 Speech by Tony Ben on the Voice of Britain, 1956. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Matthew Ward, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. With Karl Manchester as George Wiggs MP. Mr Wedgwood Ben, Bristol, South East. This adjournment debate has been arranged at very short notice, and I should like to pay my personal tribute to the Minister who has agreed to deal with what I think will turn out to be one of the most explosive consequences of the policy we have seen pursued during the last week. I suggest that the House should consider this afternoon as the very first of the many postmortems we shall have on the events of last week. I think we may now say that the Prime Minister's unhappy military venture has come to a conclusion. A week ago he announced that an ultimatum had been presented to the Egyptian government under which they were obliged to allow British forces to be stationed in Egypt to guarantee the safety of the canal. The position now as we all know is that the British government have agreed to a ceasefire and that NASA controls almost all the canal. Therefore this is an appropriate moment to look at the events of last week and see what lessons we can learn from those happenings. In that spirit I wish to refer to the subject of the broadcasts put out by the voice of Britain. I understand that there was in Cyprus a broadcasting station about the ownership and control of which I am not quite clear called Shark Al-Adna. That station used to broadcast in Arabic to the Middle East and when Her Majesty's government took over they renamed broadcasts from that station the Voice of Britain and broadcast from it on behalf of the Supreme Allied Command certainly until today when no transcripts have come in. The Voice of Britain has been speaking for this country and we are morally under the necessity to look into those broadcasts to see exactly what has been said through the courtesy of the BBC and the generosity of the foreign office in making these things available I have been able to study the transcripts. What I have studied and proposed to reveal to the House now is I believe so sensational that it merits a tribunal inquiry to be set up at once to see where responsibility for this catalogue of lies, stupidity and folly really rests. I must tell the House also that in doing this I feel bound to compare the broadcasts by the Voice of Britain with the statements made by the Prime Minister in this House. The disparity and discrepancy between the two statements is so great that I feel it my duty to raise it this afternoon and I have notified the office of the Prime Minister that I propose to do this. May I say first that my interest in overseas broadcasting did not begin with the Voice of Britain broadcasts at one time for a very short time in a most undistinguished capacity I served in the overseas service of the BBC. Since then I have always taken a great interest in broadcasting because I think it is very important that the true Voice of Britain should be heard abroad. Therefore, I begin by saying that my complaint about this whole situation is that it is technically appallingly badly managed. I cannot, of course, now consider the policy which lies behind it, we have debated that and will no doubt do so in future but the experience of the BBC which is an experience unrivaled in the world as an organ of stressing the Voice of this country has been built on one very simple thing it is to tell the truth. Throughout all the years, even during the war when we were broadcasting to Germany and since the war when we were broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain the BBC overseas service has always stuck to the truth. That is why it is accepted and why the chimes of Big Ben are known all over the world in a happy context. If we have a broadcasting station, therefore and a war breaks out and we feel that we must broadcast then we must always stick to the simplest principle of all to put out the truth. That requires a degree of directive from high authority and proper consideration at every stage of the long and short-term effects of telling lies. The first task of the Voice of Britain was to explain to the Egyptian people exactly why a British ultimatum had been presented to them. I find it very curious that there is no record of the Voice of Britain broadcasting to Israel at any stage since the Prime Minister said that the intention of the ultimatum was to compel both sides to disengage. I think it is very odd, indeed more than odd that at no stage has a transcript been received of a broadcast directed to the Israeli troops advising them to keep clear of the canal. Be that as it may let us consider exactly what the position was. I want to quote first of all the Prime Minister's own statement to the House in which he explained on 30th October as reported in columns 1279 and 1347 of the official report the reasons for this action. He said and we all remember the statement I must tell the House that very grave issues are at stake and that unless hostilities can quickly be stopped free passage through the canal will be jeopardised. Moreover, any fighting on the banks of the canal would endanger the ships actually on passage. One of my honourable friends if not all of us was intensely suspicious of the Prime Minister's motives. My honourable friend, the member for Sheffield Brightside Mr R.E. Winterbottom as reported at column 1298 of the official report for the same day asked the Prime Minister this will the Prime Minister give the House an assurance that those troops will be withdrawn as soon as the Israeli Egyptian clash is over or temporarily settled and that the occasion will not be used to keep British troops in the canal zone in furtherance of the dispute between ourselves and the Egyptian Government. On that I want a categorical assurance. Hansard records that the Prime Minister indicated ascent but lest the official reporters should have strayed from their task I found the exact passage in column 1347 where the Prime Minister said I want now to deal if I may with one or two other points raised the honourable member for Brightside Mr R.E. Winterbottom and one or two other honourable members asked whether British troops and other troops will be withdrawn once the hostilities cease of course that will be so certainly it is our intention that they shall be withdrawn as soon as possible. The last thing that we want is an enduring commitment of that kind the last thing Official report 30th October 1956 Volume 558 Chapter 1279 to 1347 Those are the Prime Minister's words he utterly repudiated on 30th October the assertion that the canal dispute had anything to do with the movement of the troops May I remind the House that the voice of Britain said only two days later on 2nd November at 1245 Greenwich meantime the bulletin put out ran as follows this is the first bulletin addressed to the Egyptian people from the voice of the Allied armies command O Egyptians this is the first blow which has before been new why has this before been new Abed Al-Nasir went mad and seized the Suez Canal which is of vital importance to the world accordingly the Allies shall continue taking measures with increasing force until peace is restored and the canal is placed above political and national ambitions on the understanding that we are in a position to apply further force to attain our objective and shall do so if necessary our fighters and bombers are now flying over you the strong forces of the Allies intervened only in order to put an end to violence in Egypt and to put the canal under international control there is a direct contradiction between the words of the Supreme Allied Command and those of the Prime Minister and I do not suggest that either of them can be exonerated I believe that on these and other issues a committee of inquiry is vital in order to determine why this situation arose of course the Prime Minister on 3rd November whether because he had heard the voice of Britain or had changed his mind I do not know came out with it and said the second point which the right honourable gentleman raised and with which I want to deal concerns his question it included the Suez Canal in the second paragraph of our reply we considered that carefully the object as I think honourable members will see when they have had time to study the reply is to show that we shall try to use this situation to deal with all the outstanding problems in the Middle East and it would be unwise to leave any one of them unresolved 3rd November 1956 volume 558 chapter 1867 so we have the position not only of the voice of Britain flatly contradicting the Prime Minister but of the Prime Minister contradicting himself in those circumstances it must have been quite impossible for those responsible for that broadcasting station to have had any directive before from London that sort of thing is technically disastrous it weakens the appeal of the station and in this case revealed the true nature of the aggression to which this country has been committed I have time to mention only one other major point which has arisen out of a study of Hansard and these transcripts and that is the question what sort of operation was this which we were undertaking at that moment the Prime Minister said that this was a police action and I quote now not a Hansard extract but from the Prime Minister's broadcast to which I listened and of which I have the official text the broadcast was made on the night of Saturday 3rd November when the Prime Minister said the government knew and they regretted it that this action would shock and hurt some people the bombing of military targets and military targets only it's better to destroy machines on the ground than let them destroy people from the air we have to think of our troops and of the inhabitants of the towns and villages later we find a passage that has been a man of peace working for peace striving for peace that was all meant to show to the British people that our attack on Egypt was designed solely to destroy the military establishments and that of course humane considerations above all influenced our bomber pilots but now we come to the broadcast of the voice of Britain which began within two hours of the Prime Minister coming off the air in this country he came off the air at 10.15pm on the Saturday and at 05.25 hours on the Sunday the voice of Britain began broadcasting to the Egyptian soldiers as follows now listen carefully to us you have hidden in small villages do you know what this means it means that we are obliged to bomb you wherever you are imagine your villages being bombed imagine your wives children, mothers, fathers and grandfathers escaping from their houses and leaving their property behind this will happen to you if you hide behind your women in the villages you are soldiers and duty requires that you defend your villages and not bring destruction upon them you have nothing with which to defend yourselves we will find and bomb you wherever you hide one thing which you can do is to wear civilian clothes and go to your homes to see if any soldiers or tanks are concealed in your villages tell them to clear out before we come and destroy these villages and don't evacuate there is no doubt that your villages and homes will be destroyed is that police action is that the voice of Britain which has been going out now for the last week or more is that technically politically or morally right of course it is not it produced in my mind a feeling of revulsion which in my young life having felt before it is the voice of Ho Ho and of Nazi type brutality it demands an inquiry it demands an inquiry for one other reason in the broadcast on the following day the people were told and I quote the transcript of the broadcast of Monday 5th November 1652 hours Greenwich meantime very soon it will be dark soldiers in Port Said you are in a hopeless situation protect your lives it is not your duty to die for your homeland your duty is to live and serve your homeland and return to your families and homes the previous day they had been told that if they return to their families and homes as soldiers their families and homes will be bombed is it right for a broadcasting station one day to say to the soldiers if you go home we will bomb your mothers, wives and children and to say to them the next day go home to your wives and children it is your duty this is the character of false news which is in itself a crime I come now to one final point which from my point of view has the most heavily charged emotional undertones of anything I have mentioned as I said earlier this radio station was originally a private enterprise Arab station broadcasting to the Arab world until it was taken over on Saturday 3rd November at 11.18 Greenwich meantime I am afraid there is no explanation of this although I will try to tell the house what I have heard subsequently the following statement was broadcast according to the monitoring report it is called an in-person statement by the director of the former Shark El Adna station this is the broadcast being the director of the former Shark El Adna station I wish it to be known for our listeners in the Arab world that the Arab staff of the station are obliged under the circumstances existing in Cyprus to remain at work listeners must understand that while the feelings of the staff are naturally with their Arab brothers they are no longer free agents there is no question that the director of this station broke in on the microphone himself without the authority of the military and broadcast this appeal from his heart to his own brothers in Egypt who were being at that moment bombed by the British I rate this message as being quite as tragic as the last messages coming out of Budapest that man was compelled to broadcast this filthy propaganda to people who were of his own race and family and who were being bombed by the British indeed as soon as this happened the censorship in Cyprus clamped down and an order was given to newspaper correspondents that the words Voice of Britain were to be put on the stop list Will my honourable friend ask the government to give an assurance that no bodily harm has come to the man who made that broadcast My honourable friend has touched on one of the many consequences of this business I can only say that a newspaper correspondent with whom I have been in touch and who arrived from Cyprus very recently said a rumour had gone round that there was trouble at the Arab station that at that moment the military censorship forbade the use of the words Voice of Britain in any cables back home that total censorship existed and that none of the British newspaper men were allowed to go to see the Voice of Britain station or how it operated I have said enough to justify the inquiry as my honourable friend the member for Dudley Mr Wigg urged yesterday in the house War criminals I believe that my right honourable and honourable friends will not only put down a motion demanding a tribunal of inquiry into the circumstances but that if at any time they are in power they will enforce it to see that the people responsible for this are brought to trial are brought to trial for what is clearly a criminal act it has done terrible political damage to this country it is morally wrong and it is not the Voice of Britain I do not envy the under secretary of state who has to reply to this debate the foreign secretary denied responsibility to this matter in the house on Monday the minister of defence was not willing to step in now we are to have an answer from the deputy to the secretary of state for war I do not envy him but there is one course open to him either he should repudiate on behalf of Her Majesty's Government the action of these men although most of them we know were under duress imposed by the government or else the honourable member should take the only course of honour open to him and follow the minister of state for foreign affairs and the economic secretary to the treasury and resign I feel and I think most people in the country when they hear this story will feel that the greatest crime of all is to speak with a false voice in the name of Britain that you Mr Speaker are in a sense the voice of Britain you derive your authority from a representative people it is your job to supervise political change peacefully it is your job to guarantee liberty of expression and liberty of conscience and I like to see you and in what you stand for the true voice of this country I desperately hope that we may soon have here the government who are willing to repudiate these crimes and seek slowly and painfully to build up the good name of Britain end of speech speech by Anthony Eden on the Suez Canal this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org speech given to the House of Commons on October 31st 1956 by Anthony Eden in view of my right honourable friend's announcement that there will be a further debate tomorrow I will, if I may, confine myself today to giving certain facts about the situation which are available to us and to meeting certain of the criticisms which may be in the minds of the House I will begin by saying this about the United Nations session this morning the United States Representative tabled at UNO a resolution which was in effect a condemnation of Israel as the aggressor in the events of the last few days we felt that we could not associate ourselves with this and we said so through diplomatic channels both in London and in New York Her Majesty's Government did not feel and do not feel that it is possible to pronounce the against one of the parties in the dispute for the action which they have taken regardless of the cumulative effects that went before throughout recent months and in particular since the seizure of the canal the Egyptian Government have kept up a violent campaign against Israel against this country and against the West the Egyptian Government have made it clear over and over again with increased emphasis of the canal their intention to destroy Israel just as they have made it plain that they would drive the western powers out of the Middle East what has happened that is what has been happening and that is the background to understanding what is happening it is from these Egyptian policies that much of the present crisis has sprung and to ignore them is to shun reality in these circumstances is there any member of this house who can consider Egypt as an innocent country whom it is right to exonerate at the Security Council by condemning Israel as an aggressor more over the Security Council resolution simply called upon the Israeli Government to withdraw within their frontiers that seemed and seems to us in all the circumstances these immediate events to be a harsh demand if it is to stand alone it certainly could not be said to meet in any way the guarantees for Israel's security which were asked for by several honorable members in the course of yesterday's debate as to our own request to both sides to cease fire and to withdraw Israel accepted that request last night and declared her willingness to take practical steps to carry it out the Egyptian Government rejected it as to the military situation on the ground I must give the house what information is at our disposal the press this morning the house will have seen reports that one column of Israeli troops yesterday morning reached El-Kasima which is one of the biggest Egyptian bases in North Sinai in an outflanking movement out of our knowledge, this is true I can confirm also what my right honorable and learned friend said last night in reply to the right honorable and learned member for Montgomery that so far as our information goes Israeli troops are continuing to advance towards the canal the press also reports that a column is now well along the highway built by Lord Allenby's forces during World War this highway leads through the desert to Ismalia other columns are reported to be nearer the canal, some troops may already be on it the latest report is that they are approaching the canal and there are a number of details on the tape since, which honorable members will have seen within the last hour a number of prisoners have been captured I understand in the light of all these facts can anyone say that we and the French government should have waited yes for a satisfactory resolution by the security council authorizing definite action to stop the fighting I must remind the house that we have recently been to the United Nations and we went with proposals for the future of the canal approved by 18 powers representing more than 90% of the traffic that uses the canal admittedly we received strong support for our proposals but they were vetoed by the Soviet government can we be expected to await the development of similar procedures in the situation of much greater urgency that confronts us now in and about the canal the action we had to take was bound to be rapid I regret it had to be so but it was inescapable we have no desire whatever nor have the French government that the military action that we shall have to take should be more than temporary in its duration but it is our intention that our action to protect the canal and separate the combatants should result in a settlement which will prevent such a situation arising in the future if we can do that we shall have performed a service but to the users of the canal it is really not tolerable that the greatest sea highway in the world one on which our western life so largely depends should be subject to the dangers of an explosive situation in the Middle East which it must be admitted has been largely created by the Egyptian government along familiar lines I would remind the house that we have witnessed all of us the growth of a specific Egyptian threat to the peace of the Middle East everybody knows that to be true in the actions we have now taken we are not concerned to stop Egypt but to stop war nonetheless it is a fact that there is no Middle Eastern problem at present which could not have been settled or bettered but for the hostile and irresponsible policies of Egypt in recent years and there is no hope the general settlement of the many outstanding problems in that area so long as Egyptian propaganda and policy continues its present line of violence what would the future of the Middle East have been if while denouncing Israel we had done nothing to check these Egyptian actions the only result would be warfare spreading through the whole area and a great increase in the strength and influence of a dictator's power in these circumstances to have taken no action would have been to betray not our interests alone but those of the free world and above all of the Middle East itself to have taken ineffective action would have been a greater betrayal than to have taken no action at all we have taken the only action we could clearly see would be effective in holding the belligerents apart which would give us some chance to re-establish the peace of the area in entering the Suez Canal area we are only protecting a vital international waterway we are also holding and this is a point I would ask the house to bear in mind between the combatants the only possible line of division which is practicable for us because even if it had been fair it would not have been possible to have attempted to establish ourselves in this line itself it is an irregular line with no facilities and no possibility of any limited forces doing anything effective to control it and of course would have been no assistance at all in respect of shipping in the canal now I wish to say something about our relations with the United States and the matter the decisions which we and the French government took were as I said yesterday on our own account and on our own responsibility the government remain convinced that we could have done no other and discharge our national duty now it is of course an obvious truth that safety of transit through the canal though clearly of concern to the United States is for them not a matter of survival as it is to us and indeed to all Europe and many other lands indeed Mr. Dulles himself made this clear on the 28th of August when he said the United States economy is not dependent upon the canal of course that is true we must all accept it and we should not complain about it but it is equally true that throughout all these months this fact has inevitably influenced the attitude of the United States to these problems as compared to that of ourselves and France if anyone says that on that account we should have held up action until agreement could be reached with the United States as to what to do I can only say that this would have been to ignore what everyone here and in the United States knows to have been different approaches to some of these vital Middle Eastern questions they know it we know it of course we deplore it but I do not think that it can carry with it this corollary that we must in all circumstances secure agreement from our American ally before we can act ourselves in what we know to be our own vital interests end of speech recording by Rhonda Federman