The Prime Minister and his colleagues, as the ex-Foreign Secretary has almost confessed to-day, had a kind of Moral Crisis.

The world is confronted with a Moral Crisis.

The only observation which I will permit myself on the speech of the hon. Member for Keighley (Mr. Ivor Thomas) is that if the Moral Crisis, through which he seems to be passing, has got him into such a psychiatric state that it can only be satisfied by self-flagellation, I wish he would not undertake his hobby in public, where it turns other people's stomachs over.

The Times leader on the Moral Crisis was right.

As I said at the United Nations last week to those who stayed to listen, quoting from Dante,The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who are neutral in a Moral Crisis.

] and would any hon. Member have a maiden neutral in a Moral Crisis?

I draw courage from the words of another great Northerner, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who not once but twice quoted the authority of Dante:The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who are neutral in a Moral Crisis".

It is meeting a Moral Crisis not by negative proscriptions but by seeking to provide postive good for people's minds and thoughts.

In respect of all those matters, the nation is facing a Moral Crisis.

According to her, those are traditional values of British life which have been undermined by state intervention to a point of Moral Crisis.

Dante wrote:The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a time of Moral Crisis preserve their neutrality.

As the noble Lord, Lord Sawyer, emphasised, that can create a sense of gross imbalances and, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, it can bring about a sense of Moral Crisis.

Indeed, as one professor wrote to me recently: "there should in my view be much more condemnation of academic leaders for failing to assail this movement - Dante on the hottest places in hell being reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in time of Great Moral Crisis comes to mind".