Foreign Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 16 June 1964.

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Photo of Mr Jo Grimond Mr Jo Grimond , Orkney and Shetland 12:00, 16 June 1964

It is a great pleasure on behalf of the House to congratulate the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Eldon Griffiths), to whose maiden speech we have just listened. The command and the fluency of the hon. Gentleman would not have disgraced his late mouthpiece. We should, perhaps, commiserate with the Prime Minister on having a lost pen, though he may have gained a voice. I sincerely hope that we shall hear the hon. Gentleman very often, particularly on the subject which he has chosen of Anglo-American relations.

I found myself in agreement with a great deal of what the hon. Gentleman said. He came near to being controversial, though he did not specify what sort of power we were to retain in order to enable our voice to be heard most clearly in Washington. We should no doubt disagree as to the type. Again, I thought that he trod on dangerous ground when he recommended Government investment in. private companies. I noticed among the companies that he mentioned was not News Week, but I thought it a most admirable speech and one delivered with the greatest confidence and in a most agreeable manner.

The hon. Member thought that while international affairs had improved at the centre they had deteriorated at the periphery. I put the situation rather differently, It; seems to me that both the Communist and non-Communist worlds are now facing the same problems, and this, in itself, is encouraging. I believe that these problems are very largely connected with what we may call the breakup of the old Power structure or, as Mr. Kennan has called it, polycentrism; the decline of various empires, and the change of the structure of various sovereign Slates. We see this in Eastern Europe and in the Commonwealth—and across the Atlantic in the break-up of the Monroe doctrine.

This seems to me to be the new situation with which we must contend and towards which we must have new policies and new departures in our thinking. Unfortunately, we must face the fact that this change does not come about through any sudden, new-found, widespread belief in democracy, but has been brought about very largely by a rise in nationalism. Many of the current difficulties in foreign affairs are due to racialism, where they are not due to nationalism. If we are to contend with that sort of situation—the situation, for instance, in Cyprus, Malaysia and British Guiana, and, indeed, the situation that the Communists have in Eastern Europe—we must look at the whole structure of Government and international action.

To begin with, many of our problems are not soluble at all in terms of the old sovereign States, yet, as has been said, there is a demand for sovereignty in Eastern Europe and in Africa today. I do not think that the problem—of trying to control nuclear weapons, or the questions that lie behind the idea of the multilateral force, are soluble at all as long as we think of disparate sovereign States completely controlling their own affairs. In regard to the multilateral force, for instance, if we think in those terms, we come back to control, and we cannot get round the fact that someone has to press the button. If we think in terms of new groupings and a new spread of power, we shall be in accord with what is happening in the world.

The growing distance between the rich and the poor countries is something to which the Prime Minister himself has constantly drawn attention, and it is certainly one of the most worrying features in the modern world. We shall not tackle that problem until the rich countries feel that they have an interest in sharing their wealth and, furthermore, feel that they share some sort of common citizenship with the poorer countries. Otherwise we are in exactly the same condition as most European countries were in the eighteenth century, when poverty was regarded as something to be treated by some sort of charity. Until we got the deliberate national policy of spreading wealth we never got the type of affluence we now have; that came about partly because people saw that it was in their own interest, and partly as a result of a fellow feeling for citizens of their own country. We do not have that feeling throughout the world, but the sooner we get it the better.

The particular difficulties that face us stem from the common difficulty that the world faces of the rise of nationalism, of the strife between different races, of the growth of new centres of power. We find that, historically, we have been left responsible for law and order and defence in certain places where it is now clear that the type of Government should be changed; where the reasons for our presence and the reasons why those places are governed as they are have completely changed.

For instance, we went to Southern Arabia to protect the route to India against pirates. This is no longer a reason for our presence there. Again, the situation in Africa, British Guiana and Malaysia has changed completely. Furthermore, these particular places are relics of imperialism. Their frontiers were drawn, not to accord with their own natural boundaries, but because of agreements between the various imperial Powers.

In this situation, what should be the first object of our policy? To my mind the object is clearly to enable a peaceful change to take place in these places. That is to say, our object should be to achieve change without leaving a vacuum into which other Powers will flow, possibly leading to a crisis. In the old days the world usually relied on war for change. War is now too dangerous a method of change, but we have not yet developed, either in the United Nations or elsewhere, any other method of change.

Our aim, for instance, in Southern Arabia or British Guiana is not simply to maintain the status quo. It is very revealing that a Conservative Secretary of State should himself say that our responsibilities in British Guiana are an embarrassment. It is very encouraging that it should be made absolutely clear that we are not in Cyprus to defend any imperial interests or to maintain things as they have been for the last 50 years, but that we are there to maintain peace and to try to find a solution to the problem—and not necessarily a solution on the old lines of the last 20 or 30 years.

The question then is: how are we to achieve orderly change without leaving a vacuum? One question that has so far not been touched on is on whom the responsibility lies. Is it the responsibility of the Foreign Office or is it the responsibility of the Commonwealth Relations Office to deal with this type of problem? There seems to me to be the strongest argument for at least having this made crystal clear, and, having read the debates on the subject, I would say that there are strong arguments in favour of combining the two Ministries into one. But we should be informed quite clearly whose responsibility it is.

Secondly, and here I follow the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds, we should have better co-operation between ourselves and our Allies. For instance, as the hon. Member mentioned, we have claimed our right to trade with Cuba, and we are sending lorries there. Now, there is a British firm, though it has a large American investment, which is talking of selling lorries to Indonesia. We do not know as yet what the Government's policy on this will be, but there is no doubt that the Indonesia-Malaysia war may drag on for a very long time. If it does, we must consult our Allies on how it is to be conducted, and it is extremely important that at the very outset we should be quite clear about this sort of question of how far we will trade with nations of which one or other Ally disapproves.

We have had this question over long-term credits for Russia, and we may have it over the arrangements by which the Spaniards will have the know-how of our frigates. We have it over nuclear reactors in Roumania. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that there should be the very closest consultation between the Allies on these matters. Furthermore, when dealing with Eastern Europe, it is most important that we should not appear to be competing with each other in encouraging satellite States to break away from Russia but should have a common policy towards Eastern Europe.

As I say, I do not believe that the troubles in the world, and I regret it in many ways, are due to any great upsurge of democracy. For instance, if we look at the Aden Peninsula, it is difficult to urge that we should have some sort of democratic system in the Federation. I find it very difficult to visualise a sort of Parliamentary system working there in the near future, though it may come in time.