AT WESTMINSTER
THE House was unusually full for a Monday afternoon when Mr. Strachey rose to move a non-committal motion on the Report of the Overseas Food Corporation. Despite his patent nervousness, his hour-long speech was a considerable Parliamentary performance, which deserved the cheers he received when he ended, and his quick repartee to Mr. Fletcher showed that he had lost none of the Parliamentary skill which is his main asset as a Minister. Mr. Oliver Stanley who followed him was grimmer and more aggressive than usual, and his attack on Mr. Strachey's dismissal of members of the Board, and on the Board's own dismissal of others within the Corporation, was devastatingly effective. Mr. Strachey had said that the principle of a military operation must apply, and those who had been in charge of failure must go. But "when this military operation fails we sack the battalion com- manders, but we do not touch the general who planned the attack, still less the Commander-in-Chief who ordered it." And he ended by pointing out the difference between the 600,000 acres, some pro- portion of which would be under groundnuts, which Mr. Strachey promised would, at a cost of k5o,000,000, be cleared by 1954 with the 3,000,000 acres under nuts which the original scheme had promised for £25,000,000.
* * * * This debate kept the galleries fuller than any for a long time, and a certain piquancy was given to the personal issues involved by the presence of so many of the personalities concerned. Equally, the number of Members who failed "to catch the Speaker's eye" was very substantial, and many sympathised with Mr. Kenneth Lindsay's protest about this. Before the war issues of this import- ance would have been debated for two if not three days, and the House is undoubtedly suffering from the " streamlining " of debate which has been such a feature of this Parliament of immense legis- lative programmes. At the end came a spirited wind-up from Mr. Lennox-Boyd for the Opposition, and Mr. Creech Jones then rose to reply for the Government. The Colonial Secretary's closest friends would not pretend that he is a Parliamentarian, and it is a distinct handicap for any man to look as rattled as Mr. Creech Jones did. The Opposition amendment asking for an inquiry into the scheme was then voted down by the Government's usual majority. * * * *
At question time on Tuesday the Chancellor of the Exchequer stood his ground firmly in face of a number of questions about the practice of payment of informers, particularly as a means of enforce- ment of the Exchange Control Act. It had been done for many years, he said, by the Customs, and he was not prepared to deprive himself of its use for the purpose of enforcement of Exchange Con- trol. After questions, the Home Secretary made a statement, for whose length he quite unnecessarily apologised, on the subject of the recent allegations made under a nom-de-plume in the New Statesman against the conduct of police in the East End. His view that to attack the police's conduct while refusing to give evidence before a judicial inquiry was, to say the least, unhelpful was generally accepted by the House, with the exception of a few extremists, the burden of whose protests was in inverse ratio to their importance. There were suggestions that the criminal law might be invoked, and Mr. Ede revealed that high legal opinion had been consulted. The Home Secretary's own conduct of the matter, including his refusal to receive information under the pledge of secrecy, was regarded as being in the highest traditions of his office.
* * * * After questions on Wednesday, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation, Mr. Lindgren, had the unenviable task of replying to a private notice question from Mr. Lennox-Boyd on the subject of the Minister of Civil Aviation's published disagreement with the findings of his own Court of Inquiry into the disaster to a Dutch air-liner at Prestwick last autumn. He had to admit that his -Minister had formed his opinion on the basis of the evidence given before the Commissioner, although he did not enjoy the advantage which the Commissioner had had of actually seeing the witnesses. An uncomfortable episode ended with Mr. Lennox-Boyd announcing that he would raise the matter again. J. A. B.-C.
Previous page
