Westminster Commentary

Homework

By CHARLES FLETCHER-COOKE, MP N0 one can quarrel, at any rate no one does quarrel, with Mr. Butler's management of our business. Come Thursday afternoon, and he is sincerely anxious to find time for debates on Railway Superannuitants, Death Penalty (Re- fusal of Reprieve), Inhumanity by Dr. Banda, Backstage Conditions, Perils of Nuclear Strategy or the Glasgow Electric Train Services. He recog- nises the great importance of all these matters. If only there were more time, he pleads; if only Members could agree on which subject to take, instead of cancelling each other out! The House's will should, of course, prevail. When the programme eventually emerges, it seems somehow to consist of the Second Reading of the Diplomatic Immunities Bill and the Report and Third Reading of the Sheriffs' Pensions (Scot- land) Bill, which no Member, except the Lord Advocate, wants at all. Yet week after week the operation goes like clockwork.

Mr. Butler, however, has been as good as his word in providing more and earlier time for de- bates on public expenditure. Two full days im- mediately after the Address were so allotted and another day in Christmas Week. Lord Hinching- brooke has had what he wanted and it is not the Government's fault if the impact of these debates was quite inconspicuous. Only one half- day out of the three produced any noticeable effect; the short debate on the report of the Public Accounts Committee dealing with guided missiles sent a tremor through Whitehall. Vice- Admiral Hughes-Hallett put the sorry story in a nutshell. 'Considering the cost of the three pro- jects together, we find that the Treasury was originally advised that the total expenditure would amount to some £4 million compared with the current estimate of £143 million. That is the alpha and omega of this story; £4 million at the beginning, £143 million at the end.'

Better still, believe it or not, was Mr. Harold Wilson. In his speech we discern the root of the matter, the real reason why this debate was good and the other two and a half days a grievous disappointment : When we read, as we have done in the past weeks, strictures about Members of Parliament

not attending to their duties, about Members'

laziness and all the rest of it, I would invite some of the newspapers concerned to study the 3,957 questions which were put by Members of the 'Public Accounts Committee in last year's Session and to recognise that these questions were not put without a good deal of understand- ing and hard work behind them.

Do these words of wisdom, Mr. Editor, strike an echo in your memory?* Do you recall publish- ing a Westminster Commentary of mine (on August 5) in which I listed part of our grinding legislative labour? And do you remember de- livering, in that same number, an editorial attack Upon my colleagues and myself for 'allowing themselves to be engulfed in a morass of detail to the exclusion of more important business'?

I pondered on this censure during the dog days (while the Duke of Omnium was bagging his record number of birds, an event accurately ._ prophesied in that very Commentary) and I came to the conclusion that I was right and that you were wrong. I now go further. I say that the effectiveness of any back-bencher depends directly upon the degree to which he engulfs him- self in detail. No greater weight can be given to a colleague than by the comment: 'he does his homework.' Even among those unutterably opposed to allowing Lord Benn to extend the privileges of the peerage in his claim for a new option, there is always heard a grudging but valuable and perhaps ultimately decisive recogni- tion that he has deeply done his homework.

Homework does not attract the press. The sneer, the orotund oration, all the wool in the minds of those who take refuge in 'the wider aspects of the problem,' these windy weapons of the past still provide a headline. But when de- livered to a chamber of thirty-five, which is the largest audience a back-bencher can hope for, they cause twenty-five to run for cover.

Of course it is another world for the spokes- man of the Government. Winding up a big debate before 400 pairs of critical ears, he must con- descend to some airs and graces. Unfortunately, by the time he has reached this exalted state, he has only too often allowed such arts to atrophy. The Lord Privy Seal concluded the Defence debate as if he was carefully checking his laundry list. Thus he was greeted, not with the howls of the Opposition, which is the appropriate reaction at that time of night, but with a rising susurration of private chats.

Some Ministers, it is true, adopt as of set pur- pose a downbeat technique. Viscount Stuart of Findhorn, when Secretary for Scotland, beat down and down, while the private chats rose up and up. But where is he now? Over the shav- ing glass of the Lord Privy Seal should be printed the reminder: 'Be Orotund!' He is probably destined for the top. Yet for lack of orotundity he too might find himself at Findhorn.

But all this fancy front-bench style is nothing to our purpose. For the common ruck, it is just a question of hard sledding. What made the first two of the three allotted days so disappointing was the absence of any signs of hard sledding.

The critics had simply not prepared for their big chance. All of which brings me directly, though not immediately obviously, to Mr. Frank Sieverts. While sweating it out at the American Bar Convention, I met Mr. Sieverts, a former Rhodes Scholar and a fine economist. He is Legislative Assistant to Senator Proxmire of Wisconsin. He conducts all the Senator's research and deals with all his policy problems. It is as though the Senator has acquired a second brain. The other ninety-nine senators also have their Legislative Assistants, all provided for them—and this is the point—out of public funds. Such power enables members of Congress to exercise really effective control over the Administration.

At Westminster, there is a handful of MPs who have leisure enough to do their own re- search, and another handful rich enough to employ expert assistants. A third handful has neither leisure nor money, but do their home- work because it is in their Wood. It is a killing business, an unequal struggle of the individual pitting himself, in a highly technical field, against all the resources of the bureaucracy. Whichever handful these few Members fall into, they are soon spotted and, if of the ruling party, removed into the Government; see, for example, that pair of dedicated baronets, Joseph and Boyle.

For the rest, they rely, if at all, on the research of trade associations, trade unions or other out- side bodies, confined to `pressure' topics and not highly effective when propounded by a Member, who must declare an interest and who knows that the fruits of the research have already reached Whitehall by a more direct route.

My conclusion is that the financial critics were asking Mr. Butler for the wrong thing. They demanded debating time. They have got their time and now they don't know how to use it. What they should have sought was Mr. Frank Sieverts.

But we must settle for the possible. We can hope that the Public Accounts Committee and other similar bodies which can collectively call upon expert assistance and research will continue to spread their new-found wings. No longer is it true, as stated by Professor Berriedale Keith, that Parliament itself treats the Reports of the Com- mittee with indifference born of the reluctance of any Member of Parliament to economise. Efforts to insist on discussion of the Committee's Reports have failed to achieve success.' Let Mr. Butler's gift be used for such discussions, for the reports are the distillation of great labour.

When Miss Joan Sutherland was asked recently for the secret of her success, she replied with the one word 'Work.' This is the answer which is always given by anyone who has ever done anything worth doing. And work, let me repeat, Mr. Editor, is 'a morass of detail.'

*They do. See leading article on page 4. 'Strange to think that but for a trick ot evolution they might be ruhni; the Earth and not us. . „