Prorogation and Dissolution of Parliament.

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 23 October 1935.

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Photo of Mr Morgan Jones Mr Morgan Jones , Caerphilly

I always listen with the greatest possible pleasure to the hon. Baronet when he addresses the House upon any subject and I need not assure him that I quite appreciate his intense anxiety that the present Conservative forces should go to the country as a National Government. He has a very acute appreciation of the point that unless those forces hang together they are likely to hang separately, and that the more they are together the merrier they will be.

I have listened with some care to the exposition of the governmental case by authoritative speakers since the beginning of this Debate yesterday afternoon, and I confess that after having listened to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister and the Minister for League of Nations Affairs my difficulty remains almost as great as it was before the discussion began. I wonder whether the House will forgive me if I interpolate this personal observation: I came into this House in 1921 as a pacifist, known to be a pacifist. I do not say that I was elected on that account—perhaps in spite of it—but my views were well known to my constituents as being those of a pacifist. I confess, therefore, that the present development of affairs has caused me, as I dare say it has caused other hon. Members who are not of my views at all, the greatest possible perplexity and difficulty. Every man in public life likes, I presume, to maintain, if possible, something approaching consistency. One can maintain, and one is entitled to maintain, consistency only so long as one can conscientiously defend it. I must admit to the House to-night that, after giving the deepest and the most anxious consideration to this new problem as presented to me and to others in the last few weeks, I have come to a very definite and clear conclusion, which I hope to indicate presently to the House.

A pacifist entertains two views, or rather, there are two parts to his creed. There is what I would call the negative part, and there is the positive part. The negative part is that which calls upon him to declare that war is such a brutal, bloody and bestial business that he feels he cannot give any sort of sanction to it. He says that war proves nothing—not perhaps that it settles nothing but that it proves nothing except where the greater measure of strength lies. You may win a war which has arisen out of a dispute, but whether you win or lose in the war the rightness or wrongness of the dispute remains precisely where it was before the war began. No harm has been occasioned to this House or to the country that the point of view of the pacifist should have been put in this House yesterday with such potency, eloquence and courage as were shown by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Bromley (Mr. Lansbury). No one here is more entitled than he to state that case, and I am very glad that he had the courage to put it, with such restraint as he did. But there is a positive side to the pacifist case, and it is this: The pacifist declares not only that he is against war as such—and with that all of us are obviously in agreement—but he also says: "I know a more excellent way than the method of war." The more excellent way is the method provided through the medium of the machinery of the League of Nations.

It is the special problem of what is to happen to that more excellent way, the method of arbitration provided by the League, that concerns us so much and so deeply in this discussion. This is not an exaggeration: either we maintain the League in this business or there is no alternative except that nations throughout the world will lay down the positive claim that they individually and severally shall build for themselves the fullest measure, the fullest amplitude, of arms. If arms are being built on every hand there is absolutely nothing to stand between us and war in the long run. If you build armaments in the same unrestrained way as was done before the War, the calamity in the long run is likely not only to be as great as in the case of the last war but to engulf the whole of our civilisation.

I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Sparkbrook (Mr. Amery) is not in his place, but that is not my fault, because I wish to draw attention to the fact that the only alternative that has been addressed to the House in this discussion to the use of the League method has been the alternative suggested this afternoon by him. What was his solution? I took it down in precise words and I was meticulous in taking down, as far as I could, the very words he used. His suggestion is that the French and the British Governments should have insisted upon taking up the matter, that is, the dispute, with Signor Mussolini, even if he tried to evade. Those are his exact words. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman, as I would ask those who agree with him: Suppose Signor Mussolini had continued to evade, what then? Let them face this great issue. It is all very well to denounce the Government's method; I will have some words to say about that myself in a moment. On the principle we are fundamentally agreed, but as between the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Sparkbrook and the Government there is a great gulf fixed, so he says. He declares that rather than use the method of the League they ought to use the method suggested by him, namely, that France and Britain of their own accord, without regard to the League, should bring some sort of pressure to bear upon Signor Mussolini, even though he evaded. Suppose that Signor Mussolini continued to evade, what then? The right hon. Gentleman says that we must not have war. What would he do? What could he do if Sigor Mussolini continued to evade even the approaches of Great Britain and France jointly?

I must admit that the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Sparkbrook has been consistent in the view that he has taken. He never hesitated during the Sino-Japanese dispute to say that hat was his view. I thought then, and I believe I told him, that I regarded his pronouncement when he addressed the House as a particularly mischievous view to advance. But I am not alone in taking that view now. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had some observations to make about him last week at Glasgow, and let me introduce them to the attention of the House. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, at Glasgow, on 14th October, said: There are some people who would tell us that these issues do not reallly concern us, but that as we are happily surrounded by the sea we can rest safely and comfortably in this little island of ours and let the rest of the world go down to chaos and ruin. Mr. Amery, for instance, told a Birmingham audience the other day that he was not prepared to send a single Birmingham lad to his death in Abyssinia. I think it would be difficult to cram into a few words a more mischievous distortion of the realities of the situation than was compressed in that one sentence of Mr. Amery's. I could not hope to express more completely and succinctly my own view of the right hon. Gentleman's contribution to these matters than has been done by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I said that the position of the Government fills me with some apprehension in this matter. I turn again to the same speech of the Chancellor for the text for my observations. I thought the Chancellor stated in most excellent terms what he considered to be the proper view with regard to the League and its functions. When nations undertake solemnly that they will not resort to war as an instrument of national policy, and that they will not lay hands on the territory of fellow members, and then go and violate both of those undertakings, if we are to allow that to pass without saying to the violator that he cannot flout the conscience of the world with impunity, none of us would look to the League in future to give us any protection against aggression directed against ourselves. That, I take it, is the view of the Government as it stood on 14th October when it was declared by the Chancellor in his speech at Glasgow, and with that statement I venture to express my humble agreement. This afternoon the Prime Minister, devoting, I thought, if he will forgive me for saying so, scarcely enough attention to the international situation, told us that in his judgment—and I was glad to hear him say it—any settlement arrived at must be conditioned by absolute loyalty to the Covenant. He went further, and he used another phrase which I was exceedingly glad to hear. He said that the Government did not imply that there should be any loophole at all. No loophole, he said, is intended.

Let me tell the Prime Minister frankly, for we want to be frank with each other surely, what my fears, and, I think, the fears of my hon. Friends are in this matter. We fear that there is a slowing down in the application of the principle of sanctions in this particular matter, and that fear has gathered strength, may I tell the Prime Minister—perhaps we are wrong—as a result of the discussions that have been going on directly in Rome between our Ambassador there and Signor Mussolini. As a consequence of them, we are assured that Italian sentiment has been made more agreeably disposed towards Great Britain; the atmosphere between Britain and Italy has been very much happier than it was before. What does that mean? The Chancellor of the Exchequer on 14th October said that we must not allow the violator to flout the conscience of the world, and yet now we are told that, as a result of the discussions that have gone on in Rome, the violator and his friends feel very much encouraged and heartened. This is obviously what we are told in the Press, and that is all that we can go on—that Italy is encouraged and heartened by the assurances given by our Ambassador in Rome last week.

That is one ground for the feeling of apprehension which we have in this matter. Out of that there follows this. I hope I am wrong, but if it should happen that there is to be a slowing down or a postponement of the application of sanctions until after the election or just before the election—10th November is the date now given I believe—and a possibility afterwards that because of the ineffectiveness of sanctions a case may arise for saying the League has failed, and then the claim being made that because the League has failed we must rearm—I am not sure that we are not entitled even from the speech of the Secretary of State yesterday to think that that is going to be the situation with which we are to be confronted when the Election is over. I do not want to read into the situation anything which I ought not to read into it, because the situation is so dreadfully serious, but I am bound to say that these assurances which seem to have been given to Italy, unless we can have them before us word for word, will still leave in my mind a feeling of unhappiness as to the ultimate issue.

Now, of course, as the right hon. Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr. Lloyd George) said, this happiness, this rejoicing at the improvement of relations between Britain and themselves is confined to Italy. There is no rejoicing in Abyssinia. It is Italy which is the aggressor. Abyssinia has studiously throughout this dispute kept well within the letter and the spirit of the Covenant. Never once has it departed by one jot or tittle from the words and demands of the Covenant, and therefore if by the postponement of sanctions the League fails, and the victim suffers and the aggressor triumphs, who can tell what encouragement that may be to others in Europe, watching this very carefully, to hope equally that just as sanctions may have failed in regard to Italy so sanctions may fail in regard to them if occasion arose?

The Government claim fidelity to the League. If, after the election, this pledge is betrayed, either willingly or unwillingly, we may be quite sure that the people of this country, when they make the discovery, will exact the uttermost from the Government that betrays them. The right hon. Gentleman says that they are not betraying them. I am very glad to hear it. But I am most anxious that, if there is to be a betrayal of the League, Britain shall not play the part of Iscariot in the matter. If there are others prepared either to give or to receive the thirty pieces of silver for betrayal, let the hands of Britain at least be as clean as we can secure that they shall be. Let us be able to say that we have not betrayed innocent blood. I have said that our own record in this matter of the League is none too clean. Let me give the right hon. Gentleman the basis of my suggestion—