be grateful.
2.36 p.m.
LORD MILVERTON My Lords, I should like to begirt what I have to say in a brief intervention in this debate, by expressing my admiration to the noble Marquess for the way in which be introduced the Second Reading of this Bill. It seems to me to-day that I have had the privilege of listening to what I would consider, with my usual arrogance of judgment, to be an ideal introduction to the Second Reading of a Bill, and an ideal speech from the Opposition Front Bench, which in this case, of course, is not in opposition to but in approval of the Bill. What I mean by that is that all the facts of the situation and What led up to the Bill were so well and so lucidly explained that there was nothing more that needed to be said on that line, and the speech from the representative of the Opposition Front Bench dealt in a wide and statesmanlike manner with the problems which confronted the new nation. It was informed in this case by a wide personal knowledge of the countryside and the people of whom he was talking. That, of course, frees somebody like myself from the necessity of repeating or going over ground which has already been so well covered.
So in rising to give an unqualified support to this Bill, I hope your Lordships will forgive a certain reminiscent and nostalgic tone in my remarks. I am one of the happy band of pilgrims who knew and loved the Malay States and remember them as a country where Malays, Chinese, Indians and Europeans lived in mutual amity, and we indeed who know that country can say, Et ego in Arcadia vixi. The Malay States, federated and unfederated, the Straits Settlements and the Borneo territories from 1908 to 1933 were my second home, as the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, has already mentioned. I served for 25 years in Malaysia, and I was married 958 in Kuala Lumpur when I was Under-Secretary to the Government there in 1927. So with an intimate, personal knowledge of all the Malay States as well as Penang, Malacca, Singapore, North Borneo, Brunei, Sarawak and Labuan, it is difficult for me to express adequately my appreciation of the statesmanship of Tunku Abdul Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew and their colleagues in bringing about this Federation.
The basic idea, of course, as has already been said, is not new. For many of us it is a dream come true. Thirty years ago, when I was serving as Governor of North Borneo, having been lent by the Colonial Office (perhaps as the person they could best spare) to the last of the chartered companies as their Governor, I remember an attempt we made to effect a union with Malaya, which ultimately failed because it did not win the approval of London. It was premature and it left out Sarawak, which, at that time, was an anachronism under the Brooke family next door to an anomaly under the chartered company with me as its Governor. In those days we dreamed of a greater Malaya, such as this Federation envisages, which would develop to the benefit of all its constituent parts and work in amity with its great neighbour, now the Republic of Indonesia. That would have been a largely Moslem bloc linking South-East Asia with the Pacific. Of course, we did not foresee at that time the problems which would overshadow that sort of dream.
I had a geographical vision of Malaya and Indonesia in the shape of a rather outstretched hand linking South-East Asia with the Pacific. I happen to know the area at both ends very well because I was, at a later period, the Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, where one looks north towards the Solomon Islands and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands up to Malaya, and east across the Pacific even to Pitcairn; and one was in charge of the islands scattered over 2 million square miles of sea, all of which have a kind of human sympathy with the people of Malaya. In the dim and distant future perhaps that, not so much a Federation as a mutual agreement will stretch even as widely as that. But events have moved in a different direction and one may still hope that the Indonesian Government of to-day will modify its rather hostile suspicions and recognise the benefits which will accrue to Bornean territories.
I am familiar, too, with the basis of the Philippine claim to North Borneo territory, based on an old nebulous claim of the Sultan of Sulu to a somewhat piratical hegemony which he and his predecessors claim to exercise, although the claim had very little substance in reality. But I do not wish to detain your Lordships with these memories. I am convinced that the linking of North Borneo and Sarawak with Malaya will be of great economic benefit to all
