Shadow Ministries
Everyone—except those in a position to do something about it—agrees that the reform of Parliament, and in particular the growth of specialist, professionally staffed, parliamentary committees, is a pressing need if we are ever to achieve an informed public debate on the in- creasingly complex major issues of the day. Meanwhile, we have to do the best we can with one or two groups of independent outside experts, in close touch with the official machine, who make it their business to study current problems and to discuss, freely and on a non- partisan basis, the real issues involved. Without Chatham House, the Institute of Strategic Studies, and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, public understanding of what is at stake in overseas policy, defence policy and economic policy would be even poorer than it is. And for the back-bencher, in particular, these bodies provide an indispensable if necessarily inadequate means of guessing what is really going on behind the closed doors of Whitehall. The Americans, of course, are far more advanced than we are in the creation and acceptance of these 'shadow ministries:' but even here the three institutes have succeeded in becoming an integral —if peripheral—part of the constitution.
There is, however, a danger: that they may get so close to the official machine that they almost become a part of it, and so lose their whole raison d'être. This threat is particularly real in the case of the National Institute under its new director, Mr David Worswick. Its last review already showed signs of diminished independ- ence: and now I learn that a directive has gone out that no member of the National Institute staff may publish his own analysis of the current state of the economy, or pronounce publicly on any pressing economic issue. This misguided gag is a flagrant betrayal of the Institute's prime duty to do everything in its power to promote an in-
formed public discussion, and should be revoked without delay. Until it is, I trust it will be ignored by those to whom it officially applies.
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