The hon. Member should not be so zealous in trying to win favour with the party to which he has deserted, because they think nothing of him anyhow—the rat apeing the clown. I was saying that I approach this subject from the point of view of one who sees the world divided into two great armed camps. On the one side are the States that have passed through a social revolution, mostly countries that have never known democracy, nearly all countries that have had their social revolution aggravated by war, civil war, and enemy occupation; and which in these circumstances are passing through the stage that all revolutions pass through, of more or less dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government. These countries have not got political freedom in the sense that we rightly prize. But they have got Socialist economies that anchor them securely to the need for peace.

On the other side are States with political freedom and capitalist economies that diminish and distort political freedom, by the pull exercised by vested interests, as in the lobbies of Congress, through the private ownership by big vested interests of the Press and radio; and which also, through capitalism, harbour powerful forces that live by massive rearmament and by economic expansion into foreign markets.

As regards the United States, I speak as one who has some of the roots of his life in that country. My mother was an American. I graduated at Yale University. I lived in the United States for years, and have visited it frequently since I was five. I profoundly disagree with the present Anglo-American foreign policy, and view with dismay the coming together of the two Governments for the purposes of that policy; but I believe that the growing together of our two peoples could be, and should be, a great power for good in the world. That is why I was pleased when Mr. Henry Wallace, a former Vice-President, invited me to join him and other members of the Progressive Party last spring in a speaking tour.

I was less pleased when I found I had become an exile from that country, for I was refused a visa. There was a long controversy between the State Department and the Department of Justice, culminating in a public statement by Mr. Dean Acheson, that under American law, I was in the category of persons debarred from entering the United States—it took them a long time to discover that, for I have been entering the United States for over 40 years—unless I had special dispensation from the Department of Justice, which they regarded as not being necessary in the national interest. At the same time the State Department replied to the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives that they could not reveal the reasons why this decision had been taken without jeopardising the confidential character of communications with other Governments.

That was regarded by my friends in the United States as strongly suggesting that there had been correspondence between His Majesty's Government and the State Department on that subject. If so, I should be glad to know what was the nature of that correspondence. Either the Government were apprised beforehand of this exclusion of an hon. Member of this House and said nothing, or they were treated with such contempt by the United Staten that they were not even informed before the decision was taken. This treatment of elected representatives of the people of this country and of France—the same fate was meted out to a former French Minister, Pierre Cot—is a symptom of the alarming growth of hysteria in the United States. Twenty years ago action of this sort would have been unheard of and unthinkable, and if it had occurred there would have been a first-class scandal on both sides of the Atlantic and a vigorous protest by the Government of this country.