It is possible that the war might go on for many years before we got peace. You could create a European desert and call it peace, and give it the per… - Sydney Silverman

It seems to me that this problem of the distressed areas cannot be dealt with as though it were a problem existing by itself and divorced from the whole of the economic and social complex of affairs out of which it arises. I have heard during this Debate and during the Debates that have preceded it in the past week many gibes at this party because, as was alleged, it has refrained from endeavouring to apply its Socialistic faith to the problems that we were discussing. Therefore, I hope the House will not think me too doctrinaire or dogmatic if I endeavour to say how, in my view, those Socialistic ideas and principles, for which I and my friends stand and work, are the only principles which have any relevance to the problems which the House is discussing on this Motion.
I am bound to say that, listening to the jibes during the past week and coming here for the first time straight from the open air and light which seem to come so rarely in this Chamber, either physically or otherwise, I felt a sense of deepening gloom as speaker after speaker from the Government Benches, beginning with the Prime Minister, made speech after speech the burden of which was, so far as I could see, purely a confession of impotence—they could not do anything, this course will not do, that measure will not do, no grand schemes will be of any effect and no particular schemes are worth pressing very hard.

It may be that you hold the view that no kind of peace is possible unless the Nazi regime in Germany is removed. If that is one of the things you regard as essential, say so by all means; but do not stop there. You have to say what you would do then. Suppose that the Nazi regime went, suppose that the abnoxious individual went, what then would you propose?

I think it is true to say that the people of this country have no enthusiasm for this or for any war, but they would not be willing, in the main, now that the war has started, to let it end on such terms as would restore the world to the position in which it was —or to anything like that position— before we started. It was a position in which we were continually stumbling along from one crisis to the next, never knowing what was to happen, and without any kind of order, stability or security. I think the people of this country would not go back to that now, and that they are prepared to fight until some kind of order, based on stability and justice can be secured.