I submit to the House that we cannot consistently with the honour of this country take any action now that would betray friends such as those. All this and Europe, too—if you can get it. The President of the Board of Trade last night seemed to think that we can. I hope that he is right, but if there has to be a choice we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Dusseldorf.

Before I leave the economic aspects of the problem—I do not want to go on for more than a few minutes more—there are two other questions that I want to raise. The first is East-West trade. The Common Market, whether we are inside or outside, is restrictive in intent. We all know that Eastern Europe, too, has its common market, a tighter and still more restrictive bloc than anything we are thinking about. All the same, if joining the Common Market means a reduced ability to trade with the Soviet Union or other Eastern European countries, or China, I submit that this will be detrimental to our economic welfare and to the prospects of full employment —and it will make real peace more remote.

So, when the Prime Minister talks in terms of a political grouping against the Communist threat, when I recall the way Dr. Adenauer last year forbade us to trade with East Germany while his own businessmen flocked across the frontier to filch our orders, I must admit that I am apprehensive about East-West trade relations. I therefore trust that the Government will tell us that they will seek assurances on this question.

The other question relates to the Coal and Steel Community and Euratom. This is a problem which was dealt with by my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton-le-Spring (Mr. Blyton) last night in a speech which drew, I think, a great deal of support from both sides of the House. Presumably it is intended that we should join both these bodies as well as the Common Market, though little has been said from the Government front bench about either of them. We ought to he told a lot more about it.

Hon. Friends of mine have made it clear that there is great anxiety in the coalfields about joining the E.C.S.C., probably far more than there is about our joining the Common Market. I am bound to ask: what safeguards would we have, if we are to go in, that British coal will not be sacrificed to the special discriminations which will be introduced in favour of Saharan oil? That is a problem—subsidised pipelines, and all the rest of it. We know that there will be competition between British and European coal. That is a problem which has to be faced in one way or another, but now we shall be up against subsidised Saharan oil. This raises some very fundamental questions on which I hope we shall get an answer tonight.

Also on the broader question, we should like much more specific assurances than the Treaty gives against the growth of private or even Government-supported cartels in Europe. Some Continental industries take to cartelistic activities like ducks to water, and there are some British businessmen who would be only too anxious to get in on that kind of organisation. I hope that this is very much in the minds of the Government.

Before I sit down I should like to turn briefly to one or two of the wider issues which have been raised in the debate, because it is clear that, for the Prime Minister at any rate, the motive is not economic but political. I think that was clear from his speech. Important as the economic issues, of course, are, and the Commonwealth issues with which I have been dealing, I think that our expectations or fears about the political aspects are even more fundamental.

First, I should like to take issue straight away with some right hon. and hon. Gentlemen, sitting below the Gangway opposite, who quite simply regard it as an issue of sovereignty. I respect their arguments, but they—and even the word itself, I think—are really out of harmony with this modern age. The whole history of political progress is a history of gradual abandonment of national sovereignty. We abrogate it when we have a French referee at Twickenham. We abrogated it—some would say that we did not abrogate it enough—when we joined the United Nations. One cannot talk about world government in one breath and then start drooling about the need to preserve national sovereignty in the next.