British-Soviet Friendship Society. Davies's deep roots in the Labour movement, and his large base of local support, saved him from a similar fate. In June 1953, he was attacked by Will Lawther, the NUM president, for defying the Labour Party's position and supporting the Soviet claim that a workers' rising in East Germany had been orchestrated by "a CIA-sponsored West-German pro-fascist organisation". Lawther demanded that the local Merthyr Tydfil party deselect Davies as their parliamentary candidate, but they stood firm. Davies found himself again at odds with his party, over the issue of Welsh self-government. He had championed this cause for many years, to the annoyance of Labour's Welsh Regional Council. In May 1954, he offered proposals for a Welsh parliament that were rejected by the Regional Council and by the South Wales Area conference of the NUM. Davies persevered, and on 4 March 1955 introduced in the House of Commons a private member's bill proposing self-government for Wales on the basis of the aborted 1914 act that would have granted home rule to Ireland. Davies claimed to have received thousands of messages of support for his measure, from all parts of Wales, but in the House he could only muster 14 votes in favour. Undeterred, he told MPs: "There is a movement in Wales, an uprising, as it were, that will not only support the bill but will continue to insist upon it until Wales is represented in the United Kingdom as something more than a mere region." According to Griffiths, when Soviet troops suppressed the Hungarian uprising in October 1956, Davies was troubled, but refused to join in the general censure lest this give comfort to the enemies of socialism. He was to be equally silent during and after the events of the Prague Spring of 1968—in sharp contrast to his condemnation of the "criminally dangerous and irresponsible heroics" of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. In 1961, at the request of the Labour Party leadership, Davies was one of 25 Labour MPs and party members investigated by the British security services as a possible Communist Party member. The MI5 report stated that there was evidence to indicate that Davies, "if not of the Party ... is at least very close to it indeed". Aberfan Davies's Merthyr constituency included the mining village of Aberfan, situated a few miles south of Merthyr Tydfil. On