His opinion was, that the Government ought to have interfered in Portugal as long ago as the month of January last, and that they should not have hold themselves until matters had reached a Crisis in April.

There was no more a Crisis in April, 1950, than there is a crisis today.

I come to some of the legitimate doubts and anxieties that people in the country have argued about from the beginning of the Crisis in April.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made a personal, and valuable, intervention in support of the authority of the United Nations, when the peace plan faced an early Crisis in April.

Interestingly, when we recently had the opportunity to challenge the Secretary of State for Health, I asked him why it had taken him three and half years to announce the plan and whether it was as a result of the Crisis in April.

In that regard, it is worth noting that with the adoption of the17 May set of changes, which I outlined earlier, the maximum concentration of ash designated as being consistent with safe flying has risen by a factor of 20 since the decisions that were made at the start of the Crisis in April.