Iron and Steel Industry

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 9 November 1964.

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Photo of Mr Iain Macleod Mr Iain Macleod , Enfield West 12:00, 9 November 1964

No dividend was paid in 1962, none was paid in 1963. The financial year of the company ended on 30th September. So we have plenty of time, if the Secretary of State for Scotland, who is to wind up the debate, wishes to get the figures, for him to give us at least an indication of how this firm has done in the last year. If I may hazard a guess, I think that he will find that the record is little, if any, better than the sad record of the last two years.

I come to the judgment of the Restrictive Practices Court. When the First Secretary was referring to the evidence of Mr. Craig and Mr. Judge and waved a document at my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, it was not the transcript of the evidence. It was Talking Point No. 18, issued by the Labour Party. Equally, the Prime Minister will remember his speech at Middlesbrough, of which I have the hand-out, giving long extracts from the evidence of Mr. Craig and Mr. Judge.

In passing, the odd thing is that Talking Point No. 18 omits from time to time, no doubt purely for reasons of clarity, quite a number of words from the evidence. The extraordinary thing is that the Middlesbrough hand-out omits exactly the same pieces. It is the same right down to the dots. If the Prime Minister claims that he wrote this speech himself, we had better agree on a joint reference to the Society of Psychical Research.

Talking Point No. 18 is as splendidly tendentious a pamphlet as any I ever wrote and I cannot give it higher praise than that.