Peter Shore's rule of silence
Leo Abse
Is Peter Shore, our Secretary of State for the Environment, now in purdah? The saga of the Windscale Inquiry is completed: a few days ago there landed upon the Minister's desk the report of the appointed inspectors, a secret document, perhaps the most fateful of our generation, of which the nation knows nothing excepting that it is composed of 450 paragraphs, five annexes and 1500 accompanying documents.
Claiming that a planning application in the Lake District for the building of a re Processing plant, spinning off plutonium, the deadliest material known to man, must be governed by the same procedures and rules as a planning application for a fish and chip shop in Wigan, the departmental bureaucrats have declared that the Minister must not discuss the report and its recommendations with any MP, back-bencher or cabinet minister.
The Minister, they claim, is now metamorphosed from politician to judge, and, in isolation, is required in his quasijudicial capacity to exclude Parliament totally from the decision-making process; although the result could be the penultimate step to a plutonium economy utterly incompatible with the continued existence of our civil liberties, still the decision must be taken only by the lonely Peter Shore. And although a decision to proceed with the re-processing plant would be an affront to President Carter who, fearful of the uncontrolled nuclear weapon capability that would result from further re-processing facilities, has halted his own recycling programme and appealed to us to do likewise, nevertheless not a word must pass on the report to David Owen, our Foreign Secretary.
If by one iota Shore departs from the planning conventions, the bureaucrats, who have this week been scurrying to and from their lawyers, are warning he will be placing himself in the same jeopardy as would a Judge who, after counsel for prosecution and defence had completed their summaries, listened in their absence to the view of others before making his judgement. The officials of the Department of the Environment are panic-stricken that publication of the Windscale Report and a subsequent debate in the Commons would, whatever the ultimate decision, bring the minister into the courts, challenged either by the nuclear industry or the ecological lobby claiming that the Secretary of State's decision was tainted by a Commons debate.
Precedents and conventions are all on the Side of the civil servants. If objections to a bypass lead to a public inquiry, no importuning, after the inquiry is closed, is formally permitted to an MP or anyone else in advance of the minister's decision. If a proposal is made to enlarge a new town and objections to the proposed extension lead to a completed public inquiry, the local MPs know that, in theory, their lobbying to the minister must cease for the minister there after affects to be a deaf man; if a reor ganisation scheme of secondary schools is proposed by a county authority, then after an announced date no further objections can be received, and the minister is required to keep the Commons at arm's length, and not to discuss the merits of the scheme until he has finally adjudicated on the issues.
Cynics, with justification, may doubt the purity of many of these quasi-judicial deci sions. Ministers are gregarious creatures with sensitive political antennae: and they jostle with MPs in the lobby's bars, and 'tea-rooms, and eat and drink regularly with them in the Member's dining-room. They are ill-equipped to put on judge's robes and withdraw to insulated judge's chambers: and whatever the formal conventions, lawyers who appear at public inquiries for months on end, marshalling evidence for or against a proposal, have learnt to accept privately that political considerations rather than their forensic skills often determine the result. But no civil servant would publicly admit to such heresy. At all costs the creation of a dangerous precedent by allow ing a presumptuous Commons to see and debate the Windscale Report and recom mendations must be avoided: even although the Commons would be deliberately excluded from shaping a decision vitally affecting at the least the future of our economy, and, at the most, the future of peace and the lives of the next generation, still the existing planning procedures must be upheld.
The Minister is of course embarrassed: he is impaled upon a decision not of his making, that the destiny of Britain was intended to be decided by a handful of local coun cillors on a planning subcommittee of the Cumberland County Council when they adjudicated upon an application from Brit ish Nuclear Fuels for an extension of their Windscale plant. Public opinion, and Peter Shore's initiative, thwarted such a folly. The Minister called in the application, appointed a sophisticated judge and two scientific experts to conduct the inquiry, and rightly directed that all considerations, not simply planning ones, and including the national consideration, must be considered by the inspectors. But the inquiry and the report remain boxed in within the con ventional planning procedures: and, if the House of Commons is passive and pliant, the great national policy decision to which the judge was directed to give his attention will be taken by Peter Shore, and him alone. Even Clem Attlee shared his A-bomb decision with a few members of his Cabinet: yet this present awesome decision, which because it could lead to nuclear weapon proliferation is no less fraught with hazards, is to be withdrawn from both Cabinet and the House.
But will the legislature acquiesce in this bizarre proposition? There have always been a handful of backbenchers who have mocked at the doctrine preached by cowardly academic MPs who, corroborating their own lack of will and submission to all father-surrogates, absurdly overestimate the power of the executive and masochistically stress their own impotence. In seasons of minority governments, however, even the most timid of backbenchers finds he can test his virility and suffer no terrible retribution. The House, not the executive, determined there was to be a full inquiry into the scandals of the Crown Agents; select committees challenge any executive refusal to appear before them with full evidence; even the Devolution Bill guillotine becomes an ineffective instrument, with the legislature becoming a victim of its own creation.
This is a moment when backbenchers revel, and demoralised whips cringe. Already 120 MPs of all parties, including former Foreign Minister Michael Stewart and former Environmental Secretary of State Peter Walker, are demanding, in a motion, publication of the Windscale report and a full parliamentary debate before Shore takes the decision. And inside the Parliamentary Labour Party the Environmental Minister, under pressure, has pleaded for time to consider the dilemma and pledges himself to return shortly with a view for the party's consideration.
Predictably, faced with growing parliamentary disquiet, within the last few days, the most powerful lobby in Britain has made a bid to hustle the minister into a speedy decision. 'In my political life,' Tony Benn, the Energy Minister, recently declared, 'I have never known such a well organised, scientific, industrial and techni cal lobby as the nuclear power lobby. It is not so much the Friends of the Earth as what Eisenhower might have called the nuc lear industrial complex of which I am aware as a minister'. Con Allday, managing director of the state owned British Nuclear Fuels, speaking for that lobby, with the all-party motion clearly in his mind, attacked what he described as 'a well orchestrated public campaign' aimed at destroying the nuclear industry. Such extravagance will not endear him to parliamentarians: nor will many find persuasive his plea that further debate must cease because of promises made to . his Japanese customers. Decisions that would make Britain the nuclear dustbin for Japanese industry are not to be taken hurriedly.
And would not a hurried decision be in flagrant defiance, not of Japanese• businessmen, but, far more important, of our international commitments? At the last
Downing Street summit President Carter called for an international fuel cycle evaluation to investigate alternative nuclear fuel cycles.
The programme, expected to be completed in eighteen months' time, includes the making of a new assessment of the availability of uranium supplies throughout the world and may put in question the need for any early commitment to the Windscale scheme. Is this what the nuclear industry now fears? And is it endeavouring to pre-empt the international report? The British atomic industry has a record of massive achievements, and major errors. Too often it seems to present the view that either we have a civilised society with atomic energy consumption or we go back to the tent and candle: the Commons does not believe these are the alternatives. But the worst blunder the industry could now make would be to encourage the bureaucrats and lawyers of the Department of Environment in their bid to gag Parliament. At Westminster these days even the sheep are lions, as Mr AlIday will shortly be discovering.
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