SIR,--Lord Radcliffe attacks the British confusion between the executive and
the legislature and com- pares it unfavourably with the American separation of powers. But surely the founders of the American constitu- tion drew their inspiration from Montesquieu. And Montesquieu based his case for the separation on a misunderstanding of the British Constitution which he revered and which has changed little in essence or in practice since his day. Also, the three examples which spring to my mind where Congress has acted independently of the Administration—the refusal to ratify the League of Nations. prohibition and the delays in civil rights legislation—do not say much for the separation of powers. In any case. 1 doubt whether Lord Radcliffe really wants us to imitate the Americans, say, by having committees of MPs on the Congressional model. For he talks so woefully of 'a flux of changing opinions, gradually eroding by criticism the rock of its institutions' that he would appear to be against all radical change. I suspect that he would regard as anarchy Professor Popper's idea of an Open Society—for which indeed 'The Dissolving Society' is but a pejorative synonym. In place of the Dissolving Society, he offers ys only the Frozen Society. Like many elderly men, he seeps to be too much alarmed by vulgar talk of 'dyttamism.' The'real point is that very little actually happens. Take the reform of Parliament. At every election, we are told that hundreds of impatient young MPs have been elected and that subsequently they have been stifled by Parliament's archaic procedures. Their protests have been met with sympathy and Select Committees —the pane"' et circetzses of the Establishment. But, of course, no action is taken. In science, technology and the arts. Lord Rad- cliffe's remarks sound even more bizarre. For these activities are meaningless without change and innovation. Attempts by the authorities to impose new writing or to impose a gimcrack science of genetics are in the end doomed to failure. Lord Radcliffe attributes our ills to this appalling appetite for change, but is it not at least possible that it is not the appetite which has put us in such a poor way but the fact that it has not been satisfied? That there has been too little change rather than too much? The puzzle remains why, after so many Royal Commissions so doughtily chaired, Lord Radcliffe should have joined the gloomiest of all— the self-appointed Royal Commission on the State of the Nation. Has he perhaps sat in so many chairs that the stuffing has entered his soul?
FF.RD1NAND MOUNT
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