Rulers and Rights
Speaking at Barnsley on Saturday, the Prime Minister drove home some truths that badly need to be driven home. It was hardly an accident that the speech fell two days after the debate on foreign affairs in the House of Commons, in which, although various habitual condoners of social injustice in Eastern Europe were denied an opportunity to make their voices heard, one or two of the coterie did make them heard. Mr. Attlee chose his words wisely. British foreign policy, he said, was based on the principle that every people had the right to choose its own Government, whether that Government was Conservative, Socialist or Communist, provided that the people were permitted to exercise the right freely. That does not alter the fact that, as the Prime Minister recognised, there are several countries in Eastern Europe where human rights are denied and so-called democratic government is a travesty. Mr. Attlee was no doubt right to make no specific reference to Hungary or Rumania or Bulgaria or Soviet Russia, but none of the hearers al- the readers of his speech could have the smallest difficulty in reading between the lines. It was not his business at that moment to pillory particular countries, but he was fully justified in expressing his concern, as a Labour Prime Minister, at the existence among his followers of persons who while professing to be Socialists appeared to condone in the case of Governments of the Left actions which they would vigorously denounce if the authors of them were Governments of the Right. The stand for absolute moral values, on which the Prime Minister laid such necessary stress, must be given universal, not selecti7e, interpretation.
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