Impossible

On the former point, the Prime Minister told the House two years ago (December 16, 1964) that the upkeep of BAOR meant “a gap falling on our balance of payments of Ј55 million to Ј60 million. I am certain the House will agree that this is an impossible situation”.

Over a year and a half ago, on May 11, 1965, he told the Nato Council that “a very high proportion of Britain’s balance of payments problem is created by overseas defence expenditure, not least within the Nato area…. I want my colleagues to realise that we cannot and do not intend to continue to take this unfair share of the economic burden”.

But ten days ago, on December 6, Foreign Secretary George Brown told the House that the BAOR is costing us Ј94 million in foreign exchange this year and the Bonn Government is offering only Ј31 million by way of off-set payments.

RACKET

That means the “gap” is several million pounds wider today than when the Prime Minister declared two years ago that the situation was impossible.

On the second point – the value of Nato – Lord Montgomery told the Lords on November 30, not only that 20,000 British troops would be ample, but that “the real danger in Europe is Germany”, and that Nato is well on the way to becoming a political racket. Money is being chucked like water. Every nation is trying to grab as much as it can. There are enormous military headquarters, from Norway right across Europe down to Naples.

Parkinson’s Law is evidently working on an American scale in Nato. It is working politically as well as financially: the more Nato costs, the less sense it makes, and the wilder the reasons advanced for trying to keep it going.

In the November 30 Lords debate the long-standing pretext that Nato is necessary to protect us against Soviet forces marching in to impose Communism was all but officially scuttled.

After all, not even their Lordships can swallow that stuff any longer.

REVIVAL

Instead speaker after speaker agreed that we must not cut our forces in Nato, because we want to enter the European Economic Community (whereas our loyalty to the U.S. is going to keep us out), and that we have to keep them there because of the revival of Germany nationalism.

One Noble Lord said he had “always regarded Germany, and not Russia, as our potential enemy”.

In view of the revival of German nationalism and neo-nazism he thought we should keep all our forces in Nato to “guard against possible trouble in Germany”. He was “profoundly glad that the Russians are along the frontier”.

The logic of that muddled argument would be that Britain should get out of Nato and join the Warsaw alliance.

OPPOSED

Instead, the Nato Council decided to admit West Germany to a share in taking nuclear decisions.

On January 31 and July 3, 1963 Mr Wilson declared that the Labour Party was utterly and unalterably opposed to such a policy, on the double ground that it would whet the Bonn Government’s nuclear appetite and make impossible any agreement with the USSR on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

That is equally true today.

In any case it would make more sense to close with the repeated Soviet offers to scrap both Nato and the Warsaw alliance and conclude all-European agreements for disengagement and disarmament, non-aggression and peaceful settlement of disputes and collective security on lines consistent with the UN Charter.

That would, in effect, mean at long last acting on the policies to which the Labour Party has been officially pledged ever since 1958, and on the principle, proclaimed as recently as in the Government’s 1966 Defence White Paper, that defence must be the servant and not the master of foreign policy.

Ay – there’s the rub; to do that would mean ceasing to flog the dying white elephant Nato, owned and trained and entered for the Armageddon Stakes by Uncle Sam.

LOYALTY

In other words, it would mean breaking with the policy pursued by all three parties in Parliament ever since the war, of basing our world position on all-in loyalty to the U.S. alliance, which, because of the vast disparity of power, necessarily and inevitably means total subservience to the U.S. Administration. It is the United States in conjunction with Blimpish and arms manufacturing interests at home which is forcing the Government to go on playing the economically ruinous, military megalomaniac “east of Suez worlds” role and to scrap our own policies for making peace in Europe.

Anglo-American policy confounds the social and ideological challenge of Communism which is real, with an entirely mythical and non-existent threat of Soviet aggression. It reverts to type the exploded fallacy, which nuclear weapons have made literally deadly, that the way to preserve peace is to prepare for war – through a balance of power sustained by the U.S. run alliance Nato, Cento and SEATO and a crushingly costly race in weapons of universal destruction, in service of President Johnson’s anti-Communist crusade.

NUCLEAR

The American alliance has become a nuclear Holy Alliance, a global successor to Hitler’s anti-Communist Axis.

The alternative is to take our stand on the United Nations Charter in deed and not only in word.

That means co-operation on equal terms with West and East, the U.S. and USSR; peaceful co-existence and co-operation with both and not being allied with either against the other.

That is the policy to which Labour is pledged and in which most of the party believes. It is the only policy which will work.