TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CAB WET SECRETARIAT.
MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S answer to the very weighty criticisms of the Cabinet Secretariat which were made in the House of Commons on Tuesday was far from satisfactory. We remain more convinced than we were when we wrote on the subject last week that the Secretariat is a danger. If the House of Commons does its duty it will watch this unnecessary and expensive innovation most jealously. Mr. Lloyd George professed to believe that no future Government could get on without the Secretariat. We take leave to disagree. If the next Government should be loyal to the traditions of our constitutional practice they will at once abolish the Secretariat. The comparative smallness of the Government majority on Tuesday- 205 votes to 111—was a sign that even in the present House of Commons there is no strong belief in the Secre- tariat, but rather the reverse.
' The Secretariat has a staff of 114 persons and in the current financial year costs £32,048. The Secretary is paid E3,000 a year, the principal Assistant Secretary £1,500, and three Assistant Secretaries /1,000 each. There are, besides three principals, an editor, a clerk who helps the editor, an accountant, a shorthand writer, four higher-grade clerks, two administrative assistants, twenty-two ordinary clerks, thirty-nine temporary clerks, twenty messengers, and fourteen charwomen. Sir Donald Maclean pointed out that although the staff in 1919-20 had consisted of only 19 persons it had grown since then to 114. The Secretariat came into being—such was the excuse—for the special purposes of the War, when the business of the Government was undoubtedly multifarious and largely novel. But here we are back in the times of peace and the Secretariat, so far from shrinking, has grown. The real reason for its continuance is that Mr. Lloyd George is in love with bureaucracy. He may think that he is not ; he gives all kinds of reasons why the Secretariat is necessary, and probably he believes them to be true ; but taken in the mass they do not approach in potency the one simple fact that Mr. Lloyd George is a victim of the bureaucratic spirit: The nation, on the other hand, is entirely out of love with bureaucracy, for during and since the War it has seen what bureaucracy means. If, therefore, Mr. Lloyd George persists either in opposing the popular will or in misinterpreting it—believing that the people want one thing when really they want quite another—his end is certain. It is a commonplace in life that the average man cannot help living up to his income. He commits himself in numerous directions because he can just afford to do so, but when his income dwindles he finds that it is extra- ordinarily difficult, and he may even call it impossible, to cut off anything to which he has become accustomed. Everything has become "necessary." Mr. Lloyd George is like that man. The Secretariat was, of course, a great convenience to him during the War, and it has probably been a still greater convenience to him since, as with the help of it he has personally conducted our foreign policy at conferences here, there, and everywhere in Europe. But all the time the Secretariat is not necessary, and those who have never used it would be able to get on perfectly well without it.
The argument that the Secretariat has not great political power in the making is contrary to experience. The present Secretaries of State developed gradually out of the simple Secretaries who were originally the mere conveyers of decisions when the Privy Council was the Executive of the nation. The officials of the Secretariat, if the Secre- tariat should continue, would certainly not stagnate ; they would be subject to the universal law of constitutional growth • they would turn into something else. The caterpillar would become a moth. Considering the func- tions which Mr. Lloyd George attributed to them on Tuesday, we are forced to the conclusion that they start life in a fair way to supersede the heads of the great Departments. Mr. Lloyd George said that the great value of the Secre- tariat was that it was composed of experts. But why experts ? Are not the staffs of the Departments experts ? If they are not, what are they there for ? And is there room for double rows of experts ? No doubt Mr. Lloyd George is quite right in regarding the members of the Secretariat as experts. The most important members are seconded for the purpose from the Departments. They come to the Secretariat already full of knowledge. That is really the danger. They are invested with dignity and authority by being in constant contact with the Cabinet, and especially with the Prime Minister himself, and then they convey decisions and explanations to the Depart- ments. They become something a little higher than any- body who remains in a Department without all this adventitious glorification. Obviously, the Secretariat is more than a mere secretarial body. Even a lover of bureaucracy like Mr. Lloyd George would not keep up an institution costing over £30,000 to write down the bare decisions taken at Cabinet meetings.
Mr. Lloyd George's argument that the press of Cabinet work has become so great that the Secretariat is indis- pensable carries its own condemnation. Within recent years several new Departments have been created to meet new needs. They are the people who should do the work. If the Cabinet finds that the work is too much for it, that only means that there is over-centralization—one of the worst of all administrative defects. If Mr. Lloyd George's reasoning were sound, a prosperous industrial company that was increasing its turnover by more than 100 per cent. every year would continually have a larger Board of Directors. But every competent controller of affairs would laugh at such an idea. He would, indeed, recognize the need for increasing his number of clerks and expanding his personnel downwards in all directions, but the directing brains of the company would remain few and select. The final and strongest point against Mr. Lloyd George, however, is that the Secretariat does not bring us the blessings which Mr. Lloyd George says actually exist. We freely admit the ability and the high sense of public service of the chief members of the Secretariat. But are even they able to bring coherence to the policy of the Government ? Evidently they are not. We cannot recall a time when policy was as shifting and as incalculable as it is now. It is never the same from day to day. There are unceasing adaptations, accommodations, surrenders. The Govern- ment say that they will never consent to something or other and within a few days they consent. The Secretariat, we are told, is necessary to bring clarity to the work of the Government, but what we see is not clarity but confusion. Mr. Lloyd George prophesied that the next Government would certainly require the services of the Secretariat, and he expressed the opinion that a continuous record of policy such as would be supplied by the Cabinet Minutes would be very useful. Here is another matter in which the apology for the Secretariat defeated itself. It would surely be intolerable that all the Cabinet secrets of one Government should be placed at the disposal of the next. In trying to calm the fears that arose at this prospect, Mr. Lloyd George assured Lord Robert Cecil that the "individual views" of Cabinet Ministers were never recorded in the Minutes—only " decisions " were recorded. But if that be so, what need remains for the Secretariat ? Surely some member of the Cabinet could be trusted to jot down in ten or twenty lines the decisions reached. • The record could then be countersigned by the Cabinet, or by the Prime Minister acting on behalf of the Cabinet, when the Minute had been read out. The truth is that Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Chamberlain impaled themselves on the dilemma. If the Secretariat discharges great functions and is valued for its expert work it is a very formidable innovation, which threatens not only the position but the efficiency of the Departments. If it does not discharge great functions but merely writes down in a colourless way decisions which may be fairly open to the inspection of successive Cabinets, it is obviously not required.
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