Egypt

MR. JUPP: Our speaker today is Sir Hugh Linstead, O.B.E., M.P., a most welcome visitor to Canada from London, England. As a Conservative Member of Parliament for the last fourteen years representing the Putney division of Wandsworth in London, he has been in the thick of the battle of ideologies which has dominated the Westminster scene since the war. As a Pharmaceutical Chemist and a Barrister-at-law he has naturally held positions having a close relationship with the National Health Scheme, notably as a member of the British Health Services Council, a member of the Standing Pharmaceutical Advisory Committee and its Sub-Committee on Hospital Pharmacy (of which he is Chairman) and as a member of the Committee on the Internal Administration of Hospitals. He is also Honorary Secretary of the Parliamentary Scientific Committee.

The international reputation of our speaker is amply attested by the honour accorded to him by France in 1948 when he was made an Officier de l'Ordre de la Saute Publique and by honorary memberships in the Pharmaceutical Societies of Antwerp, Texas and India.

In the last few weeks Sir Hugh has travelled from coast to coast and has attended the meetings of the Canadian Pharmaceutical Association. We are singularly fortunate in having him with us today.

There has been a good deal of discussion both before and at the Head Table about the subject of today's talk and by common consent the subject of today's speech will be on the current crisis under the general heading of "Egypt". Sir Hugh Linstead.

SIR HUGH LINSTEAD: I have greatly valued the invitation to speak to your club and with it is some regret that I have to claim your indulgence. It has been announced that I will talk to you about the relationship between the State and the individual in Great Britain, but through the kindness of your chairman I have been allowed to change my subject. It seemed to me that as a Member of the British Parliament, here in Toronto, talking to the Empire Club at this particular moment in history, the least that I owed you and indeed the least that was my duty, was that I should try to tell you something about what is happening in Egypt today. It can only be from my personal point of view. I have been away from my home for a month and I have had no sources of information except your newspapers. Nevertheless, I am well familiar with the British House of Commons and I know many of our Ministers personally. In these circumstances I feel that I may have something to say that ought to be said. With that explanation may I plunge straight into my subject?

Why are Israel, France and England doing what they are doing?

We can understand why Israel is taking the action she is. We all know of the intense historical hatred between Arab and Jew. We know too, of the deep patriotic feelings which animate the Jews in relation to the Jewish home which is Palestine. We also know the historical relations between Arab and Jew have been exacerbated by frontier incidents and we know how bitterly Nasser's threats against Palestine have been resented by the Jews. Israel's attitude is surely this-now that Russia is occupied with her satellites and Egypt is embroiled with France and Great Britain she sees an opportunity which may never recur for curbing the growth of Egyptian power and the dangers implicit in repeated Egyptian threats. Now if ever is the time, is what Israel is saying.

We can too, understand the action that France is taking. Let me pay my tribute to France as a colonizing country. Her policy has been a policy of integration. She has sought throughout her colonial countries to bring the peoples into ever closer relationship with the home country. There has never been any colour bar. Algeria is a department of metropolitan France and Algerian citizens send their representatives to the metropolitan parliament. France believed that she was satisfying colonial ambitions by this policy of integration. What she did not realize, as my country has realized only just in time, was how intense is the feeling of patriotic nationalism. Asians { and Africans do not want good government. They want Asiatic government or African government. It may be that France has moved too slowly, although at present law and order has been restored to Algeria. France has seen Indo-China slipping away and now Morocco and Tunesia following suit and she has to remember that in Algeria there are l,000,000 French of Metropolitan France, second and third generation Frenchmen who have made their lives in that country. We can recognize that France in the action she has taken in Algeria and in her action alongside us in the Suez has been animated by pride and self interest. But believe me she has surely been animated by a very real concern for the peoples of the countries for which she has had responsibility. Certainly she has reason for a lively fear of the cry "Africa for the African", for to her it may well mean "Africa for the communists". Remember France has over 100 communist deputies in her National Assembly.

So much for those two questions. Now for the third ', question which you are entitled to ask me and which I must seek to answer. Why is England doing what she is still doing? More particularly, why is she doing it independently of UNO and why is she using force? This I believe to be the crux of the present situation--the position of UNO. Great Britain has consistently sought to make UNO the foundation stone of her foreign policy. No statesman contributed more to the establishment of UNO than has Sir Anthony Eden. No country furthermore has greater need for or desire for peace than Great Britain. What have we to gain by war? We have everything to lose by it. We therefore pinned our faith in UNO when the Second World War was over in spite of our experience with the League of Nations in the old days. We have not been disappointed over the work of the special agencies of UNO such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Refugee Organization when it was functioning, but these special agencies apart, the high hopes we had have dimmed. Russia has kept a grip on her satellite countries until now. China has absorbed Thibet. Only in Korea, by the accident of Russia's absence from the Security Council, has UNO been able to take effective action. Many of the high hopes we all had went with the first use of the veto. We in Great Britain and probably you in Canada are accustomed to the power of veto. The Queen in our country and I suppose the Governor General in yours has the power to veto legislation. But paradoxically the effectiveness of that veto has depended upon its never being used. It was surely our belief when the original statutes of the United Nations were being drawn that the veto should be a rare procedure, to be kept in reserve and to be used only in an extremity. Instead of that Russia has made it a matter of current procedure and her sixty vetos have killed UNO as an agency for the joint maintenance of peace. In consequence UNO has become merely an instrument of national policies. We of the West have been playing a game according to our rules, the rules of UNO, while Russia and the dictatorships have been playing a game according to their rules. For too long we have allowed them to have their way because of our strict adherence to what we thought were the rules binding all of us.

What Great Britain is doing at this present moment therefore, is to call in to question the whole structure of agreements, protocols, notes, schedules, undertakings that we have built around us since the war. We brought them into being in the belief that they would prove to be a strong enough bulwark for democracy against aggression. We have striven hard enough to make them work, Heaven knows. But our verdict now is that in some fields, and those the most important, they have become a snare and a delusion.

That is our verdict. What is yours?

Let me pause here a moment to give the verdict of my chambermaid this morning in this hotel. Learning that I was to speak to you she spontaneously summed up her view of the situation and my duty to you in these words, "Eden had nothing else he could do. England's always taken the dirt. Rub that in and rub it in thick". I duly comply.

Ask yourselves these questions. Are we forever to see the civilized world losing ground before lawlessness and communism? Who is to apply international sanctions if the United Nations Organization is impotent? After Thibet, what? After Indo-China, what? Great Britain negotiated a peace on Persia. Great Britain negotiated a compromise on the Suez base. Is Great Britain to negotiate a compromise on every demand made no matter what country? If she does, to whose advantage is it? There is only one country which gains as Western powers are negotiated out of Asia and out of Africa piecemeal and that is Russia.

As Britain sees it, because of the veto UNO is impotent in many vital fields. Yet if no one takes action then we play into the hands of international anarchy and of the one country that stands to profit by it. This then is the background to what Great Britain is doing in Suez today.

We shall be criticized for unduly strong action, but that criticism does not concern me greatly. Once the decision has been taken that action is necessary, then half-hearted action is worse than useless. It must be, and be seen to be, ample to achieve its aim.

Why is Suez so vital to us? In brief, because our economy is shifting its base from coal to oil. Remember we are 50 million people cramped on a small island, dependant for any reasonable standard of life on exports. We can no longer export the heavy machinery of Victorian days. Our customers make it themselves. We must export the latest discoveries in engineering, physics, electronics, aeronautics, and in nuclear fission. At present our second greatest source of power for the factories that make these things is oil. We are dependant on its increasingly for heating, for road transportation and more recently for our railroads. Without it Great Britain would slowly run down. The bulk of our supplies of oil comes to us through the Suez Canal. We dare not allow those supplies to be held under the arbitrary control of one man who has already shut the canal to the ships of one country.

It may be argued that Egypt has acted legally. That is a matter for the lawyers. The point that I am certain about is that their act was by any standards a gross breach of international faith. Supposing that Panama in the purported exercise of its rights of sovereignty were to seize the Panama Canal. Then the situation would be brought home to the Americans. Co-operation in international affairs depends on good faith far more than it depends on, lawyers' interpretations of documents.

Nevertheless had circumstances not gone further than seizure of the canal the question might still have been negotiable. It is true that all through Great Britain has reserved the right to use force but I am satisfied that it was at first intended to use force only in two circumstances, to protect British lives and property and secondly should it have decided to do so by the United Nations Organization.

The Israeli attack, however, put a completely new complexion on the situation. When she marched in to Egypt it became essential to control the flames, it became legal for us to re-open our old Suez base and it became necessary for us to protect our shipping and keep the canal open. Would the United Nations have done all this? Would it have put in forces to keep Israel and Egypt apart? Could it have kept open the canal? The answer to these questions is certainly, no. That is why we and the French have gone in. We have gone in because we have been injured by a gross breach of international good faith. We have gone in in default of there being any other instrument to do so. Certainly we are serving our own vital national interests but we hope and believe that by keeping Israel and Egypt apart we are preventing a prairie fire that would affect the interests of every other country in the world.

The West has for too long been prepared to compromise under the pressure of authoritarian states. Someone sometime must say no. When the policeman is not able to act, some citizens somewhere have got to do something about maintaining the rule of law. In doing so they will of course lay themselves open to criticism, the most obvious being that they are denying the very principle they seek to maintain. When that happens they are at least entitled to ask that their actions should be judged by their previous records. And my country's record in the pursuit of peace is a proud one. She has sacrificed her youth and her riches in two world wars so that good faith and decency and democracy may prevail over lawlessness and arbitrary power. Since 1945 out statesmen have sought by every means in their power to settle disputes by way of negotiation. Time after time we have found ourselves impotent and frustrated, caught up in a web of words and procedures. And in the meantime the boundaries of the free world have been shrinking.

As I see what has now happened, we have been driven to the decision at last that the dangers of security based on words alone must be exposed. With our French allies, we claim the elementary right to safeguard a line of communication vital to our life. We can see no hope of safeguarding that line of communication by any other means than by our own strength and our own determination.

I ask our Canadian friends, and most of you surely are, to do two things. The first, to assess again Canada's own position in relation to the functioning of the vast structure of international commitments in which we have all involved ourselves with so much hope and with so little security and to judge our action accordingly. The second, to recall that my country did not serve the world ill when she challenged Napoleon, when she challenged the German Kaiser, when she challenged Hitler the Nazi.

Granted we are serving our own interests, yet those interests cannot basically be other than identical with those of all peace-loving states. We and France are seeking to maintain standards of international good faith, to keep open a great international highway and to prevent two implacable enemies tearing at one another's throats. We will I believe be justified by the results of our actions. We in this room are perhaps too near events to see this now. But in time others in addition to ourselves will be grateful that Britain has once again, and with courage, taken her own destiny into her own hands.

THANKS OF THE MEETING was expressed by John L. Bonus, Esq.