Political Commentary
Eric, or Very Little
Ferdinand Mount
Mr Eric Varley may yet get away with it. If anyone is sent to the Tower, it won't be him. The Select Committee's ultimatum that the chairman of the British Steel Corporation hand over his quarterly figures is less menacing than it sounds; these figures are already past history; it is BSC's options and forecasts that are still red-hot. The more we see of Sir Charles Villiers in the headlines, the less we see of the Industry Secretary. And the longer the government can hold out against a full-dress Commons debate on steel, the less chance there is of any Labour MP voting with the Tories to humiliate Mr Varley. BSC is in a terrible mess. But then nationalised industries are expected to fail. Indeed, a Labour government was returned in 1974 partly in order to help the steel industry to fail. Labour's programme, 1973 contained a promise to 'freeze and then reconsider all plans for closures and redundancies'. Throughout his ordeal, Mr Varley clutches Labour's programme, 1973 with the knuckles of a drowning man — or with one set of knuckles at any rate. With the other hand, he jabs this little red book (well, medium-sized orange pamphlet), he pats it, he slaps it, he does everything but kiss it. Figures fly about the House of Commons and the subsequent press conference — will it be £366 million that the BSC will lose this year, or £450 million or £520 million? The figures are uncertain, says Mr Varley. It's like aiming at a moving target, a senior BSC man tells me. Look, the estimate is already out of date. All of which goes to demonstrate the great and glorious truth that nobody really cares which of these astronomical figures BSC is really losing. The only thing that excites people is the suggestion that somebody was covering up the figures.
There was no cover-up, Mr Varley insists. He was co-operative and courteous to the committee at all times. Why, on one occa sion, he had to wait outside their door for twenty-five minutes because the committee couldn't summon a quorum. Indeed, he mentions this lost twenty-five minutes so often that one begins to blush for the committee's solecism. One feels as bad as if one had heard that Louis XIV had been kept waiting for his carriage by a couple of AWOL coachmen. However, on the later occasion when everyone did turn up, I can not say that I was bowled over by Mr Varley's candour. Co-operative like a clam, he was. He protests that they never asked him the right questions and that he is prepared to go back to the committee. It seems hardly worth it in view of the fact that he also thinks that he has already complied with all the usual procedures in dealing with the Select Committee. If so, the usual procedures appear to amount to : never volunteer any information, never answer a question if you can evade it, and say as few words as possible. As a backbencher Mr Varley himself had sat on the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries. Did he think select Committees in general received enough information? It was for the House of Commons to decide. Get along with you, blabbermouth. The committee's demand for all the papers is of great importance. It is the first time in living memory that a select committee has refused to accept the customary limits under which it operates and has dared to argue that its powers to send for persons and papers must be taken literally.
The response of the House so far has been highly revealing: initially, wild excitement and expressions of outrage on all sides, which inevitably draw in the opposition front bench. This unnerves outraged Labour MPs. Mr Varley thumps his medium-sized orange pamphlet to recall them to their election pledges. The socalled cover-up is dismissed as a purely 'procedural' matter of concern only to Erskine May nuts. Gradually, the two sides polarise in the familiar way. Outrage cools and, although it may still be reheated if a debate is held soon, the process has gone far enough to demonstrate how and why the House as a whole is unlikely ever to act as an effective scrutineer of the government sector — because the performance of that sector is so intimately connected with the political fortunes of the government.
And so it should be, says Mr Michael Foot. The Leader of the House is the scourge of uppity Select Committees. People have expressed surprise that Mr Foot, a 'progressive', should turn up in the 'reactionary' camp on this issue. It has even been suggested that he is inconsistent, that he has fallen away from his old principles, that the purity of his democratic ideals has been tinged by the world's slow stain. Not a bit of it.
Mr Foot thinks as he always thought. And what he thinks was never more clearly shown than in his exuberant defence of party politics in last week's Spectator. For Mr Foot, party is the sublime engine of principle. The ultimate numbskullery is the Namierite 'attempt to reduce all politics to the level of family connections and corruptionist intrigue.' Party is not a mere ganging up for advantage; it is ideology mobilised, the church militant.
The glory of Parliament in Mr Foot's eyes is not that it is a forum for scrutiny, criticism and correction of laws and ministers but that it is a cockpit of history in which great forces clash. A select committee which goes beyond its allotted modest role is attempting to interpose its body in the real conflict, much in the manner that Lytton Strachey told the Conscientious Objection Tribunal that if he saw a German soldier attempting to rape his sister he would try and interpose himself between them. Such intrusions are bad enough from outsiders like judges or coalition-mongering journalists, but they are more dangerous still when they infect your own troops. Labour MPs, in Mr Denis Skinner's phrase, were not sent there to join forces with the Tories but 'to save the jobs of steelmen up and down the country'. For a young Labour MP to sit on a select committee, therefore, is another form of the insidious temptation which drew Ramsay MacDonald into the embrace of marchionesses; the ambience seduces him from his loyalties; he forgets the folk from whence he came; he goes soft.
There is something in this. Membership of a select committee — and particularly of the committee on nationalised industries — is bound to alter the perspective of any sentient Labour MP. It is simply the activity of inquisition. The business of combining with MPs of other parties to put a sustained series of questions to a witness creates what Marxists might call a common critical perspective.
This independent critical inquisition is essential in a country in which the government owns, controls or leans on more and more things. There is a natural alliance between party and bureaucracy, between mobilised ideology and immobile bureaucracy. This is a familiar problem in Communist-governed countries, but in Britain we have not yet come to grips with the fact that the interests of party and bureaucracy do coincide. Both elements flourish under the same conditions: secrecy, cohesion and freedom from interference. Solidarity is a characteristic of bureaucracies as well as of political parties. The principal feature of nationalisation has been the attempt by the ideological-bureaucratic complex to extend its unbroken front to take in and protect its newly acquired territories from public scrutiny, let alone public control.
Under the existing set-up the select committee is the only available siege engine. There is no other body which has the legal power and the political authority to breach the wall. The Tory alternative of setting each corporation profit targets and then leaving it to manage itself can never be a total answer. The government is bound to be drawn in again and again, not only on questions of employment but also on questions of monopoly, pricing, tariffs and major investment. And these interventions create continuing links which must be subjected to continuous scrutiny. Most governments, like most shellfish, do not open themselves. They have to be prised open.
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