Mr Nigel Nicolson: What about Haifa?
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I agree with the hon. Member for Coventry, East (Mr. Crossman) on two things. First, I agree that this is a matter of urgency. Secondly, I agree that it is something which concerns the Foreign Office as much as the Colonial Office. I am sure that it will not have escaped him that it was the Foreign Office, in the person of the present Minister of Defence, who made our case at the United...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I am just coming to that. The hon. Member for Coventry, East remarked that it is not very attractive to the Cypriots to be told that we are going to establish airfields in their country from which H-bombers can take off. Would it be any more attractive if the airfields were under Greek supervision?
Mr Nigel Nicolson: Whether it is a Crown Colony or a province of Greece, an H-bomb falling upon an airfield in the middle of a small country has precisely the same effect, that of obliteration.
Mr Nigel Nicolson: It will not have escaped the attention of the hon. and learned Gentleman, I am sure, that both Great Britain and Greece are members of the some alliance, which is guarding against the same enemy. We are both members of N.A.T.O., and Russia is our common enemy. The airfields, whosever they are, will have precisely the same purpose. The airfields in Cyprus are totally irrelevant to the question...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I appreciate the hon. Member's point. I deliberately referred to the Cypriots as Europeans. This brings me to my next point. The Cypriots are hurt because they feel that they are subject to precisely the same form of colonial rule as East or West Africans.
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I do not want to be too long. It is because the Cypriots are subject to the Colonial Office in London and have as their administrators reasonable and efficient British officials who may have come straight from Africa, Singapore or some other remote Colony, that they feel it to be an indignity to a people who are of European race, are educated, are Greeks if one likes, and have proved that...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: Malta would be another example of the type of Colony I have in mind, and that is why I want to put this proposition to my right hon. Friend. Could we not in some way devise this intermediate stage, which would not be a humiliating status, but would not confer that full self-government in the sense in which Australia or New Zealand possess it, which carries with it the right to secede from the...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: Because they have refused it.
Mr Nigel Nicolson: Is there not something rather pathetic about the efforts of the hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Dodds) to tell the people of this country that they are worse off under Conservatism?
Mr Nigel Nicolson: On behalf of publishers, I should like to say a final word of welcome to the Bill. I was among those who, on Second Reading, criticised the Bill rather heavily for including in its definitions publications which were not particularly harmful. I now think that my criticisms at that time were exaggerated, and that they have been entirely removed by the Amendments which my right hon. and gallant...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I am the only publisher who has spoken in our debates. I must point out to the hon. Gentleman that in everything I said I tried to strengthen the Bill against the publishers of horror comics, and a few minutes ago I gave it, on behalf of the whole of my profession, the warmest welcome I could because it is directed against something that we want to root out.
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I should like to make one or two points against the Amendment before we have a Division on it. When I spoke in the Second Reading debate I disclosed at once my interest, as I do again now, in that I am a book publisher and include, among other books, children's illustrated books. It might, therefore, be thought that I should be in favour of including newspapers in the general ban which...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I was making that very point. Are we interpreting "stories" in the journalistic sense or in the ordinary sense that we use in common parlance?
Mr Nigel Nicolson: There is another Amendment—
Mr Nigel Nicolson: Sir Rhys, it is most relevant—
Mr Nigel Nicolson: Perhaps I might continue with my argument but omit that point. On two other grounds a newspaper can never be a horror comic. If a horror comic is published under the auspices of a newspaper, then the sheet ceases to be a newspaper and becomes a horror comic. Newspapers contain news. [Hon. Members: "Not always."] They never consist wholly or mainly of pictures. Even the "Daily Mirror" does...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: So-called newspapers published for children could come within the definition of the Bill, because they would certainly be covered by the term "other like work." They are not newspapers in the sense the hon. Member used the word, but in the eyes of a jury they would certainly be covered by the Bill, although they are much closer to the magazine type of publication than to a newspaper, in the...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I think that it will weary the Committee if I go on disclosing my interest as a publisher. With the permission of the House, I make this third disclosure as the final one for this evening. I do not disagree with the Amendment, or with what the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson) said about it, but it will cover only a tiny field. It will cover only those publications which...
Mr Nigel Nicolson: I am sorry to oppose the Amendment, but I do so most strongly. If the Amendment is incorporated in the Bill, it could release a flood of concealed horror and pornography in publications designed for children. Both hon. Members who have spoken have said that one cannot by photography produce some horrific, bestial result as one can by drawings. That is not true. One can, by methods of trick...