POLITICAL COMMENTARY

PETER PATERSON

Government hurries on apace, mocking all those Labour politicians who only three weeks ago were jeering at three months of drift and inactivity by their successors. Indeed, as I remember it, opinion in the Labour ranks when Harold's battered army had its Blackpool reunion was about evenly divided between those who deplored the amount of time the new Prime Minister was spending aboard his yacht, and those who feared that every achievement of the Labour government was even then being dis- mantled by the wicked Tories.

We do not yet know the full extent of the drastic reassessment of government that was in fact going on during that time, but we know enough to applaud the instincts of the `wicked Tories' school of thought. There has been nothing like it in terms of changing the old order since Mr Khrushchev started hav- ing statues of the late Stalin blown up. Far from idling away the long Parliamentary summer holiday, Mr Hee,th's squad set off on their long march at a cracking pace and the real fear is not that they are doing too little but much too much, and doing it too quickly.

Amid all the frenzy there is a distinct danger that one of the basic rules about governing Britain may be lost sight of, the old precept about governing by consent. Mr Heath hint elf talks of a 'quiet revolution', but the operative word seems to be 'revolu- tion'. Without Parliament to distract him, he and his assistants have already announced detailed plans for reforming industrial relations, for changing the structure of departmental government and for altering the direction and emphasis of British foreign policy—the latter no theoretical Green Paper exercise but an adjustment of the machine while it is actually moving. We also know that the whole tax structure is to be reorganised, the National Health Service probably switched from a non-discriminatory free service to one that makes selective charges, and that whole sectors of govern- ment are to be hived off into independent agencies with private capital being allowed into whatsoever is good and profit-making in the nationalised industries.

All new governments are entitled to hurry things along when they first come into office: indeed, for some governments the first year or so proves to be the only constructive period they have before they are over- whelmed by events beyond their control, split by internecine strife, run out of the ideas they brought with them from opposi- tion, or simply overtaken by inertia. No doubt this Government had a somewhat larger portfolio of ideas than some other new administrations, but we were—re- member?—promised deliberative government and things generally look rather different from inside the Ministries than they do from the outside. But that does not seem to apply this time: many of the plans now being un- folded are identical in nearly every particular to those worked out during Mr. Heath's most stolid period in opposition, and they look somewhat makeshift and secondhand.

There is an argument for urgency in some areas. The disaster of the Donovan Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Em- ployers' Associations—possibly the most politically dense Royal Commission in history—plus the Labour government's own failure in attempting reform made it poli- tically necessary for the Conservatives to get off the mark quickly with their own pro- posals. Except in two particulars, however, the Government has gone right back to its own pre-Donovan 'Fair Deal at Work' scheme as if the whole debate of the past three years had never taken place. Just because the Royal Commission allowed the conservatism of Mr George Woodcock to dissuade it from recommending the minimal legal reforms that would have satisfied public opinion—and, incidentally, probably have saved the Labour government as well—is no reason for pretending that its valuable and painstaking analysis of the problems of labour relations had never been made. And then peremptorily to place an impossible time-stop on consultation with interested parties, with the further injunction that no amount of discussion would shift the Gov- ernment from the main pillars set out in Mr Robert Carr's 'discussion document', is calculated to drive the unions into boy- cotting the whole proceeding.

That really is not a very clever way of going about things. No one supposes that the unions will call a general strike in protest— they know very well that this would merely lead to the decimation of the Labour party in a general election on the issue—but an extension of the present boycott on discus- sions with the Government could lead to a withdrawal of co-operation by the unions that would make the whole scheme totally unworkable. By the time that mess was sorted out, Mr Carr might well have changed the sign over his desk to read, 'More haste, less speed'.

Again, there is the restructuring of the Whitehall machine. This may not be revolu. 'tionary, but it is going to be damned incon-

venient for a great many people and it seems, .as a package, to be as hurried as anything that Mr Wilson attempted in tlfis field. To

.take just one hanging thread and tug on it why on earth have a Department of the Environment and then allocate responsibility for the Concorde and the siting of the third

London airport to the Department of Trade and Industry? You know it doesn't make sense. We must also take into account the real feeling of apprehension that thousands of Civil Servants must feel at the prospect of no longer being employed by the Govern.

meat. It might make economic sense, say, to detach the Royal Mint or the Forestry

Commission from government and hand one

over to a coin manufacturer and the other to a consortium of timber merchants, but

where does it leave the employees in terms of career prospects, pensions, security and all the rest? The outlook for many of these people is a sight more grim than for workers

caught up in ordinary commercial mergers. The parallel with the Labour government's

transfer of the Post Office to nationalised industry status is not an exact one: the Post Office was already a -fairly specialised con.

cern within the Civil Service, and the unions

were strong enough to insist that no one should lose by the transfer. No doubt the

Government insists that such should always be the case, but with rumours flying around, plus the example of what is now regarded as consultation, those about to be restruc- tured by Mr Heath's efficiency experts may be forgiven their anxiety.

Which brings us round to foreign affairs, and specifically to the question of supplying arms to the Republic of South Africa. This is altogether a bizarre episode, beginning with Sir Alec's blurted indiscretion immedi- ately the Government came into office last June and climaxed—if only we could say ended—by the ill-tempered exchanges be- tween the Prime Minister and President Kaunda at Friday evening's dinner party at No. la. Here again there is evidence of the very special meaning this Government at taches to the concept of consultation. It is a distorted meaning, a process by which the Government announces to whomever it may concern what it intends to do. The policy is decided in advance, and consultation is not permitted to alter the policy in any material way. This is genuine consultation only in the sense of a hitacker discussing his flight plan with the pilot of an airliner. The President of Zambia came to Ilti* tain, on his way to the United Nations is New York, for the purpose of having con. sultations with the British government on the South African arms issue. It is clearly s matter of some concern to Mr Kaunda, as it is for Mr Nyrere of Tanzania, who saw Mr Heath earlier in the week. It is also a matter of considerable concern for Mr Heath's own Government, if they cast their minds back to the little affair of the South African crickd tour that had to be cancelled. Even if Mr Kaunda brought out the worst Tory instincts he was intitle,d to consult and to be consulted. What we have here, in the case of 11)°, unions, the restructuring of government and the future of the Commonwealth, is more than a mere question of semantics. It is also considerably more than just pointing to chapter and verse in an election manifesto and claiming that therefore anything goes A reluctance to consult is nothing less thy a reluctance to govern with consent.