The night of the plastic knives
POLITICAL COMMENTARY ALAN WATKINS
It was, one might say, the night of the plastic knives. (I am thinking of the kind with serrated edges which British Rail supply to cut, or rather to fail to cut, their pork pies.) Certainly Mr Harold Wilson's casting, with his own hand, of seven parliamentary private secretaries into the outermost darkness of the back benches has aroused more hilarity than alarm. And yet the affair has its serious side. So far, those who have taken it seriously have tended to contrast the fate of the seven abstaining PPSS with that of the thirty-six Labour MPS who, in the Common Market debate, actually voted against the Government. The latter will, it appears, live to vote against the Government another day. This, it was being said at Westminster, only goes to show what an unjust world it is.
The comparison is a perfectly fair and valid one to make. In this article, however, I should like to take the affair of the PPSS as the starting point of a discussion not so much of party discipline as of collective responsibility. To put the matter differently, the real contrast is, not between the seven PPSS and the thirty-six MPS, but between the seven PPSS and the eight Cabinet ministers—we all know their identities by now —who are sceptical about, or actively hostile to, the Common Market.
The principle (of collective responsibility),' said Mr Wilson in the House of Commons on 24 April 1951, 'requires from each minister a full and wholehearted acceptance of the measures decided upon by the Cabinet and of the policies underlying them.' Sir Ivor Jennings concurs. 'Cabinet ministers,' he writes, 'are expected not merely not to oppose a Cabinet decision but also to support it.' The situation was put perhaps more realistically, and certainly more racily, by Lord Melbourne. The occasion was a Cabinet meeting on the Corn Laws. 'Bye the bye,' Melbourne is reported to have said, 'there is one thing we haven't agreed upon, which is, what are we to say? Is it to make our corn dearer, or cheaper, or to make the price steady? I don't care which: but we had better all be in the same story.'
Over the Common Market, however—which provides several instructive points of com- parison and contrast with the Corn Laws— ministers do not all tell the same story. Cer- tainly they do not all give the same degree of support to the British application to join. There is, to put it at its lowest, a difference of emphasis between, say, Mr George Brown and Mr Fred Peart. Does this mean that the current Cabinet situation over the Common Market is therefore unconstitutional or otherwise improper? Hardly. Despite the quotations from Sir Ivor Jennings and Mr Wilson given above, Cabinets have in practice rarely been united over every aspect of policy.
For example, Churchill, who was then a free trader, sat in Baldwin's protectionist Cabinet of 1925-9. Woman's suffrage was a notable cause of open Cabinet dissension. Sir Austen Cham- berlain actually voted against a suffrage measure when he was a member of the Cabinet. And Lord Birkenhead made no secret of his opposi- tion to the Equal Franchise Bill, even though he was proposing it to the House of Lords. 'I have,' said Birkenhead, 'been a member of the Cabinet with a very slight interruption for thirteen years, and I can hardly recall a single measure of first-class importance on which all members of the Cabinet had precisely the same views . . . I have spent nearly the whole of my political life in giving wise advice to my fellow- countrymen, which they have almost invariably disregarded, and if I had resigned every time that my wise and advantageous advice was re- jected I should seldom, indeed, during that critical period, have been in office.'
Nor is it simply a matter of Cabinets failing to agree in the past. As circumstances have changed, so has the need for collective responsi- bility diminished. The doctrine grew up when Cabinets were small, when they really were coalitions both of ideas and of interests, and when they actually took collective de- cisions.
As Mr P. J. Madgwick puts it in a valuable essay entitled 'Resignations' in the Winter issue of Parliamentary Affairs (from which many illustrations given in this piece are taken): 'The modern Cabinet has been, so to speak, pre- processed in unity before its formation, then its decision-making is compartmentalised. The in- dividual member of the Cabinet does not feel so intimately involved, so operationally com- mitted to every decision of the Cabinet. In con- sequence, the convention (of collective responsi- bility), in so far as it may lead to resignations, hardly now applies in practice for any member of the Cabinet over the full range of Cabinet policy.'
And yet, having said all this, having conceded that there is nothing necessarily wrong in a Cabinet disagreeing among themselves, is there still not something a little odd about the situa- tion over the Common Market? First, what is involved is a major item of policy. Secondly, the dissentients number not one or two but over a third of the Cabinet. Indeed, it is the con- junction of these two facts which makes the current situation so unusual. It is unusual be- cause resignation, or the threat of resignation, might have had, and might still have, some political effect.
The solitary resigner, as we know, accom- plishes little except gain some short-lived pub- licity for himself. This is almost a law of British politics. It is as true of Mr Frank Cousins as it was of Lord Randolph Churchill. Sometimes the resigning minister is taken back into the Government, sometimes not: irrespective of whether this happens, the resignation rarely
affects the conduct and policy of the Cabinet. But eight ministers are a different matter. It will be recalled that it was the resignation of eight ministers which brought down the Govern- ment in 1931, though it may also be recalled that the Prime Minister stayed on to head a National Government.
Yet despite the strong position in which the Common Market dissentients found themselves a few weeks ago, it does not seem that any one of these threatened resignation. The only threat came from Mr Brown, who is always doing it. And this reticence was not altogether surprising. For one thing, the dissentients are not united about the reasons for their opposition to the Market : Mrs. Barbara Castle, for instance, does not think in precisely the same way as Mr Herbert Bowden, nor Mr Denis Healey in the same way as Mr William Ross. For another thing, a leader is lacking: there is no one on the anti-Market side remotely comparable to Mr Brown. Above all—and to put the situation at its simplest—the dissentients do not want to resign: not only do they enjoy being ministers, but they are, in the main, admirers of Mr Wilson, whether of long standing or of more recent conversion.
None of the Common Market dissentients can be blamed for not resigning. As Mr Madg- wick says in his article: 'Resignation is not the only path of honour. It may be equally honour- able to stay and fight again.' And this, as far as can be gathered, is exactly what Ministers such as Mr Peart and Mr Douglas Jay intend to do, assuming that, following General de Gaulle's press conference, they need to do any- thing. Their argument is that they have far more chance of influencing events from inside the Cabinet than from outside it.
And at the moment it seems that they, and others who think like them, have made the right calculation. General de Gaulle has as good as said No once again. Nor, judging by the opinion polls, are the British people themselves over- enthusiastic about the prospect of Europe. They can hardly be blamed for this. A rise in the level of food prices of around 15 per cent, with the price of butter doubled, is not exactly vote- catching stuff. Moreover, Mr Wilson himself has not helped matters: when he is not being technical and tedious—boring for England, as it were—he is being discouraging, with much talk of the way ahead being hard, and so forth. After dark predictions of this kind, it is not unnatural for the voters to ask why we are bothering to go into Europe anyway.
It is, I believe, entirely proper and healthy that sentiments of this nature should continue to find expression inside the Cabinet. For the case in favour of the Market has been put everywhere; the case against has scarcely been heard, except from the General. A rigorous interpretation of collective responsibility, with the dissentient ministers either resigning voluntarily or being compelled to resign, would make the anti- Market case even more faintly audible. (This, of course, is to assume that the Government could survive eight resignations.) There are, to be sure, those who would be extremely happy if the ministers did go. According to this view, it is the function of politicians, and particularly of ministers, `to lead.' Yet politicians should not only lead but embody real divisions of interest and opinion that exist in the country. The divisions over the Market are not ade- quately expressed either by the press or in the official policies of the three parties. It is per- fectly fitting that they should continue to be expressed inside the Cabinet.
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