the River Oder was clearly implied in his reference— made without any qualification about second thoughts at a peace settlement— that:

"Poland will stretch broadly along the Baltic on a front of over 200 miles."

There was equally no doubt that Poland was promised—as a quid pro quo for accepting the Curzon Line—the southern half of East Prussia and the city and port of Danzig.

In that same speech Mr. Churchill referred to such extensions being:

" supported by Britain and Russia,"

and he went on to state baldly that there would be a

"total expulsion of the Germans from the area to be acquired by Poland in the West and North."

I invite the House to read the speech in full, for I think there can be only one interpretation possible: that Poland was being solemnly promised restitution in the West for substantial and serious losses in the East Such restitution had to be substantial, and would be guaranteed by Britain no less than Soviet Russia. Furthermore, it was to be irrevocable, for only on this interpretation could the massive expulsion of Germans to which the Prime Minister referred, be regarded as other than cruel and unnecessary.

If some ambiguity remained about the scope of the territorial shift envisaged for Poland, it was substantially removed by a later speech by Mr. Churchill delivered in the House on 27th February, 1945. In reporting on the recently concluded Crimea or Yalta Conference, he stated:

"The three powers have now agreed that Poland shall receive substantial acquisitions of territory both in the North and in the West. In the North she will certainly receive, in the place of a precarious Corridor, the great City of Danzig, the greater part of East Prussia West and South of Königsberg, and a long, wide sea front on the Baltic."

That was to repeat, in essence, his earlier forecast in the House. But then he added:

"In the West she will receive the important industrial province of Upper Silesia"—

one of the great coalfields of the world-—

"and in addition, such other territories to the East of the Oder as it may be decided at the peace settlement to detach from Germany after the views of a broadly based Polish Government have been ascertained."

I submit that this was a substantial clarification of the intentions of those who drafted the Protocol to the Crimea Conference from which I quoted. There it is simply stated, in essence, that

"Poland must receive substantial accessions of territory in the North and West,"

that the views of the new Polish Government

"should be sought in due course on the extent of these accessions,"

and—in wording which was to anticipate Potsdam—that

"the final delimitation of the Western frontier of Poland should thereafter await the Peace Conference."

The "final delimitation" could only mean, in the context of the British Government's exposition of Yalta to this House, relatively marginal adjustments in Lower Silesia. The remainder of the so-called Recovered Territories of Poland, including the wealth of the Upper Silesian coalfield and the wide window on the Baltic—200 miles or more—was unequivocally offered to Poland in exchange for Polish acceptance of the Curzon Line.

For the British Government to imply that anything other than a marginal adjustment of the frontier with Germany would—at most—be negotiable at a peace settlement, would be to default on solemn undertakings given in this House to Poland.

This interpretation of Yalta as, in all essentials, predicating the Oder-Neisse, seems to be confirmed by Mr. Michael Balfour in his definitive study of Four Power Control in Germany 1945–46. He stated:

"It is questionable whether there was a really significant difference between the area which they "—

that is the Russians—

"gave up to the Poles"—

Oder-Western Neisse—

"and the area which all three statesmen"—

including Churchill, that is—

"had been prepared at Yalta to see given."

Later, in discussing the inevitable resentment caused in Germany by this Polish advance to the lower Oder and the Western Neisse—which gave the whole of Lower Silesia to Poland—he concluded:

"How far the resentment and the problem were changed in character by the extension from the Eastern to the Western Neisse and by the evictions must remain doubtful."

In other words, if any faint question mark were still to lie over the adjustment of the post-war Polish-German border as and when it gained de jure status, the overwhelming bulk of the Polish territorial acquisition was unequivocally endorsed by the Allies. Nevertheless, for nearly a quarter of a century, the formula first employed at Yalta, and repeated in essentials at Potsdam, has become a verbal defence behind which successive British governments have manned the cold war barricades.

For, let there be no doubt that British hesitancy in declaring the Oder-Neisse to be permanent, and non-negotiable at any eventual German peace settlement, was nothing to do with the justice of the Polish claim. The contrast with the similar problem of Russian acquisition of northern East Prussia—which gave the Soviet Union the port of Königsberg— is surely worth making.

In that case, where there was no historical justification for the Russian annexation—Königsberg had never been a Russian city as Settin had been a Polish city in the Piast dynasty—we find the Potsdam Protocol read as follows— and I read in full Article V, headed, "City of Königsberg and the Adjacent Area":

The Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government to the effect that, pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia.

The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of Königsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.

The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister have declared that they will support the proposal of the Conference at the forthcoming peace settlement.

This view was confirmed to me in a Written Answer by the Foreign Secretary on 24th April, 1967.

So that in one case the Western Allies have effectively pre-empted any post-war German agitation for the re-acquisition of Königsberg. Any refugee organisation in the Federal Republic which sought to blackmail either of the major parties into demanding a redrawing of that former German frontier in East Prussia would have had the rug pulled from under it by the knowledge that Britain and America had announced their support for its inviolability.

Yet for 23 years, because no such undertaking has ever been given to honour the basic promises made to Poland when Britain and America endorsed the Curzon Line, the Oder-Neisse frontier has become a symbol of irredentist agitation in Germany and a distorting influence upon the evolution of German democracy and the relaxation of cold war tensions throughout Central Europe.

It is true, of course, that the British Government have qualified the Potsdam formula by stressing that the views of the present inhabitants of the Recovered Territories would be of high importance in any final delimitation of the Polish Western frontier. Since it is perfectly obvious that the eight or nine million Poles who now inhabit these lands are unlikely to wish themselves evicted in another Drang nach Osten, the British Government are really saying, as clearly as diplomatic euphemism permits, that the Oder-Neisse is here to stay.

But, in a misguided effort to placate German politicians, who dare not admit publicly what they, too, know to be true, I suggest that we are inadvertently provoking dangerous yearnings among those elements now seeking lebensraum via the N.P.D.

There is a smell of the thirties in the air, and it is time to stop summoning demons from the deep in modern Europe. I urge the Government, particularly this Labour Government, to exorcise the spirits or revenge by declaring that whenever, and if ever, a German peace settlement is negotiated, Her Majesty's Government will insist that the Oder-Neisse is non-negotiable.

I wish now to turn my glance southwards and backwards, to Czechoslovakia and the time of Munich. For here, too, I think that the British Government has an opportunity to help the cause of peace and democracy, 30 years after a great wrong was perpetrated by those who surrendered principle to expediency.

Here the problem is not the same problem of uncertain boundaries, for the Allies were to make it clear that the German acquisition of the Sudetenland in 1938 is: utterly null and void. In a Question which I put to the Foreign Secretary on 24th April, 1967, I was told:

"Her Majesty's Government regard the Munich Agreement as completely dead and have so regarded it for many years. The fact that it was once made cannot justify any future claims against Czechoslovakia. Her Majesty's Government take the view that no consideration should be given to any changes affected in or since 1938."

Although the reply went on to say that:

" The final determination of the Czechoslovak frontiers with Germany and Poland cannot be formalised until there is a Peace Treaty."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 24th April 1967; Vol. 745, c. 207–8.]

it would seem that the same view is taken by Her Majesty's Government of the irrevocability of the present Czech-German border as has been taken of the Soviet acquisition of Konigsberg. By "formalised" the Minister meant gain de jure status.

But to say that the Munich Agreement has been considered completely dead for many years is to beg the question of when life became extinct. Indeed, was the Treaty possessed of such deficiences that it was never even consummated as a valid international instrument?

The House will recall that a marriage which is never consummated due to the deficiencies of one or other partner, or or both, is null and void ab initio. Perhaps the terminology of my analogy should, in this case, replace the concept of marriage with that of rape, but I shall not seek to depend on argument from analogy. Instead, let me refer to the International Law Commission's draft for a Convention concerning the law of treaties, adopted by the General Assembly of U.N.O., which states:

"A treaty is void if its conclusion has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of the Charter of the U.N."

Munich, of course, pre-dates the United Nations, but the use of force had been outlawed by the Covenant of the League of Nations, and in particular by the Paris Pact of 1928.

It is manifestly the case that the German armies were poised to attack Czechoslovakia, with armed bands of the Sudeten German Freikorps ready for insurrection, in the anxious days which preceded that ill-fated flight by the British Prime Minister. A requirement of any treaty is surely that it shall have been reached with the free consent of all parties. In the case of Munich, the State of Czechoslovakia was territorially and militarily castrated in order to placate a Nazi régime which was otherwise threatening a full scale holocaust.

A treaty arrived at under such duress is as worthless as a scrap of paper, and, furthermore, was in direct contravention of that obligation placed upon members of the League to respect the independence and the territorial integrity of other members. Britain, as a leading member of the League, was specifically precluded under Article 20 of the Covenant from concluding any treaty which contradicted that obligation to respect territorial integrity, and it was not only shameful and degrading, but illegal, to connive at the emasculation of Czechoslovakia.

Then again, the character of the Hitler régime was never more characteristically demonstrated than in its behaviour after Munich, culminating on 15th March, 1939, in the occupation of the remnant state. In his speech in the House of Commons that afternoon the Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, gave a speech which I read for the first time a few days ago. I understand now why appeasement has ever since been a dirty word. He was followed by Mr. David Grenfell, who poured withering scorn upon the Prime Minister's credulity:

"The Prime Minister still believes that what was done at Munich was done in good faith. It is incredible. After all, one is entitled to believe only when one has had evidence … Where is the assurance of good faith? Not for a single day have the promises made at Munich been observed."

He went on to develop this argument in detail, referring to paragraphs 5, 6 and 7 of the Agreement which made various arrangements for plebiscites and commissions to determine the final frontier.

His conclusions were as succinct as they were true:

"Guarantees—nothing remains; options— forgotten; plebiscites—completely repudiated." —[OFFICIAL REPORT, 15th March, 1939; Vol. 345, c. 445–6.]

In other words, it was abundantly clear from the outset that Hitler signed his Agreement without the slightest intention of honouring it, and an Agreement so utterly based on the bad faith of a principal signatory is as null and void as a marriage agreement entered into by a bigamist.

For reasons such as those I have tried to develop, two of the four participating powers, France and Italy, were to declare the Munich Agreement null and void from the very outset.

In his note of 29th September, 1942, addressed to the Czechoslovak Provisional Government in London, General de Gaulle declared that the French Committee of National Liberation

"considered that the said Agteement as well as all acts which have taken place in execution or as a result of this Agreement were null and void from the very beginning."

The first post-facist, democratic Government in Italy was similarly to express itself on 26th September, 1944.

Why bother to rake over these embers of ancient diplomacy today? Certainly, I am not concerned particularly to prove that Neville Chamberlain was as credulous as David Grenfell alleged. One does not initiate an Adjournment debate in order to prove the sphericity of the earth.

My purpose is two fold. In the first place, there is a debt of honour to be paid to the Czechoslovak people, and today, thirty years afterwards, at a moment when that people are proving their inextinguishable love of freedom and truth, is a fitting time to eradicate Munich from the record of internationally acceptable treaties.

Secondly, it is important to make clear, as have France and Italy long ago, that neither Nazi Germany—nor any subsequent German state—has had any legal title at any time to these ancient Czechoslovak border lands.

May I conclude in this way. For those of us who grew into adolescence in the Second World War, the memory of Czech and Polish heroism and suffering in Warsaw and Lidice is part of our inheritance. The war was to cast long shadows across the peace, and it is time to lift those cast by monuments of folly and pusillanimity. I urge the Government to give the most serious consideration to the two major points I have raised: the ending of doubt about the Oder-Neisse, and a final renunciation of the Munich Agreement in its entirety. Much will be gained by such action; not least the buttressing of democracy in Germany, at the very moment when Emergency laws are arousing grave anxieties in the Federal Republic. The closing days of May, 1968, have brought great menace to peace in Europe once again. I hope that my right hon. Friend, who I know is intensely concerned about these problems, will be able to speak today in words which may help to redress the balance of risk for future generations.

rose—

Order. I would remind hon. Members who were not here before that this debate will end at quarter past one. The Minister will rise at seven minutes to one. Hon. Members should share the time between them. Mr. Dickens.

The House is greatly indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Bebington (Mr. Brooks) for his wholly admirable analysis of the frontier problems of Poland and Czechoslovakia in their relationship to Germany, and for raising this matter on the Adjournment.

I merely want to make a brief comment to underline what my hon. Friend said about Czechoslovakia, because the House meets this morning against the background of a Europe in turmoil. That turmoil has affected Poland, Czechoslovakia and our nearest neighbour, France.

In Czechoslovakia today there is a growing resurgence which has given European democrats and Socialists a new hope. I want to see this Government showing a positive sign that we appreciate the significance of these internal developments in Czechoslovakia towards greater democracy and that they will be taken up by this Labour Government in Britain in such a way as to encourage these developments in a positive sense and to discourage what my hon. Friend has rightly described as the revival of Nazi views being expressed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilkeston (Mr. Raymond Fletcher) pointed out recently, by Mr. von Thadden and the neo-Nazis in West Germany. They have said that they regard the Munich Agreement as being still in force and they want to see the resettlement of a German population in the Sudetenland.

My hon. Friend the Member for Beb-ington drew attention to the views of the French and Italian Governments, who were signatories to the Munich Agreement of 1938. They have said, in the statements to which my hon. Friend referred, that the Treaty, so far as they are concerned, is null and void. The equivalent statement issued by Her Majesty's Government is rather less satisfactory. The Foreign Secretary, during his visit to Prague in April, 1965, said that he regarded the Treaty as "detestable and dead", but he drew a distinction between the Treaty being null and void in a legal sense and his and the Government's detestation of the Treaty. I should like my right hon. Friend this morning to make clear beyond a shadow of doubt that the Birtish Government take basically the same view of the Munich Agreement as do the French and Italian signatories.

The Federal Government of Western Germany have made it clear that they have no territorial claims on Czecho- slovakia. It would greatly assist not only the forces of democracy in Western Germany as a whole just now, but those democratic forces in the grand coalition if we could this morning have a clear statement from my right hon. Friend in this respect.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bebington rightly drew attention to the fact that this year, 1968, is the 30th anniversary of the ignominious Munich Agreement of September, 1938. When Mr. Neville Chamberlain came back from Berchtesgaden, only four hon. Members are recorded as expressing their disagreement with the Munich statement made that day. They were Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Avon, Sir Harold Nicolson and the Communist, Mr. Gallagher.

I think that we are honour bound to say in the clearest and most emphatic terms that we wish to repudiate that statement in this House and wish to take the steps which my hon. Friend the Member for Bebington and I urge upon the Government this morning, namely, to declare the Munich Agreement null and void.

I apologise to my hon. Friends for not being present at the opening of this debate. I merely wish to add a few comments by way of footnote to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bebington (Mr. Brooks) said. However, I should like to make it clear that those of us who are concerned about this matter are not just historians. We are not concerned about an historical crime. We are not concerned about a piece of paper probably gathering dust in some public record office. We are concerned with something which has contemporary significance.

It may well be that the fears of the Czechoslovak Government are exaggerated. It may well be that those fears are irrational. I am talking about the fears of resurgence of Nazism in Germany. But, as we know, fears have to be facts in international relations. To use a rather tainted expression, appeasing fears is part of the job of any competent Foreign Secretary. The new Czechoslovak Government have considerable anxieties about what is happening in Western Germany. We owe it to the Czechoslovaks as a people and to the new courageous Czechoslovak Government as a Government put some of those fears at rest in so far as it is possible for the Government of the United Kingdom and this House to do so.

I must confess that I am a total ignoramus about the technicalities of international law. I have received a document, as many hon. Members have, which is couched in rather more charitable terms about the late Neville Chamberlain than the terms which my hon. Friend the Member for Bebington used. The Czechoslavak professor who drafted this document says that Mr. Chamberlain and M. Daladier were deceived, but no doubt honestly believed that they were securing peace for their generation at that time and—I emphasise this—shows that the people who are discussing the matter in Czechoslovakia are not doing so in any sterile way.

The writer of this document states— and I accept it—that a basic rule of international law, as it is embodied in the Charter of the United Nations Organisation is this:

"A treaty is void if its conclusion has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

He correctly states that the United Nations did not exist at the time of Munich, but the League of Nations did, and the attitudes on international law of the one were transferred almost automatically to the other. It is a perfectly reasonable request that we should ask in the House for a rather more emphatic statement of repudiation than we have so far received.

In the new Czechoslovakia, to relate what is happening to our own history and in terms which would commend themselves to us, I believe that the Peter Wentworths of Czechoslovakia are now getting their chance. They may not yet be in power—the Peter Wentworths of this world are not greatly attracted by power—but they are getting their chance. Because the new Czechoslovak Government are taking this new courageous course, they are entitled to every kind of affirmation of their present frontiers and eradication of the crime which destroyed those frontiers in 1938 from the international community of which we are a leading member.

Like other hon. Members, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bebington (Mr. Brooks) on raising this subject. I do not wish to take up the legal argument which has been adduced. It may strengthen my hon. Friend's case that that should be so. I arrive at approximately the same point as they do, but from rather a different direction. I think that they perhaps make a mistake in treating this as if it were an international legal issue where the arguments were clearly more on their side. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Ilkeston (Mr. Raymond Fletcher), I believe that it may well be better to concentrate on the political issue. I say that advisedly.

For my sins, I was forced at one time to study international law, and I rather enjoyed it. The legal issues are by no means as clear as my hon. Friend the Member for Bebington and others have suggested. In fact, purely in point of law. probably the Foreign Office view in this case is correct. Without going into the details of the international law of treaties which in some respects is very ancient and in other respects archaic, which is precisely why the Convention mentioned by my hon. Friend was prepared, and in yet other respects is extremely doubtful, I suggest that hon. Members may care merely to think of the possibilities in applying the question of duress to all treaties signed in the past.

Hon. Members have heard of the Spanish argument in relation to the Treaty of Utrecht, which was undoubtedly arrived at under duress. It was a peace treaty. The same is true of half the treaties which have been signed. If hon. Members consider the implications of applying the doctrine which they have applied to this Treaty to all others, they will realise that they are virtually suggesting, which international law does not, that we should scrap half the treaties in existence.

What is much more true is that we should not adopt the attitude of the Foreign Office. Although slightly differing from the Foreign Office view, it seems to me that some of my hon. Friends have arrived at their view by dealing with the legalities. This is what the Foreign Office is doing. In point of law, the Foreign Office is probably correct, but I do not think that it is right. I arrive at the same view as my hon. Friends, but by a different route. Legalities are not in question here. What we should be considering, as we always should in foreign policy, is what is right from the point of view of the world as a whole and from the point of view of this country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bebington rightly said that we owe the Czechs a debt of honour. That is the first point which we should remember. This is perhaps a point only of morality. Secondly, whatever the legalities, it would be right to say that the agreement should be repudiated—forgotten. We should make ourselves quite clear on this issue. However legal or illegal, void or voidable it may be, it should not be regarded as being in existence by this country. I can think of only a few reasons why the Foreign Office does not wish to say that clearly. It may be that the Minister will say this clearly later; I hope that he does. But one reason, I believe, is a lack of desire to offend any section of German opinion in any way.

My hon. Friend is right.

If that is the case, it is highly undesirable. If it is the case, as it may have been at one time, that we do not wish to offend the German Government because we hope for their assistance in other aspects of foreign policy, such as accession to the Common Market, this might have been a perfectly reasonable attitude for the Foreign Office to take. Although I do not agree with that policy, I do not see why we should not adopt all the resources of diplomacy in an endeavour to achieve it. But this is surely over and done with now, and they should forget that reason for trying to placate German opinion.

The other possibility is that one wishes not to arouse the passions of neo-Nazism and nationalism in Germany. It seems to me that this is a reason which often weighs in the minds of men and Ministers—and it has invariably been proved wrong, historically. Surely what we are now discussing is the ultimate example of the truth that we do not placate the forces of extremism, reaction and violence by not saying something that we believe to be right. Surely we are dis- cussing a perfect example of attempting to placate exactly the same forces in exactly the same country.

I suggest, as my hon. Friends have, that we do not achieve anything with German opinion. We may arouse neo-Nazism occasionally, but we will arouse it in a cause which we believe just. I think that this is one of those rare occasions in foreign policy when we should say something simply because it is right and also as a gesture of goodwill, instead of saying that this is a quid pro quo for something else. There are internal events in Czechoslovakia which are favourable in a general European context and which are favourable to us who believe in democracy. The régime is better than it was before. We should, for once, say something on this subject and say it to the Czechs.

We should say, "We have noticed that you have changed. We have made a gesture which we believe to be just in itself, but which also is a gesture of noticing that you yourselves have done something which is good in a European context". Let us do that for once.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bebington (Mr. Brooks) has made a speech characterised by substantial research, responsibility, and a most welcome touch of literary grace. While I cannot agree with everything that he said I welcome this opportunity of stating as clearly as possible Her Majesty's Government's views on the important matters which he has raised. He did me the great courtesy of informing me of the broad outlines of what he intended to say and I am most grateful to him.

As has been stated in the House on many occasions, Her Majesty's Government's view is that the final determination of Germany's boundaries must await a peace settlement. This was laid down in the Joint Declaration by the Governments of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America on 3rd October, 1954; again in the Bonn Convention of 1954, and again in the Tripartite Declaration on Germany and Berlin of 26th June, 1964. That is the basic position, to which we are bound by the international agreements and declarations that I have mentioned.

In the case of Poland, however, it is fair to point out that while we hold to the view that the final determination of Germany's boundaries with Poland cannot be formalised until there is a peace treaty, nevertheless, as we have made clear on several occasions—and I do so now—any solution will have to take account of the wishes of the present inhabitants of the territory concerned. This will be a factor of fundamental importance when the time comes to make a final settlement. Until such a time as the vexed and central problem of Germany is solved to the satisfaction of all who are legitimately concerned, however, no final "Yes" can be said to the frontiers.

My hon. Friend referred to the speeches made in 1944 and 1945 by Mr. Churchill —as he then was—and to the Potsdam Agreement. I want to make two points on this. First, the changes which Mr. Churchill then foresaw in Poland's western frontiers had taken place. There had been massive movements of populations, and for over 20 years Poland had been in possession of the territories in question. There is, therefore, nothing to stop these changes being ratified in a peace settlement.

Secondly, however, we all know that the position in 1944 and 1945 was very different from what it is now. At that time, on both sides of the House and in all parts of the world high hopes were entertained of achieving a just and early settlement of problems created by the war. The fact that solutions were not soon reached was certainly not the fault of the Western Powers, and it is, unfortunately, true to say that the unilateral actions of the Soviet Union in breaking the Four-Power Agreements have impeded any satisfactory settlement of these problems.

It was specifically laid down in the Potsdam Agreements that the final delimitation of the Western frontier with Poland should await the peace settlement. It was also laid down that the peace settlement would have to be accepted by a German Government. As we all know, the expectations lying behind these Agreements have not been fulfilled and we are not, therefore, faced with a comparatively simple situation, as it seemed then.

Turning to the present, it is clear that the Federal Republic of Germany is genuinely seeking a reconciliation with Poland. I should like to remind the House of the statement made by Dr. Kiesinger to the German Bundestag on 13th December, 1966. In this speech he said:

"Large sectors of the German people very much want reconciliation with Poland whose sorrowful history we have not forgotten and whose desire ultimately to live in a territory with secure boundaries we now, in view of the present lot of our own divided people, understand better than in former times. But the boundaries of a reunified Germany can only be determined in a settlement freely agreed with an all-German Government, a settlement that should establish the basis for a lasting and peaceful good-neighbourly relationship agreed to by both nations."

Bearing this in mind, I do not think that it would help if we were to rush in and make statements of our own. As I have said, the final peace settlement was envisaged as being acceptable to Germany. If we were now to dictate to Germany on this point we would, with respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, West (Mr. English)—who made a thoughtful contribution to the debate—risk giving a fillip to the extremist nationalist feeling which we all wish to check and prevent from reappearing, and to which my hon. Friend the Member for Bebington rightly referred.

Let me repeat that we are bound by solemn international obligations with our allies, and cannot unilaterally breach these agreements. The implications of selectively doing so were validly drawn up by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, West. Whatever statements may have been made from time to time by certain people, the formal position of ourselves and our allies remains that the final determination of Germany's boundaries must await a peace settlement.

As regards the frontier between Germany and Czechoslovakia, here again the formal position of Her Majesty's Government is that the final determination of the frontier cannot be formalised until there is a peace treaty. Ever since Mr. Churchill, as he then was, said in 1940 that the Munich Agreement had been destroyed by the Germans, successive Governments have made their position clear. We were reminded earlier in the debate of what my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said in Prague in 1965. He was then asked both in the official discussions and in public whether we could not declare the Munich Agreement null and void from the beginning, ab initio. His reply was that the Agreement—I improve a little on what my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, West (Mr. Dickens) said—was detestable, unjust and dangerous, as events have shown, to the peace of Europe. He stated then unequivocally that the Agreement was completely dead—that is to say, what my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, West phrased as "did not exist"—and had been dead for many years.

That statement was subsequently repeated in this House and I repeat that Her Majesty's Government regard the Munich Agreement as completely dead and that, when the time comes for a final determination of Germany's frontiers by a peace treaty, the treaty discussions will start from the basis that Czechoslovak frontiers are not in question.

Will my hon. Friend not agree that there is a slight difference between the point of view that he has just outlined and the point of view that we requested, and that the difference might well affect the individual personal rights of, for example, people who have lived in the Sudetenland between the time of the conclusion of the agreement and now?

This in itself is a very large question. If we were to have a full dress debate on it we should have to go into the implications, including the one mentioned by my hon. Friend, of what is involved if one declares null and void ab initio an international agreement deemed to have been arrived at at that time. This is a matter of constant difficulty in the minds of persons not only in this country, but in Europe generally, who seek some way of abrogating the Munich Agreement without leading to certain consequential difficulties which would not only not improve on the present position but create new conditions of friction and danger.

My hon. Friend has referred to the position taken up by the French and Italian Governments. First of all, on a point of detail I would not wish to let pass without comment my hon. Friend's rendering of the French and Italian Gov- ernments' statements of their position. If he will look at the French text of the French National Committee's Note of 29th September, 1942, to which he referred, he will see that the words "from the beginning", with which he concluded his translation, do not appear. Nor do they appear in the Czechoslovak/ French Declaration of 22nd August, 1944, nor in the Italian Declaration of 28th September, 1944. I am not suggesting that there is a major point of substance here. I mention this purely for the sake of historical accuracy, in which my hon. Friend, I know, is equally interested, and also in order to keep the whole argument for and against a denunciation ab initio in its proper perspective.

What is of substance about the French Government's attitude to the frontiers is the fact that they signed the Bonn Convention of 1954 and the Tripartite Statement of 1964, both of which reaffirm allied agreement that the final determination of the boundaries of Germany must awaft a peace settlement. It is not for Her Majesty's Government to interpret the attitudes of other Governments, but so far as the question of frontiers is concerned the French Government do not seem to have gone much further than my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, in his Answer of 24th April, 1967, which was quoted by my hon. Friend—

Would my hon. Friend—

I am very sorry. I cannot give way. I have to sit down by 1.15 p.m. and I have some more ground to cover. I am sure that my hon. Friend will bear with me in the circumstances.

I should like to take this opportunity to say a few words about the N.P.D. My hon. Friend referred to the 'thirties. But the situation today is quite different from what it was then. The German Government and German public opinion as a whole have shown that they are fully alive to the damage which the so called National Democratic Party could do. The Federal Chancellor has made it clear publicly that the Federal Government are keeping a close watch on the party's activities, and I have no doubt that the Federal Government would take effective action against the party if it proved necessary, as, indeed, the Federal authorities did against the Sozialistische Reichs Partei in 1952.

Extreme Right-wing minorities exist in all Parliamentary democracies and one could not expect the Federal Republic to be an exception. The N.P.D. vote is still not as large as the vote achieved in Lower Saxony by the Sozialistische Reichs Partei in 1951. Of course, we must take the N.P.D. seriously, but to ignore the achievement of democracy in the Federal Republic since the war, and to give currency to exaggerated doubts, is to play into the hands of the very nationalist tendency that we are all concerned to prevent from recrudescence in Germany.

It may be argued, and is by some, that the uncertainty about frontiers is a threat to peace in central Europe. These uncertainties cannot be allayed by unilateral action; they could create new uncertainties. The important thing is that we and others, including "the Federal Republic of Germany, are actively working towards a détente in that area in the hopes that an atmosphere may result in which a peace treaty may be negotiated and the frontier thereby finalised.

As I have said, to return to the specific question of the eastern frontier of Germany, the Federal Government is anxious for friendly relations with Poland and is ready to talk to the Poles on all subjects of common interest. There has been a considerable evolution of opinion in Germany on these matters, and it would be very regrettable if we were simply to ignore it and pre-empt or anticipate a decision on a matter which so directly concerns the German people themselves. We shall not bring a solution any nearer by doing that.

A peace treaty with Germany on terms acceptable to all concerned is a basic aim of our policy. But given the existing differences between Western and Soviet policy on Germany, the conditions do not exist at the moment for early progress towards a peace treaty itself. Indeed, we must all recognise that a solution to the problem will not be easy or quick. It will involve a major change in the attitudes now held in the Soviet Union and in Eastern European countries. It would be unrealistic to believe that these attitudes can be changed quickly. Progress towards a settlement of the problems can come only as a result of a steady and patient process of reducing tension and it is dependent on the building of confidence between the two halves of Europe.

This is also the stated view of the present German Government, and I want to emphasise that fact. In the declaration I have already mentioned, the German Government expressed a desire to improve relations with the Soviet Union and their Eastern neighbours and to establish diplomatic relations wherever this was possible in the circumstances. Our own immediate objective is to bring about conditions of détente in Europe and it is for this reason that we support the Federal Government's attempts, which are slowly bearing fruit.

It is very disappointing, in this context, to see that the East German authorities are being so negative and even hostile in their reaction to the initiatives of the Federal Government in seeking to open talks with them on the various practical and humanitarian issues arising from the arbitrary division of Germany. Nor do I think that it would help the process if, as is sometimes argued, we were formally to recognise the permanence of the division of Germany by recognising Eastern Germany. In our view, it would merely crystallise the present unsatisfactory status quo in Europe and hinder the prospects for a just and lasting solution of the German problem.

This has been a useful debate. It has been conducted with thoughtfulness not untinged by emotions, which we all share as we recall the dreadful things which happened in the 1930s and as we resolve again to do everything in our power to prevent their resurgence. My hon. Friend spoke with an informed passion for things which everyone in this House supports— for peace, democracy and the prevention of the re-emergence of the abomination of Fascism. These are objectives that we all strongly share, but I want to emphasise, in conclusion, that the attainment of these objectives depends in very large measure on the establishment and sustaining of the rule of law, and in the rule of international law the sanctity of international agreements is an essential ingredient. Indeed, we have been discussing an agreement which, in itself, because of its nature and the fact that it was not honoured for what it was worth, led to the Second World War.

My final point must be that, in support of the objectives which my hon. Friend and we all share, there must be this basic attitude—that is to say, the sanctity of international agreements within the rule of law—and Her Majesty's Government must and will have regard for that vital fact.

The subjects of these last-day adjournments vary enormously and I want now to raise one of the problems of the National Health Service—the problem of the downgraded designated officers. We not infrequently discuss the National Health Service from the patients' point of view, from the medical angle and from the point of view of its development and the shortage of professions auxiliary to medicine. This is a valuable opportunity now for us to inquire into some of the problems and difficulties—rarely discussed by the House—of those engaged in making the National Health Service work.

In particular, I seek to raise the problems and anxieties of a handful of men whose loyalty enabled the National Health Service to begin the programme of rationalisation some years ago, which has been, in effect, the foundation of the development plan of successive Governments.

Following the White Paper issued in 1962 by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell) when he was Minister of Health, plans for merging hospital management committees and groups were put in hand and were becoming effective by 1964. This meant that where the mergers occurred senior administrative officers such as hospital secretaries and treasurers and group secretaries found that their posts were obviously also affected because, for example, where two group secretaries had formerly been required now there was only one post.

Therefore, in order that the programme could proceed smoothly and efficiently, these designated officers were downgraded. They retained their former salaries on a purely personal basis but no future salary increases were to apply to them. In other words, at the time the mergers occurred, these men had their salaries frozen for life, and so, in consequence, their pensions also.

I do not think that it will be disputed that had it not been for the co-operation and assistance of the administrative staffs of the hospitals affected by these regroupings the programme of amalgamations could never have succeeded so smoothly prior to 1967. After 1967, no problems present themselves. First, in July that year, after prolonged negotiations, the appropriate Whitley Councils had reached an agreement under which the salaries of the officers downgraded as a result of amalgamations were to be fully protected. Secondly, since 1967 there have been no further amalgamations. There-for we are concerned today only with designated officers downgraded following amalgamations of hospital management committees prior to 1967, and in that category with a very small number of people.

But this tiny minority is probably the only section of our working population that has had its earnings frozen for the past five years and, what is more, during a period when the cost of living has risen by 20 points and appears to be likely to continue to rise. They also face the prospect of retirement—and not too distant retirement—on a pension frozen at a level of some years ago which, while it may have been appropriate to their then salary level, will hardly be adequate now and, with the frightening loss of purchasing power, will certainly not be adequate in ten years' time.

Having tried to give the House the general problem of the downgraded officers, I will give examples, one from my constituency and another from the neighbouring constituency of Eastleigh. My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Mr. David Price) cannot be present but has asked to be associated with the debate.

My constituent entered the National Health Service at its inception in 1948 and from then until 1964 was group secretary to the Alton Group Hospital Management Committee and group secretary to the Treloar Group. When the Alton and Winchester groups were merged, he was downgraded from group to hospital secretary. According to prac- tice then, he was allowed to retain his salary on a purely personal basis. While it was agree that he could have received any increments on the salary scale of his former post, no future increases in the scale were to be allowed him, and in his case, since he was on the maximum scale, no increments were payable.

The question of age enters into this. After the July 1967 agreement, any designated officers downgraded as a result of the mergers were allowed to keep their existing salary scale, with the benefit of future increases if they were 55 or over. If under 55 this protection lasts for four years. This is a simple admission of the indisputable fact that the older one is the more difficult it is to get a comparable job.

Despite the fact that the Ministry has told all employing authorities that officers downgraded should be given every help subsequent to their downgrading in finding employment appropriate to their earlier grade, my constituent tells me how difficult this is. He writes:

"In spite of the fact that hospital authorities are (or should be), aware of the importance of finding suitable alternative employment for staff downgraded following amalgamations and the efforts of the National Staff Committee in this direction, it is virtually impossible for anyone of my age (59 at the time of amalgamation, 63 now) to find another comparable post. No management committee, except in very exceptional circumstances, is going to appoint anybody over 55 as their group secretary, despite Ministry exhortations or National Staff Committee efforts. I know this as I have tried."

I can understand this. This man has had his salary frozen at the date of the merger four years ago, when he was 59. It is exactly the same today. His former grade enjoyed a small increase in salary in July 1964, which did not apply to him. There was another in January 1965 and a third in April, 1966. Had my constituent been eligible for these he would be paid nearly £600 more a year than he is now. More important for a man of 63 is that his pension would have been enhanced. This, for a man of his age, is the most important consideration. Had my constituent been affected by a merger following the agreement of July last year, his whole position would have been protected. Despite the fact that his employing authority has supported him, the Ministry fears that to ameliorate his position would open the door to limitless retrospective claims from downgraded officers. I will deal with this argument, to which the Ministry clings with all the force of an agitated limpet, later.

I want to turn now to the second case concerning another designated officer, a former deputy finance officer. He had to suffer downgrading on the amalgamation of Winchester and Alton H.M.C. He was downgraded to the senior administrative grade four years ago, on 1st April, 1964. His original salary was on the scale of £1,142 rising to £1,426 a year. He was on the maximum, but the salary scale of the senior administrative grade to which he was downgraded was £1,125 rising to £1,382. Three months later, in July, 1964, the senior administrative grade enjoyed a salary increase which made the grade £1,164 rising to £1,430. This man had entered into the new grade on his maximum on the old salary scale so he could not benefit. Subsequent increases in the grade he now occupies means that the present maximum scale is £1,734, while he remains on the salary of his downgraded post, a maximum of £1,428. Had he retained his old salary scale he would have been earning nearly £1,800.

Two other cases have been brought to my attention by my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr. Brian Harrison). He was anxious to participate in the debate, but ironically he is the chairman of a hospital group and is presiding over a meeting of that group. The cases which have been brought to his attention relate firstly to a group secretary and treasurer of the Severalls H.M.C. He was appointed in 1956, after 26 years' service. In 1964, after amalgamation, he was down-graded and appointed deputy group secretary to the St. Helena H.M.C. Again he retained his old salary, with no prospect of future reward.

The irony in this case is that he was subsequently appointed a group secretary again, to the St. Helena group. By 1967 the wheel had turned full circle and he was back in his old post from which he had been downgraded. However, the Ministry had decided that previous service in group secretary's grade could not be approved for incremental purposes. This unfortunate officer will not reach the maximum by pensionable age. This is a very hard case. His financial loss is over £1,500.

My hon. Friend's second case relates again to the wheel of misfortune turning full circle, and refers to a deputy group secretary at Colchester H.M.C. He was appointed in 1953, again following 23 years service with various hospitals. At the time of amalgamation his post became redundant, and he retained his old salary on a personal basis, without any future increment. Once again, he found himself reappointed to the same post, with the same responsibilities from which he had been downgraded.

As in the other case, he was placed on the minimum of the salary scale. His Service and experience have been totally disregarded. In this case the financial loss is over £800. If a private employer sought to treat his experienced employees as hardly as this he would not be able to keep them long. If ever there was a manifest injustice it is illustrated by this case.

The Ministry has taken the view that it could not do very much, even partially to help. If they sought to help one downgraded officer it would open the door to claims from all of them, it has said. I refer to a tiny majority of our working population. On 8th March I asked the Minister of Health how many officers were affected. The reply was

"On the information available, 42, of whom 15 have since retired or secured posts at least as good as those previously held; no amalgamations have yet taken place since 1st August, 1967; those affected were 17 hospital management committee secretaries, 11 deputy secretaries, 7 treasurers, 1 deputy treasurer, 3 supplies officers, 1 deputy supplies officer and 2 hospital secretaries; all hospital authorities are fully aware of the importance of finding suitable alternative employment for staff downgraded following amalgamations, and the National Staff Committee is paying particular attention to this problem."

As to the last part of that Answer, I can only remind the House of my constituent's comments about his efforts to find another post. No one would agree that any designated officer can say that he has any claims on our sympathy or the service if he has left that service. It seems from the reply that there are 27 men to consider. Of the 42 referred to in the Question, it seems that

"… 15 have since retired or secured posts at least as good as those previously held".— [OFFICIAL REPORT, 6th March, 1968; 8th March, 1968, c. 184.]

The 27 are very probably ones who, because of their age at the time of amalgamation, found it difficult to obtain posts comparable to their former posts. They are men who were downgraded to a lower salary scale than they previously occupied, but who have been denied the subsequent rises of salary attributable to their new posts—because they held their former ones.

These are 27 people who have suffered a wage freeze such as no other group in the country has endured, and their pension prospects have been frozen as well. It is a chilling thought for those over 60. It must seem a curious irony when they read of the recommendation of the National Board for Prices and Incomes that wages and salaries should not rise by more than 3½ per cent. per annum.

I have received details of many of the 27 cases. For the convenience of this debate, I have quoted only four of them. They illustrate the dreadful difficulty that these men are in. Despite representations from the employing authorities, from Members of Parliament, many of whom have been in correspondence with the Ministry, and from the National Association of Local Government Officers, the Ministry has clung fearfully to the argument that, if one man's case was accepted, all would have to be admitted, that retrospection would open a very dangerous door, that the cost would be incalcuable, and that the repercussive effects would be utterly unpredictable.

Ministries can advance arguments ad infinitum, as every hon. Member knows. I want to comment briefly on the ones that I have mentioned. I do not think that the repercussive effects would be so great. In the Civil Service, problems of this sort can be absorbed much more readily; the problem does not arise; in any case, there are different agreements. The same is true in local government. The other State services have industrial and commercial personnel and unions, and the transfer between the private sector and the State sector is very flexible. Hospitals are scattered all over the country. There can be no interchange with the private sector, only interchange and regrading within the hospital service.

It is, therefore, essential that when such regrading occurs it should be fair, just and reasonable. Personnel can now be assured that, following the agreement of July, 1967, these things will be. But for the officers who made the hospital Plan possible prior to 1967 regrading has in many cases been bitter.

I appreciate the Ministry's long-standing fears. It is proper that Ministries should be fearful of opening dangerous doors. However, I do not believe them to be so substantial as the Minister thinks. I suggest, therefore, that the case of the downgraded designated officers in the hospital service should be taken out of the arena of argument now and referred to an impartial umpire. I suggest that the impartial examination of the case should be entrusted to the National Board for Prices and Incomes. I have reason to believe that I would be supported in this submission by the unions involved. Such a reference would place the case of these downgraded officers in the hands of those experienced in delving into the equity, consequences and repercussive effects of such awards and would ensure a full and fair examination.

The Board is the Government's own brainchild. I do not think that the Government could have any objection to the reference of this case to the Board. If the Government's arguments are sound, the Board will certainly uphold them. If they are not sound, I believe that the House has a right to expect that an injustice should be righted—after all, this is what the House is for—and nothing but credit will accrue to the Government if they will accept this suggestion and refer the case of these downgraded designated officers for the impartial opinion of the Board so that these men can have the confidence that their case has been explored thoroughly and fairly.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Petersfield (Miss Quennell) on her skill in securing this debate on the very important subject of hospital services. I want briefly to refer to one of the services in my constituency which has been suffering over the past six to nine months. The casualty department at the Royal Hospital in Richmond was closed by the South-West Metropolitan Regional Board on 19th December, 1967. I informed the Minister that I would seek to raise this subject today, so I do not think that he can complain at my bringing it forward.

The hon. Member very courteously gave me notice that he would seek to raise this. I have been puzzled as to how this issue can be applied to the subject of the Adjournment debate which had been raised by the hon. Member for Peters-field (Miss Quennell).

It can be so applied, because the casualty department provides a service in the hospital service; and this debate is on hospital services. Before I raised this subject, I took advice and learned that it would be perfectly in order.

As I say, the casualty department was closed on 19th December last, due to work being carried out in the X-ray department. The X-ray department was opened on 14th February of this year. During the period after 14th February, the house surgeons occasionally helped on very urgent cases which came in at the last minute, when the casualty department was not in full operation. On 30th April, all staff were withdrawn from the casualty department.

From 19th December right down to when the department was reopened on 13th May, no advice was given from the Board to local general practitioners in the area that the casualty department had been closed. If an urgent case came up which a local general practitioner wished to send to casualty, the case might have been sent, although the department would have been closed; but local general practitioners were not aware of it. The South-West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board took no trouble to circularise doctors in the area about what had happened.

There was great local indignation about this. I have raised the subject in Parliamentary Questions on several occasions since the beginning of the year. As a result of this local indignation, the casualty department was reopened on 13th May. At the time of the reopening, on 14th May, I received two letters, one from the Minister and one from the Chairman of the Regional Hospital Board, the letter from the Minister telling me that the casualty department would not open in the foreseeable future, the letter from the Chairman of the Board telling me that it had reopened the day before—13th May.

I do not blame the Minister for this. There was obviously a misunderstanding between his private office and the Regional Hospital Board. A few days later I received a very courteous letter from the Minister apologising for this error. The fact that the Minister was not informed of the Board's intentions about the casualty department underlines the confusion of the Board itself.

Many people in my constituency are very worried about what the future holds for this casualty department. There seems to be a total lack of public relations between the Board and the people living in the area. Contradictory statements are put out. Apparently, the Minister was not informed about what the Board was doing. This has caused deep concern, not only to myself, but to the staff of the hospital, the consultant surgeons who attend it, the friends of the hospital, the patients and the people living in the area it serves. It seems to me wrong that no information is given to local people until it is forced out of the Board either by the Press or by myself.

I ask the Parliamentary Secretary whether he can tell me what is to happen now. The casualty department is at present open from 9.30 to 5.30 only. It is staffed on a sessional basis with local general practitioners and anybody who can be obtained. The casualty department is closed entirely on Sundays and at night from 5.30. I understand that these arrangements were started for six weeks. No one seems to have any knowledge of what will happen after the six weeks elapse. The present casualty officer leaves on 7th June. There has been no advertisiment to replace him. I have heard that the Board will advertise a job, but it may well be for Kingston Hospital. Everybody suspects that this might mean that the casualty department will again close.

If the Parliamentary Secretary is unable to answer me in detail today—and I would understand if that were so—I beg him to give me an assurance that his Ministry will carry out an immediate investigation with the Board into, first, the future of the casualty department and, secondly, into the appalling public relations arrangements which the Board has with the people living in my constituency.

I support the case so ably made by my hon. and fair friend the hon. Lady the Member for Petersfield (Miss Quennell). I have two constituents, Mr. Brooman and Mr. Ward, who are in exactly the position to which she referred arising from the amalgamation of the Winchester and Alton Groups.

I wish to emphasise three points. First, these officers' careers have been jeopardised by circumstances completely and absolutely outside their control. Ironically enough, they may even have contributed to these circumstances by selflessly carrying out their duties and advising on the amalgamations. Secondly, arising from these circumstances, in September last year the Winchester Group Hospital Management Committee stated that considerable injustice had been done to my constituents and the other officers concerned.

I am sure that the Minister will agree that when the Winchester Hospital Management Committee and the National Association of Local Government Officers, which does such excellent work on behalf of its members and knows fully the details of a case like this, speak as they have spoken about considerable injustice being done, it is time for the Minister to sit up and take notice.

In raising this topic the hon. Lady the Member for Petersfield (Miss Quennell) has expressed her sympathy with hospital staff who have been affected by amalgamations or reorganisations. I for my part welcome this opportunity for setting in perspective the question of salary protection and for stressing that it is not because of any lack of sympathy with the officers concerned that the protection arrangements introduced last July were not made retrospective.

I am grateful, too, to the hon. Lady for giving me advance notice of the many points she wished to raise, which I hope will result in my being able to give her a slightly better informed reply. I endorse what she said, namely, that we must be very grateful to the loyalty of many of the officers concerned without which it would have been difficult to carry out many amalgamations and reorganisations.

I think that it may be helpful if I define three technical expressions which I shall use in the course of my speech. The first of these is mark-time protection, or scale point protection. This means that an officer whose post has been downgraded retains on a personal basis the actual salary which he was receiving previously until the salary scale for his new post catches up with the mark-time salary. Next, scale protection. This means that an officer on an incremental scale may continue to advance up that scale to the maximum but does not receive any increases in the scale negotiated following his downgrading. However, if the scale for his new post overtakes his protected pay, he will then proceed up the new scale in the normal way. This seems inconsistent with the facts of the second case as given by the hon. Lady.

Finally, there is full protection, which means that a downgraded officer may continue to receive his old salary scale plus any increases in that scale subsequently negotiated. I will not apologise for the complex nature of that part of my reply. Perhaps the hon. Lady and the hon. and gallant Member for Winchester (Rear-Admiral Morgan Giles) will accept that the speeches and my reply today will merit examination by those people most immediately concerned.

I now turn to the main principles with which we are dealing. First, there is the doctrine that a man should be paid the right rate for the job he is doing and not for some job which he used to do. Against this, there is the argument that but for an act outside his control a redundant or downgraded officer would still be doing his old job. The conflict here between the general principle and the argument relating to the individual does not admit of any easy or obviously right solution.

It is for this reason that the management sides of the various Whitley Councils have always been very anxious to get the right balance in arrangements for salary protection. It may be said that to offer protection is to tackle the problem at the wrong end. If an officer has been doing a job at a certain level and this job ceases, clearly the best course is, if possible, to offer another job at the same level.

This is not only because otherwise the public service would lose the benefit of trained manpower or, if protection were available, would be paying a man more than others doing the same job; but it is also in the interest of the individual officer. Salary protection may protect his income in the short term, but may conceivably work against his long-term interest by discouraging him from finding a post elsewhere which would employ his talents and experience as they should be employed and thus give him corresponding standing in the Service.

This is why more than one of the protection arrangements which have been introduced includes a requirement that the officer if below a stated age must give an undertaking that he is prepared to move to a post elsewhere commensurate with his protected scale.

We realise, of course, that it is not easy to ensure alternative employment for redundant officers, partly because the individual hospital boards and Committees which are responsible for making appointments may prefer a local officer seeking promotion to a redundant officer from another area, and partly because officers in the hospital service have so far not always been willing to move to posts elsewhere.

I can, of course, understand the view of employing authorities, particularly if one of their own staff who knows their hospitals and is already on good terms with the clinical and nursing staff, has been groomed for the expected vacancy and perhaps feels that it is already nearly within his grasp.

But the National Staff Committee, set up by my right hon. Friend's predecessor following the advice of the Lycett Green Committee, has advised that when an employing authority, having a vacancy, receives an application from an officer affected by reorganisation who previously held a comparable post, it should consider that application before taking any steps to fill the vacancy. My right hon. Friend commended this advice to hospital authorities early in 1967.

I can understand the attitude of the man whose roots are in a certain town and who may feel it unfair that he should be expected to move some distance away in order to secure a post comparable with his old one. Nevertheless, with a developing, changing and expanding service he cannot necessarily expect the Health Service to continue to provide him with a career in the town of his choice.

Against this background it has been necessary from time to time to introduce varying types of protection to meet different situations. I shall confine myself to those applicable to the designated grades to whom the hon. Lady has specifically referred, although these are not, of course, the only staff who may be concerned.

The first important step was taken in August, 1956, not by the Whitley Council, but under the then Minister's statutory powers. As part of a general policy for smoothing the passage of group amalgamations, group designated officers were granted scale protection when they were downgraded following an amalgamation, but only if employed by the successor authority. In July, 1963, the Minister of the day decided that down-graded officers employed by an authority other than the successor authority should be entitled to mark-time or scale point protection. I have already explained the terms.

In the meantime, the Administrative and Clericals Staffs Council had been evolving a new pointing system for determining the salary scales of designated officers in the Hospital Service—points being calculated according to the number of hospitals, number of beds, number of out-patient attendances, etc.

When this new system was introduced in 1962, it was agreed that officers downgraded as the result of a drop in points— for example, because of the closure of a hospital or ward or because of a reduction in beds—should receive full protection unconditionally if aged 55 or over and should also receive it if aged under 55 if they gave an undertaking that they were prepared to move to a post elsewhere commensurate with their protected scale. This replaced previous arrangements which were less favourable, their main feature being mark-time protection.

The House will, of course, realise that in this type of case the officer is still doing substantially his old job although some aspect of it has become less demanding. It was this consideration in particular which was felt to justify a special type of protection.

As I have said, protection for down-pointed officers was introduced in 1962, but it was not long before the staff side was arguing that it ought to be applied not only to down-pointed officers, but also to officers downgraded following an amalgamation—who might be performing a job very different from their old one. The management side resisted this proposal largely because it felt that the case of down-pointed officers was different in kind from that of officers downgraded following an amalgamation, but also because at this time the Lycett Green Committee was considering the recruitment, training and promotion of administrative and clerical staff in the Hospital Service and it was hoped that their recommendations would provide some help in the resettlement of downgraded or redundant officers. In fact, the Committee's advice was similar to that of the National Staff Committee, which, as I have said, had already been commended to hospital authorities.

I would remind the House that at an earlier point in my speech I said that when an officer's job folds under him following an amalgamation, the first consideration should be to fit him into a job of similar responsibility: protection arrangements are only a sort of safety net and, indeed, they may operate to the officer's long-term disadvantage by reducing the incentive to move to another post.

At this point, I think that I should refer to the Severalls-St. Helena case referred to by the hon. Lady. This officer did, in fact, suffer a temporary setback because we did not consider that service as a group secretary in a relatively small group should be taken into account when he became group secretary in a very much larger one; but he is, of course, now much better off than if his former post had continued and he had continued to occupy it.

In the Colchester case mentioned by the hon. Lady, the officer in question, again, has finished up in a post more highly paid than his old one, and I think that this cancels out, to a large extent, the short-term setback. It was, I think, in this connection that the hon. Lady specially referred to the adverse effect on his retirement pension.

He cannot reach the maximum of his present scale by pensionable age.

As I was remarking, the hon. Lady referred to the adverse effect that there would be. I should like this to be looked at. He has now gone into a better post. We will have to see whether and to what extent the one balances out the other. I cannot commit myself on this case, but I will look into it.

To return to what I was saying in the main theme of my speech, the management side of the Administrative and Clerical Staffs Council found it difficult, for reasons which I gave earlier, to advance beyond the protection—whether scale protection or mark-time protection —already authorised under the Minister's powers. As I have said, there is a conflict here between the principle that a man should be paid for the job he is currently doing and the argument that through no fault of his own he is no longer in a position to do his old job. Even mark-time protection is some concession to this argument: scale protection is a much greater one.

This was the thinking of the management side of the Administrative and Clerical Staffs Council when the staff side pressed its views that the protection arrangements already available for down-pointed officers should be extended to officers downgraded following an amalgamation. In the event, the management side decided on a major advance to meet the staff side's point of view. In July, 1967 they offered to extend full protection to senior officers of the designated grades downgraded as a result of reorganisation and also to certain officers of the special grades—this class including, incidentally, catering officers and domestic superintendents among others—who would be similarly affected.

These officers would receive full protection if aged 55 or over but below the age of 55 full protection would be limited to a period of four years—after which scale protection would be available—and also would be subject to an undertaking that the officers were prepared to move to a post elsewhere. Those officers of the special grades who were not given full protection were given, in fact, scale protection.

The basis of the distinctions in these arrangements is that senior officers experience greater difficulty in finding alternative employment. As the hon. Lady rightly said, the more senior that people become, the more difficult the problem. It is possible that they can be called upon to advise on desirable amalgamations which do not improve their mental attitudes. As against this, younger officers, even though in senior posts, can more readily find alternative employment. I accept that.

In introducing these proposals, the management side took the view that protection was a subject on which, in the nature of things, one could not offer an agreement with retrospective effect: once the principle of retrospection was conceded, it would be impossible to set a limit without someone arguing for further back-dating or extension. It was for this reason that the management side offered an agreement with immediate effect from the date of the meeting.

The hon. Lady will, no doubt, feel that she is not seeking a general award of retrospection, but is concerned only with the 42 designated officers mentioned in the Answer which my right hon. Friend gave to her on 8th March. But if the present agreement were to be applied retrospectively to these officers, the matter would not stop there.

The hon. Lady has suggested that this is a matter which should be referred to the National Board for Prices and Incomes. This is a suggestion that I should have to consider with my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and the First Secretary of State. But I am bound to say that as I am advised at present, this case would not be appropriate for reference to the Board.

In conclusion, may I stress again that when an officer is downgraded or made redundant following an amalgamation the first consideration should be alternative comparable employment. I have spoken of the duty of employing authorities in this matter, and the National Staff Committee and regional staff and regional staff committees also have a part to play; but so has the individual affected. While employing authorities must remain responsible for making individual appointments, my right hon. Friend would always be willing to make inquiries if given details of difficulty on the part of an individual in obtaining suitable alternative employment in the National Health Service.

I hope that with that assurance, the hon. Lady will not press for the introduction of retrospection, which could have repercussions well beyond the limits which she currently contemplates.

As I said at the beginning, perhaps what I have said is complex and may not be fully appreciated merely by being listened to, but I think that what I have said would justify officers concerned in reading carefully my words so that they can, if they wish, pursue the matter by further inquiries through the proper channels.

I wish now to turn to the intervention by the hon. Member for Richmond, Surrey (Mr. A. Royle). I was interested to hear that he had received an assurance that his intervention was on a similar subject. He will know that my right hon. Friend has already written to explain the cause of the discrepancy between the letters from the regional board and those from the Minister himself. This was caused by a rather unexpected appointment of a locum registrar at the casualty department which was not known until 9th May. It was decided to reopen the casualty department.

I think that the hon. Member is making rather heavy weather of this, and I cannot quite disabuse my mind of the idea that there is some local political antagonism to the chairman of the board concerned. Of course, I may be wrong.

I really cannot accept the allegation that there is any political antagonism whatsoever. As I said, the main concern is with the regional hospital board and not necessarily the local board. I must ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw that remark.

I am very delighted to hear the hon. Member's observation on that point. I feel that in these matters one has to be very careful of the people who serve the regional boards of their own volition and very well indeed. I am glad to hear what the hon. Member said.

The changed circumstances, as my right hon. Friend has admitted, have been reported to my Department, but there was a week's interval, a total of four days' discrepancy, between the letter and when the matter should have been reported to us; it was reported rather late. I think that the hon. Member is mistaken in reading into a small administrative oversight a lack of liaison between the board and my Department. He was wrong in saying that there was no local information about this matter, because I was advised that the public were informed through Press announcements about the temporary closure and the reopening of the casualty department. I do not think that his criticisms of the regional board are justified, but I can see that there has been some local misunderstanding.

I would say this to the hon. Member: that I am taking steps to ascertain from the regional board what its long-term plans are for this casualty department, though I must ask him to bear in mind that we are suffering from a lack of skilled medical manpower, and that it is not always possible to do all that we should like to do. However, I will try to get the matter inquired into as far as possible and I will write to the hon. Member.

I wish to bring forward the subject of Turkish transport tolls. This is possibly a rather abstruse subject, and I concede at once that there are not many people in this country who are particularly concerned, but those few who are concerned are suffering very grievously indeed.

Let me begin by taking a moment or two to go over the background to the present situation. In July last year the Turkish Government published a decree which imposed a levy on all foreign commercial vehicles entering into or passing through that country. I have here a copy of that decree—or, rather, a translation— and I will quote from it. It is headed:

"Decree No. 6/8458 of 4th July 1967".

It says:

"The following fees will be collected in order to meet the supervision and administrative expenses connected with the transport by trucks and/or trailers entering into Turkey or passing in transit through Turkey: (a) 15 Kurus (or 0.15 Turkish lira) per ton kilometer on the distance to be covered in transit by trucks and/or trailers; (b) a lump sum of 2,000 Turkish lira separately from each truck and/or trailer entering into Turkey."

In English money that was equivalent to approximately £300.

There is a loophole in the decree. Clause 4 reads as follows:

"After coming to an agreement, or even de facto, such fee may be partly or not at all collected from trucks and/or trailers belonging to countries who do not charge inspection fees, transit fees, or any other fee similar to that which is referred to in paragraph 1 above from Turkish licence plate trucks and/ or trailers entering into their country or passing in transit through their country."

It is not absolutely clear, but the effect in general is that Governments must obtain exemption for their hauliers. It is not possible for an individual haulier to obtain exemption from the Turkish decree. It is the Government of his own country which must do this.

The professed object of the Turkish authorities in imposing this substantial levy is set out in the first paragraph, where they say "in order to meet expenses" but the size of these levies seems to me rather large for such a purpose and I am wondering if there is some other reason. It is, of course, the case that a Turkish truck entering into this country, or, for that matter, into any of most other countries of Western Europe, has to pay a fee, which is a proportion of the normal rate of the road fund licence tax applicable to it, that proportion corresponding to the length of time that the truck will stay in this country. I rather suspect that the Turkish authorities imposed the levy in order to have a bargaining counter to secure for their trucks coming into this country, and other countries of Western Europe, exemption from paying the relatively small levies which are currently imposed.

I found some support for that view in an Answer to a Question which I set down on 25th October last year. It was Question No. 89, and the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs replied to that Question:

"Exemption for British hauliers requires the agreement of the Turkish Government on the basis of reciprocity."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th October, 1967; Vol. 751, c. 505.]

In other words, to obtain exemption from the effects of this decree for British hauliers the British Government have got to offer some sort of quid pro quo.

The same situation applies to other Governments in Europe but other Governments were able to reach agreement fairly speedily with the Turkish Government. The Dutch Government, for example, obtained exemption for their hauliers in September, and other European Governments followed not long after. It appears that in those countries the respective Ministers of Transport were able to reach agreement with the Turkish authorities simply by, as it were, a stroke of the ministerial pen. In this country, however, the position is somewhat different. The Minister of Transport here is not empowered on his own authority to reach an agreement for lifting a levy off Turkish vehicles coming into this country. Before he can do that it is necessary for him to place an affirmative Order before both Houses of Parliament. I would quote here from a letter addressed to me by the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, dated 30th November. He said this:

"Under the Motor Vehicles (International Circulation) Act, 1952, we are able to waive taxation on foreign vehicles where we are committed by international agreements to do so. But this can only be done by Order in Council which requires affirmative resolution of both Houses of Parliament."

Indeed, that is so. I have here a copy of that Act and it certainly appears that an Order in Council may be made for this purpose, but it requires an affirmative resolution of both Houses before it can come into effect.

In this situation there was a certain deadlock between the Turkish authorities and ourselves. This House would not consent to an affirmative Order without being satisfied that the Turks were lifting their levy, but the Turks were not willing to lift their levy until they were satisfied that we had lifted our levy. Negotiations were, therefore, necessary between this country and the Turkish authorities. The first question I wish to put to my hon. Friend who is to reply is, why did it take so long for these negotiations to come to a conclusion?

The decree in Turkey was published on 17th July, 1967. The Board of Trade knew about it on 1st August; I have a letter from them saying so. But the Foreign Office, it appears, did not know about the decree until 31st August. Again, I will quote from an Answer to a Question which I put down on 23rd October 1967. The Reply of the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs said, among other things that:

"my right hon. Friend first received information about its"—

that is the decree's—

"effects on British hauliers on 31st August."— [OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th October, 1967; Vol. 751, c. 505.]

I still pressed on with the matter and put down yet another Parliamentary Question to which I received the reply that

"a formal case for exemption was prepared and put to the Turkish Government at the end of September."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 20th November, 1967; Vol. 754, c. 924.]

There does not seem to have been a great deal of zip in this matter. I am advised, however, that the Turks did not reply to our request until 8th November, so perhaps the delay is not all our fault. Nevertheless, negotiations dragged on. I asked a further Question on 22nd January, and received the reply that:

"Considerable progress has been made with a draft agreement embodying reciprocal waivers of the relevant taxation."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 22nd January, 1968; Vol. 757, c. 15.]

Still things drifted on, but at last, on 2nd April, an agreement was reached, and I have a letter saying this from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary which is dated 4th April:

"We have now heard from our Embassy that after some further delays, the Exchange of Notes finally took place on 2nd April."

That was a long, long time. All the time that these negotiations were going on, British hauliers entering or passing through Turkey had to pay this substantial levy.

It will be understood that not many firms are engaged in haulage between this country and Turkey, in fact I know of only two. One of those, a firm called Asian Transport Ltd., is based in my constituency, and it is for that reason that I am raising the matter today. The business of Asian Transport Ltd., as its name implies, is direct haulage between this country and the Middle East, in fact between this country and Teheran. For that purpose, their vehicles must go through Turkey. There is no other way of getting from here to Teheran other than by a madly uneconomic detour through Russia and down through the Caucasus, or an even more expensive detour across the Straits of Gibraltar and across North Africa. These two routes are quite impossibly uneconomic, and the only practical way is to go through Turkey.

Every time this firm sent a vehicle through Turkey since the decree was published they have had to pay £300 until the date of devaluation, and after that date they had to pay £340, and no firm can possibly sustain such a drain on its resources.

The situation is not too bad for outward loads, as the cost can be recovered in the charges made to the customers, but in negotiating for return loads the firm is placed in an uncompetitive position vis-a-vis its European competitors, who can obviously quote much lower terms to firms in Teheran for return loads, since those European competitors are not now subject to the levy and any Turkish firm engaged in haulage between Turkey and this country need pay only a relatively tiny proportion of the Road Fund licence duty.

In this situation it was a great relief to my constituent firm, and to me, to learn that on 2nd April, 1968, agreement had been reached. This pleasure was short-lived. I was most surprised to receive a letter on 11th April, 1968, from my hon. Friend who is to reply, in which he said:

"We have put in hand the preparatory work on the necessary Order in Council."

My next question is this. Why were the Ministry of Transport not keyed up and ready to go immediately agreement was reached with the Turkish authorities on 2nd April? How is that the Order in Council was not tabled before the House on 3rd April? I have had a suggestion that the exchange of Notes had to be examined. I cannot understand this. Surely our people must have known what we were negotiating about; after all, they had months and months in which to find out about this. I should have thought that, once agreement had been reached, there would be no difficulty in tabling the requisite order straight away.

Asian Transport Ltd. still went on paying the levy of £340 every time a vehicle went through Turkey, and they are still having to pay the levy now. This they find very frustrating, and I will quote from a letter which they have addressed to me:

"It really is incredibly demoralising and frustrating for a small company like ours, working as hard as we possibly can for British exporters, to see how slowly the departmental wheels turn in this country compared to those on the Continent. … Clearly, we now have no alternative but to move … we have no choice but to establish ourselves in a foreign country, taking our assets and our earning power with us."

This would be a tragedy for a firm actively engaged in assisting our export drive. What could be of more direct benefit than a firm engaged in direct haulage moving goods from this country to the recipient country abroad? Yet it appears that this firm which is doing such good work will be forced to go abroad. My third question to my hon. Friend is, when is the requisite Order in Council to be laid before the House and in the other place for an affirmative Order to be approved? There are still no signs of this, as far as I can tell, upon the Order Paper of the House.

My fourth question is about the financial burden that Asian Transport Ltd. have had to incur. I received a letter from them on the day before yesterday in which the firm said:

"Turkish Transport tolls paid by us—

(a) From the start till 2nd April 1968, £6,000,

(b) From 2nd April 1968 to date, £1,600."

I therefore ask, are negotiations going one with the Turkish authorities for the recovery of sums that have been paid by way of this levy, since agreement with the Turks has now been reached? If no negotiations are going on for the recovery of these sums, may I ask, why not?

My final question is this. If we do not succeed in recovering the sums paid by Asian Transport Ltd. to the Turkish authorities will the Government be prepared to make any reimbursement to my constituent firm? I hope that it will never be said that I ask for too little. I would like to ask for reimbursement of the whole amount, that is to say £7,600; but if that is considered too substantial a sum, at the very least I submit that there is a serious and genuine case for the reimbursement of the £1,600, which is the amount of the impost which has been paid since 2nd April. Although it might be argued that it was not the fault of the authorities in this country that the impost was paid from last July until April, the blame for the delay after 2nd April in rectifying this situation can rest nowhere else except upon the shoulders of the Government, and I respectfully submit that there is a substantial case for reimbursement, if not of the whole sum, definitely for the reimbursement of all tolls paid after 2nd April.

I will summarise the five questions to which I should like replies. First, why did the negotiations with the Turkish authorities take so long? Secondly, why was the necessary Order in Council not laid before the House instantly that agreement was reached, on the first possible day, which was 3rd April? Thirdly, when, even now, is the appropriate Order in Council to be laid before the House? Fourthly, are we making any attempt to recover from the Turkish authorities the sums which Asian Transport Limited have paid? Finally, if we are not, or if these negotiations are unsuccessful, what offer can the Government make to my constituent firm to reimburse them for the expenditure to which they have been put? I look forward eagerly to my hon. Friend's reply.

I should like to begin by offering my regret that the Turkish system of taxation on foreign goods vehicles bears so heavily on the constituent firm of my hon. Friend the Member for Chislehurst (Mr. Macdonald). I certainly share his concern and realise the need for something to be done to ease this financial burden on British road haulage to or through Turkey.

My hon. Friend has written to me several times on the matter. To my knowledge there is one other British haulage firm, presumably the one which my hon. Friend has in mind, which trades regularly to and beyond Turkey. The action of the Turkish authorities has borne very harshly upon these businesses, and it is only right that the House should know the course of our dealings with the Turkish Government and the efforts which Her Majesty's Government made from the outset to get this handicap removed.

The extra tax on foreign goods vehicles was introduced by the Turkish Govern-men in a decree published in mid-July last year. As far as we know, the tax was introduced without prior notice to those who would have to pay it. Certainly, we received no notice and no immediate copy of the decree. A translation of the decree was examined in this country as soon as it could be obtained. It said that the new tax would be collected on foreign goods vehicles entering Turkey or passing in transit through Turkey. But it also stated that by agreement or arrangement —and I emphasise the word "arrangement"—the tax would either not be collected or not collected in full in the case of vehicles belonging to countries which did not charge inspection fees, transit fees or similar fees on Turkish vehicles.

At this; point, I should outline the United Kingdom's system of taxation on goods vehicles. A vehicle excise tax, graded according to unladen weight, is levied without distinction upon British and foreign vehicles alike. Moreover, by comparison with the Turkish tax it is very modest in scale. We impose nothing which we could recognise as falling within the Turkish description of "inspection fees, transit fees or similar fees", and we concluded that we had a good case for approaching the Turkish authorities in the terms of their decree and asking for exemption from this new tax. This, we thought, would be an "arrangement" of the kind visualised by the Turkish authorities, and should be capable of fairly easy settlement.

The sequence of events, however, is that on 16th August the Ministry wrote to the Turkish Ministry of Communications, with whom we have occasional contacts, suggesting that an arrangement should be made whereby this extra tax on foreign vehicles would not be collected from British vehicles travelling into or through Turkey. At the end of August, we received a reply to the effect that negotiations could not take place at that level. The British Government, said the reply, must approach the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Foreign Office were, therefore, asked to take on these negotiations.

Naturally, we were extremely disappointed with that response, which seemed likely to delay a settlement considerably, if only because on neither side would the Ministries principally concerned be in direct contact. Negotiations had to be conducted by our Embassy in Ankara who were obliged to refer back to London for advice on all points of difficulty as and when they arose—and, of course, difficulties did arise. There was a regular exchange of telegrams between the Embassy and London following the approach to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September, 1967,

The Embassy, as advised, put forward our case for exemption by arrangement, but it soon became apparent that we were to be involved in protracted discussions. Our negotiating partners surprised us by introducing the subject of the British carriers' licensing system, which had nothing whatever to do with the subject of our discussions—namely, taxation. In any case, our carriers' licensing system had been very much simplified in its application to foreign visiting vehicles. This was probably due to some misunderstanding on the Turkish side. Nevertheless, it took some time to dispel.

At the end of October, the Turkish authorities were still considering our request for an exemption arrangement, which, they led us to think, would be granted within a few more days. Again, our hopes were dashed. Notwithstanding continuous pressure by the British Embassy, our Turkish friends were, in November, still finding fresh topics for discussion. And then, for the first time, our Embassy was faced with a definite refusal to grant exemption for British vehicles by arrangement—or, for that matter, by agreement—unless we agreed to grant tax exemption on Turkish vehicles.

As my hon. Friend knows, it is not possible under our law to grant any tax concessions to foreign vehicles by the stroke of an administrator's pen. It can be done only by an Order in Council made under the Motor Vehicles (International Circulation) Act, 1952. The Act says, in effect, that an Order can be made for the purpose of implementing an international agreement which is in force for the United Kingdom.

My hon. Friend will, therefore, understand that by November all our earlier negotiations with Turkey for an arrangement under their decree had failed to bring about the desired result. They could, at best, be regarded as paving the way for what must, in the light of events, be a formal agreement between the two countries. A draft agreement to give our negotiating partners what they now wanted was quickly prepared and despatched to Ankara. But, again, we encountered yet another obstacle. We were told that in Turkey the negotiation of an agreement in that form would be a very protracted business, requiring the approval of their Council of Ministers. An exchange of Notes, they said, would be a much quicker procedure.

The Note was drafted with all possible speed. It was the subject of further queries by the Turkish authorities and resulting telegrams between London and the Embassy. Finally, the formal exchange of Notes took place in Ankara on 2nd April this year—seven-and-a-half months after we first took up the matter, and after a great deal of correspondence and of frustration.

I have dealt with this extremely tedious sequence of events at some length, because I do not want my hon. Friend or the House to gain the impression that the Ministry, or, indeed, the Government, has been dilatory or inert in this matter. From its inception, considerable time and trouble has been devoted to trying to get the lot of British hauliers who trade to Turkey alleviated. Difficulty after difficulty was overcome with as much speed and flexibility as we could command. I think that it must have taken our Turkish friends some considerable time to understand that Britain really was negotiating from an already liberal position—in other words, that we had no discriminatory taxation to forgo in the exchange.

My hon. Friend has also raised the question of the reimbursement of his constituent. This matter was raised in the course of the negotiations with Turkey. I would point out to my hon. Friend that at one point in time we had to make a clear decision whether we further pursued what we thought were to be finally abortive discussions and consequently to be a further financial burden on his constituent, or to get on and get an agreement concluded. I very much regret that there appears to be little chance of success with this aspect of the negotia- tions, and we are not aware of any power whereby the British Government may reimburse the money that has been paid in Turkish taxation. I know that this will disappoint my hon. Friend, but I have to make this point clear.

Now that we have the exchange of Notes, I should like to assure my hon. Friend that we are doing all we can to accelerate matters. We are not, for example, resting on any "normal procedures", if it is within our competence to do otherwise. In the normal course of events an international agreement is printed in the treaty series for presentation to Parliament before legislative action to implement it. However, on this occasion, because of the urgency of the matter, we shall lay a preliminary certified copy of this exchange of Notes together with the Order in Council.

I fully understand my hon. Friend's anxiety that we should press on with the Order, and indeed I am investigating urgently any possibility that seems to offer an earlier completion of remaining necessary procedure. We had hoped to include in the Order in Council agreements with Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden, in addition to Turkey. But, in view of the pressure from my hon. Friend for action on Turkey, we are pushing on on the basis of two agreements so far as they are concluded now with Turkey and Sweden. This has the extreme disadvantage, from the Government's point of view, of causing an added burden on parliamentary time.

My hon. Friend has asked precisely when the Order will be laid. I am not in a position to give a precise time, but I can assure him that the officers of my Ministry are giving urgent consideration to this problem. I hope that, even during the Recess, the Order may be laid. I certainly hope that, as early as possible after the Recess, it will be brought before the House.

Having said that, even when the necessary Resolutions have gone through this House and the other place, there will still need to be a meeting of the Privy Council to confirm the Order.

We are a little ahead of time. I remind hon. Members who were not here earlier that the next debate will finish promptly at 3.45 p.m.

My purpose, Mr. Speaker, in raising this subject on the Adjournment is to draw attention to the dangerous state of affairs in the Middle East and the apparent incapacity of the Western Powers to adapt their policies, as speedily and effectively as they should, to deal with the situation; and also to the long-term adverse effects which increasing Russian influence in the area could have on British interests.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Eldon Griffiths), if he catches your eye, Mr. Speaker, will deal with a number of aspects which I will not touch upon.

Soviet naval activity is one manifestation of this open and increasing influence. I do not look upon the Soviet naval presence as presenting a major threat to our trading routes. It is the political threat inherent in such a presence, and its causes, which should be examined; not the mere fact that part of the Soviet naval capability happens to be deployed in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean at a particular moment in peacetime, although I would like to have from the Minister more information about this activity than has so far been made available.

By saying that this threat is political, I mean that the Soviets have acquired a new means of influencing events in the Middle East. The cheque book is now backed up by the gunboat, and this development could prove a powerful booster for those elements in each country which are most hostile to Western interests.

When presenting his credentials to the President of South Yemen, the new Soviet Ambassador stated that South Yemen's victory of liberation would undoubtedly have a positive effect on the development of the liberation movements of other peoples in the Arabian Peninsula.

One motive for the Soviet Union's increasing interest in the Gulf could be that Russia has growing oil requirements; and it has been pointed out that by the 1970s it is likely that she will be needing significant quantities of oil from outside her own borders.

, the Chairman of Shell, recently said that

"by establishing herself in the Middle Eastern oil scene, Russia would not only be strengthening the hand of local national oil companies vis-a-vis the Western private companies, she would also be taking steps to ensure that at least part of her expected future needs from outside Russia will be there to draw upon when she wants them".

But the most significant fact is that the Soviet Union has found it increasingly easy to pursue its aim in the Middle East. We should, therefore, look beneath the surface and establish why it is that Soviet influence and military presence are being actively welcomed by some Arab countries, being passively tolerated by others, and not openly criticised even by those who seriously fear them.

The answer, or certainly one of the principal answers is not hard to find for those who wish to do so. It lies in the confusion and bitterness caused in the Arab world by the so far unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict: because of the fact that almost exactly a year after the end of the five day war of June, 1967, Israel is still occupying the whole of the West Bank of Jordan and Jerusalem; that is troops remain on the Suez Canal; that over 300,000 new refugees are still encamped in makeshift tents on the overcrowded east bank of Jordan, and that they have not been allowed to return to their homes; that the United Nations Resolutions of July, 1967, on Jerusalem have been ignored; and that the United Nations Resolution of November, 1967, sponsored by Britain and unanimously passed by the Security Council, remains unimplemented.

It is true that in "real politique" terms Israel's present attitude is perfectly understandable. She won the war, and she is greatly stronger than the Arabs. She therefore expects the normal laurels of a conqueror, but the Israeli situation is not a normal one.

What has happened in Palestine during the last 50 years—the progressive displacement of the indigenous population —is almost unique. Sooner or later, the Israelis have to decide to live amongst the people of the Middle East. To rely upon indefinite American support would not be far-sighted. For Israel increasingly to alienate not only the countries around her, but the countries beyond them, seems foolhardy. It would be an illusion, however, to believe that Israel has not done precisely that, and more Arabs and more Arab States now feel themselves threatened by an expanding Israel.

Anybody who still believes that Arab hostility is confined to the periphery should visit Kuwait. Since the war the Kuwaitis have not merely given large financial aid to Egypt and Jordan additional to the long standing and enlightened aid programme channelled through the Arab Development Fund, they are politically involved and are playing a significant rôle in Arab affairs.

Moreover, they have worked hard to improve relations between this country and other Arab States ever since the June crisis of last year, and I should like to pay tribute to their efforts in this direction What the Israelis need above all is peace, and acceptance by their neighbours. Their conduct since last June has made that acceptance less, not more likely. The Israelis expect the Arabs to pay for defeat. The Arabs expect the Israelis to pay for peace and acceptance.

Behind all that, one incontrovertible fact remains, that British interests, and indeed Western interests, are complementary to Arab interests. It is not a British interest that the Suez Canal should remain indefinitely closed. It is not a British, nor indeed a Western interest that the Arab States should be driven increasingly towards the Communist Powers for help and encouragement, because these alone appear to show them understanding.

Again, for instance, the Soviet Ambassador to the South Yemen, when presenting his credentials, reiterated that the Soviet Union stood firmly by the Arab countries in their just struggle for the withdrawal of Israel from occupied Arab territories.

It is overwhelmingly a British interest, economically and politically, that relations with the Arab States should be improved, and that mutual understanding should grow. Britain to some very considerable extent has appreciated this obvious fact, and has adjusted her policies accordingly. Indeed, relations between Britain and the Arab countries have greatly improved since June, 1967. In the Gulf our policy has been less far-sighted, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds will be able to refer to that. The United States, on the other hand, apparently mesmerised by the power of the Zionist vote, has totally failed to do so, although many of her more able diplomats have pointed out the reality of the situation, and the need to adapt United States policy to it.

The Americans, however, seem prepared to continue pursuing policies contrary to their interests and the interests of the West. Because they are prepared or able to commit this folly, there is certainly no reason why we should do the same. Quite apart from anything else, the American investment in the Middle East is quite marginal to their economy, while our investment, so far from being marginal, is crucial. I should like to hear something from the Minister about the progress of the Jarring Mission, and any alternative policy the Government may have in the event of its failure.

Soviet naval presence is a symptom of a much more serious illness. I wish to be assured that British policy will maintain the right priorities in the Middle East, namely, to put British interests first.

I remind the House that this debate must end at 3.45 p.m. There are three back bench Members who wish to speak before the Front Bench intervenes. If they make reasonably brief speeches they will all be called.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) on raising this subject, but I hope that he will forgive me if I do not go into the detail that he did about the Arab-Israeli dispute, but, rather, address myself to the presence of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, because I believe that this has important strategic implications for this country.

This is not the first time that the Russians have taken an interest in the Mediterranean since the end of the war. In fact, one can trace a Russian interest in the area back to Peter the Great. I should like, therefore, to approach the problem in historical terms, and to ask two questions: first, whether the Russian presence in the Middle East is for defensive purposes of the Russian mainland, which has been the historical trend, or—and this is my second question—it represents a new threat to the area, whether it has an aggressive intent.

There is considerable evidence to suggest that the Russians now see the advantages of using their new fleet for diplomatic purposes, that is to say, where there is a naval presence it is easy to interfere, or to apply one's strength at a vital time to reap diplomatic advantage. As the hon. Gentleman said, the presence of the Russian fleet at a time of dispute between Israel and the Arab world can accrue immense diplomatic benefits for Russia.

On the other hand, there are some disturbing signs that the Russians intend to use their fleet for reasons other than diplomatic initiatives, although I think that they will take every opportunity— economic, political and strategic—to use their fleet as an arm of their overall policy.

If one looks at the composition of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, one finds that they are building up an amphibious force, and even resurrecting a marine corps, which presumably could be used overtly for intervening in any area in which they felt it would be useful. We cannot afford to be complacent about the Russian presence in the Middle East, and yet I fear that if we react too hastily we may encourage an immense build-up of naval power in the Mediterranean. In fact, we may encourage a naval arms race.

There is a certain amount of imprecise information and contradiction about the strength of the Russian fleet. In an article in the Spectator, Professor Laurence Martin said:

"Some of the recent Press accounts of Soviet policy are clearly inspired by naval lobbyists and patently exaggerated; missiles with a range of 10 miles are equated with those of hundreds, and aged cruisers are presented as fierce new contenders for naval supremacy."

In an article in the Time magazine of 23rd February it was said:

"Unlike the United States and Britain, both of which emerged from World War II with large surface fleets, Russia had to start practically from scratch after the war. The result: while 60 Per cent. of the U.S. fleet consists of ships 25 years old or older, the Soviet navy's surface fleet is sleek and modern."

The first question is whether it is possible to give a more accurate account of the kind of surface fleet that the Soviets have in the Mediterranean. My view, based on such information as is published, is that the combined Western fleets at the moment are far superior, both in tonnage and in firepower, to the Russian fleet at present active in the area.

I regret that, owing to a misunderstanding, I arrived here late. Will the hon. Gentleman tell us what he thinks about the Soviet fleet's penetration of the Persian Gulf?

I said in my opening remarks that I placed great significance in the fact that the Soviet fleet is now active in these areas. On the other hand, there is a tendency by some naval lobbyists to argue that the intensified Russian naval activity represents a new and aggressive Soviet bid for supremacy at sea. The House should be careful before accepting that proposition too easily. This policy represents a new departure.

rose—

Order. I cannot discourage interventions, but I am trying to get four speakers into the next ten or 15 minutes.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving way. He will know that Fleet Admiral Gorshkov, head of the Soviet Navy, has a declared philosophy that it is essential to rival Western fleets throughout the oceans of the world.

I shall be referring to what the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy has said. Nevertheless, this represents a departure in Russian policy and it would be fruitless to ignore that Russia is pursuing an active policy of penetration in the Middle East and will seize every opportunity for the extension of her influence.

About 40 Soviet ships are now regularly deployed in the Mediterranean. As the hon. and gallant Gentleman said, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy has made a boast that it will be only a matter of time before the Russian fleet exceeds the power of the United States fleet. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to credit Russia with the skill and power to threaten our existence, and to see the Russian presence in the Mediterranean as a calculated plot to outflank our laboriously constructed defence in Europe.

Russian naval preoccupation at sea is still perhaps defensive in response to the United States seaborne nuclear strike force, and it would be churlish to ignore the influence of the Chinese-Russian dispute upon Russian policy. There is a trend at work which forces the Russians to look potenially more militant than they actually are.

Nevertheless, there is no room for complacency, and I hope that my hon. Friend will assure the House that now that we intend to withdraw from the Far East in 1971 and to reduce our forces in the Persian Gulf, those forces will be redeployed in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, since it is essential that there should be a Western response in this area, but not to the point at which we encourage a naval arms race.

We now have 20 minutes before the Front Benches intervene. There are three hon. Members to call.

I thought that we had an hour, Mr. Speaker, so I shall be even briefer than I had intended. I came here to congratulate my hon. Friend upon raising this subject, which is of first-class importance to all of us in this country. In what is going on in the rest of the world, we tend to forget that this problem has continued for a long time.

I maintain my interest in it, which my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Lewes (Sir T. Beamish) has sustained for over 20 years in the House. I shall not go back on the mistakes that we made in the past. We have all made them. We now have to face the situation because, as time goes on, it does not get better. The hon. Member for Horn-church (Mr. Alan Lee Williams) said that he did not think that the Russians were aggressive in the area. I believe that if we leave a vacuum, which we have done in parts of the world, people like the Russians are likely to move in, especially in the oil-producing areas, in view of the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) that the Russians look like being net importers of oil in the early 1970s.

It was not my intention to say that the Russians were not aggressive. I said that I was not sure.

I take the hon. Member's point.

All this goes back to the fact that we have this continual Arab-Israeli dispute in the Middle East. It has been of some interest to those of us who go to the Western European Assembly to know that Western Europe now looks to this area not because of any interest in Israel, but because it is interested in the continuing flow of oil from that area. Because of that there will be an increasing interest in what is going on there.

What the Government might propose to do about what is happening in the Middle East I do not expect the Undersecretary to tell us in detail now, because this is clearly a moment for confidential diplomacy, through the United Nations and elsewhere, to try to reach a compromise over the various outstanding issues. When I played a rather small part in trying to deal with this problem the Jordan waters seemed the easiest part. Now, following the developments last year, that seems in large part to have been taken care of.

Perhaps the Minister can tell us whether it is possible to involve the World Bank in this matter. The Bank did a marvellous job in settling the Indus waters dispute between India and Pakistan, and it would be a very constructive effort. The problem of refugees is the greatest human problem, which continues and perhaps grows. A settlement of the Jordan waters dispute could do a certain amount to help in that direction by providing the area with food.

The closing of the canal has a greater effect on countries abroad than here. By building up agreement on one or two points, we may be able to work towards the final settlement to which we all look forward.

Compromise is not an attribute of the Semitic people, in the many areas in which I have worked with them. Sometimes we forget that both sides in this dispute are Semitic people. It is a form that we have got used to. If a solution to this problem is to be produced it will require of certain leaders in the area the courage to compromise, which some have tried to effect in the last 20 years. Time has not made this easier, and I hope that the Under-Secretary can tell us that he hopes, if he cannot specify it in details, that we may see some constructive results before too long.

I welcome the opportunity of making a brief contribution to the debate on this very important subject. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for West-bury (Mr. Walters) has had the opportunity to raise it.

Everyone will agree that the fundamental changes in the political pattern in the Middle East during the last year have highlighted the very great importance of British foreign policy being coherent and consistent. I greatly regret that I cannot say that it has been either.

I want to refer briefly to a few ways in which the Soviet Union is exploiting the new and vulnerable situation in the Middle East. The result of the Arab-Israel war was a severe blow to Soviet prestige, but already great strides have been made in restoring the military situation. The Soviet Government has re-equipped the Egyptian and Syrian armed forces to at least three-quarters of their pre-war level. This meant a great many arms.

Russian naval activity has been referred to, and I hope that the Under-Secretary will tell us more about it. I have been checking on a few of the figures which are known, and find that in 1967, before the June war, 45 Soviet men-of-war were sailing in the Mediterranean, and that after the June war more than twice that number, over 100, have been sailing in the Mediterranean. This is a very significant increase. It applies to minelayers, gunboats, survey ships and other craft.

Pravda said recently:

"Soviet Hags in the Mediterranean Sea are one in the eye for imperialists."

The Russians mean what they say.

The First Deputy Head of the Soviet Navy, Mr. Kasatonov, said in July, 1967, that the Soviet Navy,

"for the first time in its history, has been transformed in the fullest sense into a long-range offensive arm of the armed forces."

We should ignore that statement at our peril.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Air Force has made prestige visits to Middle East countries on what is described as a good will basis. It is the very first time that the Soviet Air Force has paid good will visits to any non-Communist countries. Last December, 10 TU16 Soviet jet bombers gave a magnificent air display in Cairo, and went on to Aswan. A squadron of Soviet bombers also recently visited Syria.

Prestige apart, there are now about 3,000 Soviet experts attached to the armed forces in the United Arab Republic, as well as 5,000 Soviet civilian advisers and technical experts in that country. There are also 2,000 military and civilian experts in Algeria, 500 in Syria, and a substantial number in the Yemen. We must take note of this.

Politically, Russia misses no opportunity of sowing seeds of distrust between the Middle East countries—this is the normal Russian technique—and also between the Arab countries and this country. Lenin said:

"As soon as we are strong enough to defeat capitalism as a whole, we shall immediately take it by the scruff of the neck."

This is a good text to any analysis that one is making of Soviet strategy.

During the past year the Soviet Union has substantially increased its broadcasts in Arabic to the Middle East, to a maximum of 58 hours a week, as well as nearly 50 hours in Persian, 28 in Turkish and broadcasts in other Middle East languages. Other Eastern European countries are joining in.

The number of Arab students in Communist bloc countries remains comparatively small compared with the numbers in the Western world—probably between 5,000 and 6,000 in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. A large number have returned to their own countries disillusioned, not least by the colour bar, which many people do not know exists in Communist countries, but it certainly does. But a few—that is all Russia needs —go back indoctrinated with Marxist-Leninist principles and well trained in subversion to seek posts of influence in their own countries.

It is significant that the Soviet Union shows an increasing interest in Middle East oil. How far this can be put down to political ends or how far it reflects actual need for Middle East oil is not entirely certain. It will be interesting to know if the Under-Secretary is able to tell us something about it. The Chairman of the Shell Trading & Transport Co. said recently in Boston, Massachusetts, that there is a strong posssibility that by 1970 Russia might need oil in significant quantities from outside her own borders. This is a new situation, and I do not think that we have taken enough account of it.

A number of Soviet technicians are exploring for oil in Middle East countries, and Russia has had some success in oil exploitation in Iraq. This emphasises the great importance of restoring and maintaining our good relations with that country. I am glad that our new Ambassador is now in Baghdad.

To sum up—I apologise for speaking so fast, Mr. Speaker, but it was more or less on your instructions—the Soviet Union is clearly and manifestly working to extend its influence in the Middle East by all possible means—political, economic, military and cultural. I have given a very brief account of it. I could have given a much longer one. The Soviet Union aims to encourage revolutionary or progressive States—whichever one likes to call them—and establish pro-Soviet régimes wherever it can. Its aim as usual is to undermine ordered society as the first step in that direction. Their influence is apparently strongest in the United Arab Republic. It has been less successful in Syria and Algeria although it has had considerable success in those countries.

But there is another side to the coin. I have been visiting Middle East counties regularly since 1937, when I first joined my regiment in Cairo and I was in the Palestine troubles. Each time I visit the Middle East, I am confirmed in my view that Communism is unacceptable to the Arabs, particularly those who adhere to the Moslem religion. I am also confirmed in my view that the ties between the Arab countries and Britain remain strong, badly shaken as they were by Suez and even more so by the broken promises of the last few years.

If Britain ignores her long-term interests in the name of short-term economy, the Arab countries cannot be blamed if they turn elsewhere. I very much agreed with the Foreign Secretary when he said, in 1965:

"Our interest simply is that that part of the world "—

the Middle East—

"should be at peace. In the Persian Gulf that still means the special relationship existing between Britain and those States."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11th July, 1966; Vol. 731, c. 1014.]

I hope that it still means that, although I cannot help having doubts. But no special relationship is self-perpetuating and Britain must work hard to retain it because it is of paramount importance both to us and to the Arabs.

We have had a most interesting debate and the House should be grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for West-bury (Mr. Walters), since the subject is of most vital importance. During many years I have visited the Middle East again and again.

It is no exaggeration to say that a wave of dismay went through the whole area last year when the Government having first sent out one of their Under-Secre-taries of State to say that we intended to stay, a month later sent him out again to say that we were going to go. This caused the greatest confusion throughout the area. Up till the time we said we were going to go, the right hon. Member for Belper (Mr. George Brown), then Foreign Secretary, had told us again and again of the value of our investments in the Middle East. As my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Lewes (Sir T. Beamish) said, they really are incalculable. I do not think that we can say how much they are.

New oil is being discovered all the time and it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the whole economy of Britain is, to a large degree and always will be in the forseeable future, dependent on a cheap supply of oil. In that situation, it was the greatest imaginable folly when the Government, for the saving of about £10 million or at the most £15 million a year, decided to withdraw from the area. If ever there was a case of false economy this would seem to be one. We have created as a result a vacuum in the area —and an area, what is more, which is used to power in an old-fashioned sense.

It is no use talking in modern intellectual language to the Sheikhs and the small Governments of the Persian Gulf. They do not understand Oxford and Cambridge vernacular so pleasantly put forward from the Front Bench. All they see is that here is an area in which there has long been a dominant Power and when that power goes they know in their hearts that there will be another dominant Power to replace it, because the pickings, to put it brutally, are so enormous and the military strength of the area is so ridiculously small. I do not want to go into the disastrous effect this withdrawal had upon Britain or the almost inevitable pushing of the Shah to closer association with the Soviet Union.

It is necessary to stress some of the really disadvantageous results of the Government's policy. What is to happen in the Gulf? We are to withdraw. A vacuum will be created. More oil will be found. As my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Lewes said, the Soviet Union inevitably will stir up troubles in these areas.

Once troubles are stirred up, what will happen? Slowly, up the whole of the Persian Gulf—or, as they call it on the Arab side, the Arabian Gulf—will come steaming a great fleet of Russian battleships. That will be the power that will matter. As a result, we shall incalculably weaken our power and influence in the areas from which we withdraw, areas which hardly anyone can deny produce oil, upon which our economy is totally dependent.

There are other side effects of our withdrawal. The first is what has happened in the Yemen. Almost anyone who has ever been to the Yemen knows that this is a country which has problems which are not easily answerable. Hardly anyone would deny, either, that it is a country which should be left to itself to sort out its problems as best it can. Yet, because we have withdrawn, the Russians have landed a large amount of arms in the Yemen itself. As a result, the war there will be indefinitely prolonged and a foothold of Communism has been established upon a land base in Arabia. There will inevitably be a recurrence of this type of armament landing in the Southern Yemen.

Going further round the Gulf, Oman is another place so fraught with troubles and dissension that it might have been specially designed for the propaganda of infiltrator. Inevitably, there will be Russian arms and infiltration. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Mr. Dodds-Parker) said, what is needed in this area is peace. What the Government declared would happen on our withdrawal was peace. Our withdrawal will mean war, increasing war, in an area absolutely vital to us.

Coming to the main point at issue, this is perhaps the richest area in the world for oil reserves, at a time when elsewhere oil is in short supply. Can we afford To continue to carry out the policy laid down by the Government of withdrawal from the area, in the light of the change in Soviet policies as a result of our policy of withdrawal?

I know that we have changed the peace treaty with Kuwait, but is it necessary for the Government still to give the impression that they are determined to get out of all this area at any price? Even a qualified assurance from the Government that they are not prepared to do this, but are prepared to reconsider our position, might change the whole balance of power in the Middle East.

One last point. As long as four months ago the former Foreign Secretary said, speaking of our ships held up by the Egyptian authorities in the Suez Canal:

"… I am cautiously optimistic that the four British ships will be released in the reasonably near future."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 24th January, 1968; Vol. 757, c. 442.]

This has not occurred. I should be grateful if the Under-Secretary would say whether there will be large claims on insurance by foreign countries as a result of the detention of these ships. Are the Government still prepared to let the situation continue indefinitely with pathetic approaches, pathetic pretences to which no one pays attention?

The House is indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) and you, too, Mr. Speaker, for bringing this matter to its attention. My hon. Friend speaks with great knowledge and also great moderation. Because of this, he carries much conviction. He spoke mainly of the opportunities created for Soviet activity by the unresolved situation between the Arabs and Israelis. I shall concentrate mainly on the Gulf.

I start with the evidence of Soviet naval activity which I would like the Minister to confirm when he replies. My understanding is that in the Mediterranean the Soviet fleet now disposes of one and sometimes two missile-carrying cruisers of a kind which the Royal Navy no longer possesses; between eight and nine extremely modern missile-carrying destroyers; up to a dozen submarines, although none, as far as we can discover, of the large missile-firing variety; and four large landing craft, capable of putting ashore the increasingly well-trained force of Soviet marines.

Together these vessels comprise a formidable armada. As yet they are no match for the United States Sixth Fleet, and their activities will no doubt come under closer surveillance now that the Minister of Defence, having first ordered the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean has now ordered it back in again. The political and military balance in the Eastern Mediterranean nevertheless has unquestionably changed for the worse from our point of view. At any one moment, I am told, there is a Soviet flotilla at anchor at Port Said, at the northern outlet of the Suez, another flotilla is likely to be found in Alexandria, and still a third at Latakia, the principal port of Syria.

These ships do not lack for powerful Soviet air cover. Since the Arab-Israeli war there has been a huge and technically most impressive, Soviet airlift of modern arms to Egypt. Soviet bomber squadrons have paid courtesy visits to Egypt. Soviet aircraft are known to be in Syria; several Soviet aircraft with Egyptian pilots are also to be found further south in Africa. Their presence has been noted in the Sudan, on a former United States airfield north of Khartoum. Egyptian-piloted Migs are reliably reported to have been in action again in Nigeria against the Ibos.

We must face the fact that Soviet power is now a very real, if still a limited force, not only in the Eastern Mediterranean but the whole of the Nile Valley. It could and I feel it will reach much deeper into Africa—indeed it is precisely because I fear that Soviet aircraft with Egyptian or conceivably African pilots might one day be invited to assist terrorist movements in the Zambesi Valley that I was so appalled by the United Nations resolution calling for "material assistance" for the so-called freedom fighters in Rhodesia.

However, this is a Middle East debate, and I turn now to the second leg of Soviet penetration, namely that east of Suez, down the Red Sea into South Arabia, and beyond that into the Gulf. So far the Soviet forces off South Arabia and in the Gulf are militarily insignificant. We know of a Soviet submarine harbour at the Red Sea port of Hadago and a Soviet squadron recently steamed up the Gulf and into Umm Qasr, the main port of Iraq. This is something quite new. Never before have the Russians taken to the warm waters between Iran and Arabia, and, to paraphrase the Economist, they have not gone there for a sun tan. They have gone there, I believe, partly to demonstrate their power to the Arab States and partly to help consolidate their increasing grip on the strategic junction of three continents of Africa, Asia and Europe. But mainly they have gone there on a fishing expedition for oil.

My hon. Friends have mentioned the growing prospect that the Soviet Union may soon become an oil-importing country. I would not regard it as a disaster if the Russians were to buy their oil from the Gulf, as we do. A car-driving Russia, dependent for her petrol on peaceful international trade, is a very much safer proposition than the old Stalinist state. But will the Russians be content to buy their oil on a commercial basis? Will they stick to the rules of international commerce, or will they chuck their weight about and seek to grab for the oil whether by subversion or, which is much more likely, by getting involved in the international rivalries and domestic affairs of the various Gulf states?

Should anything like that happen it would be a grave blow to British interests. It is not simply a matter of oil; it is a matter of our balance of payments, therefore of the British economy and consequently, of the standard of living of the British people.

The importance of the Gulf to Britain is hard to over-estimate. Each year we import from the Gulf oil which we pay for in sterling to the tune of £400 million. If we did not get this oil from the British companies in the Gulf, we should have to buy it from elsewhere, much of it across the balance of payments. Then, too, the British Gulf companies export oil to third countries—to Japan, Europe, and the United States. Those sales to hard currency countries help our balance of trade to the tune of nearly £200 million a year.

British capital investment in the Gulf is now valued at £900 million. Most of it is in oil. But increasingly there are British investments in the developing copper fields and the industrialisation of Iran which, in my judgment, is one of the Middle East's most exciting economic frontiers.

Finally there is trade. Our exports to the Gulf last year were worth more than £300 million. The future potential is immense. Kuwait alone has a five-year plan involving an outlay of getting on for £800 million by the early 1970's. Bahrein is industrialising. Abu Dhabi soon will have an income of £75 million a year for 30,000 people. Dubai is also developing. Its port reminds one of a miniature Hong Kong. I was interested, though not particularly encouraged, when I was there to see that the largest new building in Dubai is the 500,000 dollar offices of the First National City Bank of New York. Beyond Dubai there is the prospect further down the Gulf of additional oil strikes in Oman and Muscat.

So much for the positive side of the balance sheet of the Gulf. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate its vital importance to Britain.

What about the other side of the balance sheet? It comprises on Government account little more than £12 to £15 million, set against the enormous British investment. The £12 to £15 million that we are paying at the moment for the British garrisons in the Gulf is about the same as British Rail loses every month and, indeed, is somewhat less than the House agreed in a recent Supplementary Estimate to spend on the new office furnishing and heating services of the Ministry of Public Building and Works.

The decision to pull our troops out of the Gulf ostensibly was taken on financial grounds. But the more we examine this statement, the more we conclude that it simply does not hold water as an explanation. For one thing, the Arab Rulers themselves offered to meet a large part of the cost and were rudely turned down by the Government. For another thing—the House may not be entirely aware of this—the United States, which was strongly opposed to the British plan to get out, was prepared, in concert, perhaps, with Australia, Singapore and Malaysia, to help with the financial aspects.

The former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Belper (Mr. George Brown), did his best to resist this foolish policy. It was not he who let Britain and America down. It was not he who opened the door of the Gulf to the Soviet Union. Neither would I altogether blame the Minister of Defence, in spite of his ill-mannered insult to our Arab allies. In the end, it seems to have been the Left-wing members of the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister most of all, who, on an absolutely crucial defence and foreign policy issue, overruled the Defence and Foreign Ministers and their advisers.

And the Commonwealth Secretary.

And the Commonwealth Secretary.

That decision is more and more coming to be seen as an act of high folly which leads in direct line to the Soviet presence in the Gulf. It has started to create, as we on this side have long warned the Government, that vacuum of power and that lurch away from stability which so damages British interest.

I can briefly measure the change since that announcement was made. Last December, when the Minister of State went to the Gulf, the situation was very different to what it is today. Then, in December, there was peace. British relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia were extremely good. The Shah was contemplating a visit to Riyadh and we all hoped that this would lead to an invaluable Saudi-Iranian entente. British trade with both countries was developing fast. We had sold the Saudis an advanced air defence system, and Iran was looking to us for more naval aid. Our links with Kuwait held throughout the tensions of the Arab-Israeli war. Our relations with Iraq were improving. In Bahrein, Abu Dhabi and Dubay there was confidence in our Political Residents and in the Englishman's word as his bond. Above all, at that time there were no Soviet ships to be seen in the area. They were not welcome; they were not needed.

But what has happened since? The first big fact is that Britain has announced its intention to pull out in 30 months' time. When that announcement was made, I warned the hon. Gentleman in this House and in person that the Gulf Rulers' confidence would be shaken, that the credibility of the Government's remaining commitments in the area would be cast into doubt, that many of the old frontier squabbles might be revived and that Iran would reinstate its claim against Bahrein. I concluded that if any of those things happened, the Russians would be the main gainers. That is precisely what has happened.

Today, by contrast with December, relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia are extremely bad. The Saudis, although still friendly to us, turn to France for the supply of armoured vehicles for their army. The Shah is drawing closer to the Soviet Union. The result is that, where the Gulf was peaceful and secure, it is today insecure and angry.

I conclude by referring the Minister to a remark made in this House by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kinross and West Perthshire (Sir Alec Douglas-Home) on 24th January this year, when he said:

"It is recognised by all who live in the Gulf that should Britain leave prematurely— that is, on anything like the time scale named by the Foreign Secretary—this area will be torn by strife and trouble, and the Soviet Union would be only too ready to stir the pot "—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 24th January, 1968; Vol. 757, c. 423.]

That was what my right hon. Friend said to the Government at that time. It was only one of the many perceptive warnings that he and this side of the House have given to the Government about creating a vacuum. It is turning out to be only too sadly true.

I think that in the time available it would probably be in the best interests of the House that I should not seek to answer in detail the partisan and sometimes misleading remarks of the hon. Gentleman the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Eldon Griffiths). I had hoped that we might have stayed rather closer to the subject named on the Order Paper this afternoon, because the subject raised by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Westbury (Mr. Walters) is a fascinating and important one, which, I think, should be discussed in this House by both sides in a temperate spirit and with a full knowledge of the very serious issues involved. In so far as the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds failed to discuss this matter in that way, I regret it. However, I think we have had an interesting debate and all of us are most grateful to the hon. Gentleman the Member for Westbury for raising the issue, and I hope for the most part to stick fairly closely to the question of Soviet naval activity, rather than be drawn, as, perhaps, he sought to draw me, into wider Middle Eastern issues, including the Israeli rôle and policy.

What I certainly can agree with him about is that it is right that the British Government, whatever its complexion may be, should put British interests first. I agree also with what he said, that it was not in British interests that the Suez Canal should remain indefinitely closed, nor that the Arab countries should be, as I think he said, pushed further towards the Communist bloc. I agree with him that there is an overwhelming need to improve relations with Arab countries as far as we can. This has been the consistent policy of the Government both before and since the June war, and I am very glad that this afternoon several hon. Gentlemen paid particular tribute to the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Belper (Mr. George Brown) during his period as Foreign Secretary. We are doing all that we can to help solve an exceedingly difficult situation, and at all times we have in mind where British interests lie.

May I say in this context that during my right hon. Friend's, the Foreign Secretary's, recent talk in Moscow the Soviet Foreign Minister reiterated his Government's wish to see a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israel dispute, which has been the principal cause, as we all know, of instability and of threats to the area. We still take the view that the best hope of reaching some solution lies in giving the fullest support to the patient efforts of Dr. Gunnar Jarring, and I am happy to say that Mr. Gromyko confirmed that the Soviet Government share this view and they welcome the success of Dr. Gunnar Jarring in persuading the parties concerned to continue their talks with him in New York.

Let us not forget the United Nations Security Council Resolution of 22nd November last year. This was a substantial step on the road, and, without in any way being complacent, because it is clearly going to take a long time, I think we are committed to a settlement which in the end will, I hope, turn out to be a just and lasting one.

On the subject of the opening of the Suez Canal, of course we are aware— very aware indeed—of the problems. We have attempted over a long period to find a settlement of this issue. We hoped that it might be treated as a technical problem divorced from wider political issues. This is the view which we held and we still hold. Although, as I think the House will know well, operations were begun mainly, as we believe, as a result of our representations to the U.A.R. authorities in January—they came to a halt only after the salvage boats, mainly from Ismailia, were fired on by the Israelis—the plain fact is that the U.A.R. and Israel have different interpretations of the no-sailing in the Canal which was arranged by the Chief of Staff of the U.N. peace-keeping organisation, and this will probably remain a problem for a while.

The noble Lord suggested that we were acquiescing in the situation. We certainly do not acquiesce, but we must be realistic about a difficult political situation. Britain is not the only country to suffer from the continued closure of the Canal. I will say no more at this stage, and I do not wish to be drawn. I understand that on 17th June there will be a short debate on this matter on the Adjournment, and that will be the right moment to pursue it further.

I do not want to be drawn into the broader issue of why we have decided to withdraw from the Persian Gulf by 1971. I can only repeat what has already been said in the House, about which I realise there may be differences of opinion, and time alone will show who is right. We believe that the outstanding problems of the area will be best met by solutions reached locally. I do not suggest that this will be easy and that there will not be moments of anxiety. But the decision on policy was made on a clear understanding of what the position was, and was likely to be, and, although there may be differences of opinion, we have debated them at considerable length.

If that decision were the result of policy, why was it changed within three months?

The decision was not changed, as I think the noble Lord knows, since he participated in our debates. The intention was clear, but there was a question of timing, and on that a change was announced in so far as we made specific in January what the timetable would be.

It is likely that for some years to come the Russians will have no economic incentive to import or to take up large quantities of Middle East oil, for the obvious reason that the Soviet Union is a major oil-producing country which has a large export surplus. On the other hand, I do not want to suggest that we are complacent. We are well aware of the long-term significance of Soviet interests in this area.

My time is limited, and I will turn to the principal question of Soviet naval activity and try, in passing, to answer one or two questions which have been asked this afternoon. We should look for a moment at Soviet global strategy. Here we should recognise that it is naturally based on the primary objective of preserving the security of the Soviet Union and of maintaining, and where possible improving its status as one of the two super powers. None of the evidence of Soviet activities points to their having any rigid master plan for this purpose, for their strategy has been conditioned by the defensive and continental traditions of their military thought.

My hon. Friend the Member for Horn-church (Mr. Alan Lee Williams), whose knowledge and perception of these issues is fully appreciated in the House, said that, in this matter as in others, there is a clear continuing tradition carrying on from Czarist times. So the Soviet Union have shown some hesitation in demonstrating their power on a world scale. Over the past two decades this has been strongly reinforced by the overriding importance of avoiding a nuclear confrontation with the United States.

Nevertheless, there is evidence of a growing feeling in the Soviet Union—and this is not necessarily confined to military circles—that more should be done to provide the Soviet Union with a military capabality on a global scale. A new stress on the maritime rôle and an increase in flag-showing visits, not merely in the Middle East, incidentally, but in the Indian Ocean, too, are examples of this thinking.

The Middle East is the area in which the Soviet Union can most advantageously experiment with the use of limited military power for political purposes. The long-term Soviet hope is clearly eventually to replace Western influence in the area with their own. As realists, however, they recognise that in the immediate future they must concentrate on trying to weaken the West and to improve their position selectively, using for this purpose political, military and economic instruments. One of their considerations in this must obviously be the value of strengthening their position in a region lying on the Southern flank of the N.A.T.O. area and which is of such vital importance to the West for a whole series of reasons.

The Soviet Union has pursued an active policy in the Middle East over the past 12 years. The decision to do so was a direct result of a change in attitude towards non-Communist, newly-independent countries. In Stalin's times these were regarded as dangerously bourgeois in character. Soviet thinking during the 1950s evolved towards a new concept of increasing Soviet influence by co-operation, particularly with those Governments which they considered progressive in character. It has, however, been clear throughout—and I emphasise this—that Soviet policy has continued to be conditioned by the wish to avoid a direct clash with the United States, a wish which is clearly mutual, and this has sometimes limited the degree and nature of Soviet assistance to the Arabs.

It is against that background that we must consider their naval activity, including the build-up of the Soviet fleet in the Mediterranean and the recent visit by Russian naval vessels to the Persian Gulf. On the second of these issues we can take it for granted that the Soviet Union is interested in the possibility of gaining political dividends from the uncertain situation in the Gulf. That is elementary and it can be accepted on both sides of the House.

But the Soviet position is not without its problems, and these are likely to limit her freedom of action. It is a great mistake in this, as in other issues, to assume that it is only the West and, particularly Britain, which is inhibited by changing situations and always put at a disadvantage. The great Powers, including the Soviet Union, have to take cognisance of local situations, which are often flexible and fluid and on which they find it difficult to have an impact, whatever theoretical power they possess.

For example, the Russians are clearly keen to avoid damaging their relations either with the Arab States or with Iran and for that reason would be reluctant, I think, to take action of a kind which might provoke the very reaction which in the long run would be damaging to them.

It would be wrong to see these naval visits, and particularly the recent Soviet naval visit to Iraq, as a precursor of active Soviet intervention. Certainly the visit to Iraq is in keeping with the military, civil and technical assistance which they have been giving. The Russian cruiser and escort ship which were recently there had paid similar visits to Madras and Mogadishu last month and are now visiting Karachi. I am not saying that that is not a situation which we must watch, but we must take each example, each manifestation, by itelf, and make a very cool assessment of what they add up to.

Questions have been asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and by the hon. and gallant Member for Lewes (Sir T. Beamish) and the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds about the Soviet fleet in the Mediterranean. It is known that the Russians are maintaining at present a force which includes a cruiser and eight or more destroyers, some of which are missile-armed, between four and eight submarines, one landing craft—not four, as was said by the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds —and a number of depot and auxiliary ships in the East Mediterranean. We should be wrong to underestimate the significance of this force, which gives the Soviet Union a new strategic mobility.

N.A.T.O. has, in fact, taken note of it. Hon. Members know of the statement made by my hon. Friend the Minister of State for Defence for Administration on 10th May, as reported in col. 152 of the OFFICIAL REPORT, Written Answers, in which he set out the improvements which, under N.A.T.O. procedure, N.A.T.O. expects to make. I will not detail them now, as they are available for hon. Members to see. In summary, there can be no doubt that the Soviet build-up in the Mediterranean and flag-flying activities in the Persian Gulf both reflect the same desire to make more effective political use of sea power in the area.

We have noted the situation. We shall watch it closely and take our part in the requisite action. But ultimately—and this embraces all that we have discussed in this interesting debate this afternoon —our concern must be that the Middle East will learn to live at peace, because it has an immense economic and social job to do, and it is a great waste that so much time and money should be spent in activities of the kind which were primarily the subject of our discussion.

At the end of this rather chaotic and hectic parliamentary week, it is a relief to turn from talk of the Guillotine and filibustering to the more rarefied atmosphere of computers and computer programming schools. I am, therefore, grateful for this opportunity of raising a subject which I have already raised on two previous occasions by means of Questions.

On 1st February this year I asked the Secretary of State for Education and Science

"whether schools of computer programming are subject to registration or approval by his department ".—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 1st February 1968; Vol. 745, c. 1536.]

On 9th May, I asked the Secretary of State for Education and Science

"whether he will seek powers to recommend a standard syllabus for computer programming schools with the object of establishing a nationally recognised examination."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 9th May, 1968; Vol. 764, c. 600.]

The hon. Lady the Minister of State, who answered both Questions, and who, I am pleased to see, will reply to the debate this afternoon, failed on both occasions to express herself with her customary clarity. I hope that she will make amends for that when she replies today. In February she told me that her Department had

"a system of recognition as efficient, and any student has a right to inquire whether an institution is so recognised. In order to be so recognised, institutions must fulfil fairly stringent conditions about the nature of their courses."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 1st February, 1968; Vol. 757, c. 1536.]

This gave the impression to me—no doubt inadvertently—that this system of recognition applied to private programming schools as well as to colleges run by local education authorities. This, of course, is not so. But one of the things that I want to know this afternoon is why it cannot be so. Why cannot these independent computer schools be subjected to the same kind of inspection and control as private schools operating in other spheres of education?

Following my Question earlier this month on the possibility of a syllabus and nationally recognised examination for computer schools, the hon. Lady was kind enough to send me the bulletin on computer education which has been prepared jointly by the Department of Education and Science and the Central Office of Information. This contains, as she knows, details of examinations set and administered by such bodies as the City and Guilds Institute and the British Computer Society.

Another question I ask this afternoon is whether these examinations are open to students from the private schools and, if not, why not? Surely nothing would weed out the incompetent and disreputable schools more effectively than an examination which it was subsequently found their students were unable to pass.

Since I first raised this subject earlier in the year, I have received a number of letters from students in various parts of the country who feel—rightly or wrongly —that they have been hoodwinked by some of the less reputable private schools. In many cases they are sad and pathetic letters from men and women who have invested all their savings in these courses, only to find that the certificate which they obtain at the end was virtually worthless to them in securing employment.

Yet the advertisements of some of these schools offer the prospect of jobs at £2,000 a year almost overnight. I have here a copy of one such advertisement issued recently by an American institute which has opened a computer centre in London. It reads:

"Ninety per cent. of graduates of"—

the institute's—

"ninety colleges in the U.S. and Canada are snapped up on completion of their course".

Anybody who knows anything about this knows that that is a grotesque exaggeration. The percentage of placings of most private schools is in the region of 5 or 10 per cent. at the most. Yet this is the sort of misleading advertisement which is appearing ever more frequently in our newspapers and other forms of publicity. It is this sort of misleading advertisement being peddled by certain schools to which I take strong objection.

The brochure of one college states:

"It is the clerk, school leaver, shop assistant and secretary who train now to become the programmers of tomorrow."

There is no mention of the desirability of having at least an A level qualification or similar qualification which many companies, when recruiting, require. I am told that I.C.T. requires at least three A levels or a degree of their trainee programmers.

I believe that private computer school advertising is a growing racket and that the more naive and gullible of our fellow citizens must be protected from the slick operators in this field. We should remember that big money is involved. Most of the schools charge between £100 and £150 for a six-weeks course. Taking as an example a class of 20, this means an income of at least £2,000 from every class every six weeks. Therefore, very substantial sums of money are involved. It is not surprising, with this sort of money at stake, that the aptitude test set by most of the private schools is an utter farce.

Last year, a computer service bureau, Indata Limited, interviewed applicants for posts as trainee programmers, of which 84 were so-called graduates of a number of programming schools. All these applicants were asked to take the I.B.M. programmers' aptitude test. Of the 84 given the test, only one passed. Most of the so-called graduates secured worse marks than the untrained applicants who were also given the test.

In an article in the Financial Times on 24th January, Mr. Jack Amos revealed that he had taken the aptitude test set by two London schools and had passed in the highest category as a person definitely likely to succeed in computer programming. But on subsequently taking the I.B.M. test, he scored only 34 marks out of a possible 88 and was told, "You will never make a computer programmer". Writing in the Daily Telegraph in April, Miss Victoria Brit-tain related a similar experience.

This discloses a most disturbing state of affairs. It shows that students are in many cases being enrolled for courses which are far beyond their capabilities merely for the financial benefit of the schools concerned. By the very nature of their advertisements, promising, as they do, a quick road to top salaries, these schools are often attracting the failures and drop-outs from other walks of life who clutch at a computer course as a way out of their current frustrations. Commonwealth students appear to be another category who are very vulnerable to the advertising blandishments of these schools.

I do not wish for a moment to pretend that all the private computer programming schools are grasping and unscrupulous. That certainly is not so. The tragedy of the present situation is that because of the bad reputation of a number of the schools all are being tarred with the same brush and even students of the reputable schools are finding it increasingly difficult to get jobs on the conclusion of their courses. This is one of the strongest arguments in favour of the proper registration and control of these private schools.

I want to impress upon the Minister the urgency of this problem. The Department of Education and Science has been caught unawares by the tremendous advances in computers in the past five years. It has been slow to respond to the challenge presented by the fact that thousands of additional programmers are required in this country by 1970. If the Government will not give a lead in this field, who on earth will? Unless action is taken quickly the Department of Education and Science will rightly be accused of evading its responsibilities.

The pressing need is for a much closer co-operation between the Department of Education and Science, on the one hand, and local education authorities and private schools, on the other. Local authority courses must be given much wider publicity. The private schools devote huge budgets to their advertising, and it is only right that local authority courses should be given similar publicity. Private schools should be subject to registration as efficient. They should be regularly inspected and there should be one nationally-recognised examination.

If action is taken along these lines we can establish proper standards for computer education and help to ensure that industry secures recruits of the number and calibre it requires. At the same time, we shall prevent the heartbreak and financial loss which is now being suffered by so many commendably ambitious but sadly naive people. For those reasons I earnestly hope that the Minister will be able to offer some positive action this afternoon.

This debate ends at half-past Four. The House has cooperated today. I can call both hon. Members who wish to speak if their speeches are fairly brief.

I want to add only a few words in support of the demands of the hon. Member for Bromley (Mr. Hunt) upon the Minister. As the Minister may know, I had a case similar to those which the hon. Member has outlined. A constituent of mine, in every good faith, applied to take a course at one of these private computer schools and was given one of the aptitude tests which the hon. Member has mentioned. On being told that he had a very good chance of qualifying as a computer programmer he was induced to part with the sum of £230, only to discover, having completed the course, that none of the established computer companies or those who were using computers paid the slightest attention to the training which he had undergone. In fact, they said that it was virtually useless.

What is so shocking about this case is that the computer school in question purported to offer my constituent an aptitude test before he paid over the money, and told him that he was suitable to undergo the type of training that it was offering, and that at the end of it he would be in receipt of the kind of salary which the hon. Member has mentioned.

This is a confidence trick, and the hon. Lady and her Department should take steps to control it. It is no good her telling me—as she or one of her colleagues did in a letter replying to the one that I wrote—that if my constituent had sought advice from the Department of Education and Science before embarking upon this course he would have been told that similar training was available from the local authority and that much better advice on his aptitude and capabilities would have been obtained if he had gone to that source.

We cannot expect private citizens to have that information, especially if, as the hon. Member said, local authorities give no publicity to the computer courses that they offer in computer programming. There is a deficiency here which the hon. Lady should realise.

The House should be concerned not only with the people who have suffered and who have paid over large sums of money; what should also concern us is the general responsibility of the Department of Education and Science to see that scarce resources are not wasted. Presumably these computer schools have people who are qualified computer programmers—I hope that is so, and perhaps the Minister will be able to tell us —but if they were diverted into institutions capable of training people possessing the aptitudes to meet the need, this would be a contribution towards the solution of the shortage to which the hon. Gentleman referred.

There is no doubt about the need. Every computer firm to which one talks says that towards the beginning of the 1970s there will be a serious shortfall in the number of computer programmers and systems analysts coming forward to meet the requirements of users and manufacturers. There is no dispute about the absolute demand for an expansion of the facilities that are available. The concern is to ensure that resources in the programme are not wasted and that people do not come forward for training who are totally unsuitable and are not able to get advice at the beginning that they are better suited to other jobs.

If the hon. Lady can do something towards that end—I do not suggest that registration is the only answer—by making proper advice available to school leavers who are being induced to part with large sums of money and, I go so far as to say, defrauded by some of the more disreputable computer schools, the debate will have served a useful purpose.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley (Mr. Hunt) upon raising the subject and upon the overwhelming case that he put forward for registration and, about all, a national examination.

In the 'fifties there was constant complaint about the form of contract used by some dancing schools. It would be a grotesque parody of technological progress if the maladministration of some computer schools became a similar educational racket in the 'sixties and early 'seventies.

I wonder whether there are any records of the numbers of civil servants taken on from private computer schools. I am led to ask this because it has recently been suggested that the consumer needs for the proposed new London Post Office telephone directories, with its 36 volumes, were arrived at after the use of computers. I can only assume that those who put the information into the computers had come from some of the less competent of the computer schools.

This is a point of some seriousness. The Minister of Technology in his recent speech at Llandudno looked forward to a new political-technological era in which computers would be used to assess the needs and desires of the public, and he believed that this would increase the happiness of the body politic. I find this a doubtful proposition because I believe that one of the fears of the British people is that, in their dealings with the Government, they will become a mere slot in a computer card and will cease to be treated as human beings.

The right hon. Gentleman the Minister of Technology has been responsible for the introduction of all-number telephone dialling and laid the foundations for the introduction of this monstrous reorganisation of the London telephone directories. In face of that sort of thing, the fears of people that they are merely to be looked upon as something to be put into a computer system are justified.

But at least we can hope that those who will put information into computers will be thoroughly competent and the proposals put forward by my hon. Friends for the control and registration of these schools and the introduction of a proper national examination are of national importance.

Despite the tempting offer by the hon. Member for Bromley (Mr. Hunt) on this Whitsun eve to follow him like St. Joan in defence of my right hon. Friends the Minister of Technology and the Postmaster-General, I shall stick to the straight and narrow path of considering the case of private computer schools and I hope that he will acquit me any lack of gallantry in doing so.

I concede a great deal of the case made by the hon. Gentleman, and in initiating this debate he can fairly be described as fulfilling the watchdog rôle of Parliament. I concede, first, that the aptitude tests offered to people who wish to attend private computer schools are in many cases worthless as any effective form of selection. Secondly, I concede that the courses in many cases, although not in all, do not lead to recognised national examination standards and in some cases, although students may take such an examination, the syllabus they follow gives little chance of their getting satisfactorily through it.

Thirdly, I readily concede that a number of students are bitterly disappointed, although it is fair to say that some have been satisfied. Fourthly, I concede that the fees are often high. They may be as high as £150 for a six-week course and therefore there is the temptation to the schools to accept unsatisfactory material because of the large sums of money spent.

In the case I quoted the fee was £230.

That may be so. The average sort of fee brought to our notice is about £150 for six weeks. I am not saying that this is the highest fee which may be charged.

Having conceded so much of the case, there are several matters I want to try and clarify. First, what alternatives exist? Quite fairly, the hon. Gentleman said that many alternatives were open to students wishing to study for computer courses. There has been a rapid expansion in the number of courses at colleges of further education, technical colleges and at higher levels in the past two years.

Not only the Department of Education and Science but the Youth Employment Service, technical colleges, local authority further education advisers and the British Computer Society are all willing to give advice to would-be pursuers of studies; in computer programming systems, analysis and the like. Therefore, there is a considerable network of ad- vice, although I concede that the network is not backed by as much publicity as applies in the case of the private computer schools.

There is, as I have already said, a wide range of courses following recognised examinations open to the would-be student. One of the points which the hon. Member for Bromley has made, both in Questions and in this debate has been met, namely, there is a Co-ordinating Committee for Examinations in Computer Studies which is drawing together the demand for computer studies, is allocating courses among its constituent members, and is trying to establish nationally recognised examinations. It cannot lay down a requirement that every school needs to follow syllabuses leading to these examination standards. We hope that this body, by setting nationally recognised examination standards, will gradually, like good money, drive out the bad; but we cannot give any absolute guarantee that this will happen.

Only in the last few months the Engineering Industry Training Board has set up a sub-committee—the Computer Training Policy Committee—which has representation from my Department, from the major computer manufacturers, from the National Computer Centre, and from the new examining body, the Coordinating Committee for Examinations in Computer Studies. It is hoped that in the field of training the Engineering Industry Training Board's sub-committee will be able to establish clear syllabuses for courses of training for those, employed in the computer field.

So much for the alternatives. It will be helpful if Members of Parliament whose constituents ask for their advice can bring to their attention as far as possible the fact that there are these alternatives and that, in almost all cases, they cost much less and offer a higher quality of training than the very expensive private courses do. I will look into the question whether more publicity can be brought to bear. We have increased our expenditure on publicity, but I am well aware that there is much more to be done if we are to bring to the attention of students the fact that these alternatives exist.

I come now to the question raised by the hon. Member for Bromley of the ways in which the private computer schools might be controlled. I will first point out exactly what our powers are. A private school serving students of more than the statutory leaving age—that is, more than 15—and only such students which is the case, as far as I know, with all these private schools—cannot be obliged under present legislation to register with the Department of Education and Science. It may, if it wishes, apply for recognition as efficient, just as an independent school may so apply.

Recognition as efficient is not a legal requirement on any institution in further education. It is a mark of the acceptance by the Department of a certain standard being achieved in accommodation, training, qualifications, and of satisfactorily carrying out the work done within the institution. So any of these institutions may apply for recognition as efficient. One of the institutions—I think the largest; namely, the Fich Institute—has now applied for recognition as efficient.

There are two difficulties. First, there is a genuine question of definition. Does such a school constitute a training establishment or an education establishment? In terms of its courses, it may be a little difficult to define it as an educational establishment. If it is defined as a training establishment, recognition as efficient does not apply to it. However, we in the Department are prepared to make our rules as elastic as possible to enable us to apply the tests of recognition as efficient to this school to see whether it satisfies that standard. We hope that by encouraging these schools to apply for recognition as efficient—I again make it clear that legally that is all that we can do at present—we will be able to indicate those that are so recognised, and which can be genuinely entered by students who are concerned to have a serious course, and those which we could not so recognise.

Again, I would say, as it were to the public at large, and schools in particular, that we hope, if they are doing a good job, and certainly one or two are, that they will apply for recognition as efficient. Beyond that we cannot go. We cannot force them to register, there is no legal power to do so. We could bring legislation before the House, but we must admit that such legislation would have to cover a very much wider range of situa- tions than merely the computer schools. It would be inappropriate, and very difficult, to draft a law which simply covered this group of institutions. This therefore raises the very much wider question of caveat emptor in the whole of the educational sphere.

May I make a suggestion? I appreciate the difficulties that the hon. Lady has mentioned, but will she at least send a circular to the headmasters of all secondary schools, drawing their attention to this problem, and asking them to make the advice that she has given this afternoon available to anyone who might be considering these courses?

We have done just this, not in respect of the headmasters, but in respect of the local authorities and the technical colleges, by sending out a booklet which we have just produced on the availability of computer courses.

If the hon. Gentleman wants me to go further and say which of the private institutions that we feel deserve support and which do not, we cannot do that unless and until the "recognition as efficient" procedure has been gone through. We would then be prepared to indicate if we can recognise one of these institutions, or any of them, as efficient that we have done so. It is quite common for such institutions to publicise this fact themselves on their own literature.

My last point is that there is a very genuine difficulty of principle about this. There is a limit, though I feel rather strange saying this as a Labour Minister to two Conservatives and one Liberal Member of Parliament, to how far one can go in protecting adults against the advertising of various institutions and bodies. Clearly one wants to indicate, as far as one can, what alternatives are available and which of these institutions one can accept.

It is not possible for any Government of anything less than a 100 per cent. paternalistic or authoritarian variety totally to protect would-be adult students against what may be institutions that are not fully up to standard. All that we can do is what the hon. Gentleman has done, namely, to raise the matter and give it the fullest publicity. As a Department we can bring to the widest attention the merits of other alternative courses and show, as I am this afternoon and as the hon. Gentleman has done, that many of these courses lead to no recognised qualifications whatever, that they are not a guarantee of employment, and that computer manufacturers will always advise on the courses that are acceptable to them.

I hope that the setting up of the Coordinating Committee on Computer Examinations and courses and the establishment of the Computer Training Policy Sub-Committee of the E.I.T.B., both of which are new developments, and finally the publication of the Department's booklet, now generally available, will do something to educate citizens about the position. It is true that in any area growing as fast as this, some people will try to get in on the ground floor. We hope that we can indicate much more widely than we have yet done which are worthwhile and which are not.