Political Commentary
Conspiracy in the Civil Service
Patrick Cosgrave
It would be disputed neither by pronor by anti-Marketeers that the question of whether or not Britain remains a member of the EEC is one of profound importance for the history of this country. Whatever else they would dispute, members of both camps would agree on that. Now, it is perfectly true that the great turning points of a nation's history are clear often only in retrospect; and that muddle and indecision and half-glimpsed visions characterise the actions of those involved in the making of the decisions, great and small, which make up the great turning points. However, I can recall no series of decisions, of remotely comparable importance to the history of a great democratic country, the taking of which were marked by such determined deceit, and such resolute fixity of purpose in preventing the ordinary citizen from having a say in the matter, as those leading up to our entry into the EEC. Most of them, moreover, are described in detail in a remarkable new book — While Britain Slept, by Douglas Evans, published by Gollancz, and indispensable for an understanding of the Common Market debate, and thus cheap at £2.00 — which has, surprise, surprise, managed almost to escape notice by the Press or broadcasting media.
Mr Evans's book is 160 pages long: it is not, therefore, a comprehensive, but concentrated, volume. Apart from some of the details one vivid impression remained with me when I had finished reading it; and the nature of that impression conveys, I think, a great deal of truth about the general calibre of economic and political management of this country for the last twenty years. One cannot read this survey of the history of the effort to get us into the EEC without noticing the extraordinary vagueness, the extreme imprecision, and the sheer day-dreaming of pro-European ministers. At this moment, of course, that vagueness is of great help to the pro-Marketeers, for it enables them to switch practical arguments about the merits and demerits of entry around and about just as they please: in 1970, for example, we were being told that entry into the Market would ensure prosperity; now we are being told that exit would ensure poverty, while, by staying in we will get at least a pensioner's remittance. But then, all history shows that there is no more confident liar than the dreamer.
It is a general truth about the British system of government — demonstrated most recently in the Crossman diaries — that no departmental minister can hope to make the Civil Service do its job — i.e. obey political directives and do its best to make them work — unless he has a very clear intention of where he wants to go. This does not mean, as poor Mr Heath once thought it meant — a very detailed legislative brief: it means, rather a very clear decision taken about what the minister wants done. A good minister is, of course, prepared to alter his intention in the light of evidence suggesting that it will not achieve his ends, but he must, to do that, have a critical mind, and few enough of recent British ministers have had that. From the beginning, and certainly once the Treasury was converted to the desirability of British entry in the early 'sixties, the Civil Service lobby for entry into the Common Market was blessed, first by the unalterable, but pliant and vague, commitment of two Prime Ministers, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath, to the idea; and by the failure of every other senior minister who came in contact with the European lobby — save that outstanding figure, Mr Peter Shore — to look critically at the advice offered them, If, of course, they had looked critically they would have seen that the enormous apparatus of departmental briefs was itself based on just such a vague, generalised and intuitive daydream as I mentioned earlier. The real truth is that our bureaucracy — and especially that in the Foreign Office — lived the idea of the EEC because it is a bureaucrats' paradise, "an Empire on our doorstep," as one of them once described it. Nothing was further from their minds than the national interest.
Now, of course, this situation is nothing short of scandalous, for the Civil Service is supposed to be a service, as well as being civil; and it has, in recent years, become a ruthless, self-perpetuating, policy-making machine, often working in direct opposition to the political objectives of democratically elected governments.
Now, I am an avowed anti-Marketeer, and I do not want to appear to make unfair and partisan points just on that subject about a number of gentlemen honoured by their country for sterling public service. Look, though, at the names of the seven top Civil Servants who worked, in some cases for years, for our entry into the EEC. They are Sir Denis (now Lord) Greenhill, former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Frank Lee, Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, Sir Eric Roll, Permanent Under-Secretary at the old DEA, Sir William (now Lord) Armstrong, former Permanent Under Secretary at the Treasury and Head of the Civil Service, and Sir Con O'Neill, former Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. In addition there were Sir Christopher Soames and Lord Harlech but, though these were in name Civil Servants, they were in practice politicians who had failed to reach the full rank. All of these men have held high and distinguished posts, and every one has been a failure, or at least no more than a moderate success. Sir Con O'Neill resigned before his time from the Foreign Office because Lord George-Brown considered him not good enough for the top job there. Sir Eric Roll presided over the Civil Service fate of an imaginative creation — the DEA — and let it fail. Sir Frank Lee retired to run (badly) a Cambridge College. Lord Greenhill handled the botched-up plan to sell arms to South Africa. Sir Christopher Soames, having lost his seat in Parliament, could not persuade any one of the many Conservative associations he approached to re-adopt him, and Lord Harlech's main contribution to the history of our time was to be a fervent and uncritical admirer of the Kennedys.
The most founidable of all these figures is, of course, Lord Armstrong. A former senior minister in Mr Heath's Government described his career thus to me the other day: "He is a most remarkable man. He persuaded Harold Wilson, totally against his will and judgement, to adopt an incomes policy, which failed and ultimately destroyed the Wilson government. He then took on Ted Heath, who was totally opposed to an incomes policy. He never disagreed with Ted, always promising to go off and look into the practicalities of how things Ted wanted could be done. The departmental papers would then arrive showing that they couldn't. And gradually, without ever seeming to try, and without a single row, he brought Ted round to an incomes policy which destroyed the Heath government: no other Civil Servant in our history has ever managed to get on the same intimate terms with one Prime Minister, except Horace Wilson; and no one has ever managed it with two opposing Prime Ministers. After it was all over Armstrong wrote an article for the Evening Standard saying that incomes policies did not work and went off to run the Midland Bank."
When, some time ago, I was working at a book on ,Churchill I was in conversation with a distinguished military figure. I knew that he had been opposed to Churchill becoming Prime Minister, but that he had changed his mind very shortly after the great man's accession to power. I also knew his intelligence too well to suppose that his change of mind had been influenced by wanting to be on the winning side. I asked him when he had changed his mind, and he replied: "I changed my mind on 3.40 in the afternoon on May 13, 1940, when I saw a Permanent Under-Secretary of State in a corridor in Whitehall, in his shirt-sleeves, running. Then I knew Churchill could shake up the Civil Servite." There is a moral there.
The truth of our national situation is that, as the calibre of our political leaders and of our civil servants has declined the latter have gained greater and greater influence over our affairs, and a greater and greater ability to protect their own position. Sir William Armstrong was the most powerful bureaucrat of our day, and he governed our economic policy, without a single success, during the lives of governments of different parties. True, the politicians he opposed were supine, but that does not take away from an adverse judgement on his political calibre, or his economic ability. The Treasury is always wrong is a motto created during his time at Great George Street which should be inscribed on the heart of every aspiring politician. As Mr Evans's book shows it is a collection of totally failed politicians, and totally failed Civil Servants, who, deviously, cleverly and with the sole object of their own survival have manoeuvred us into the EEC and are set on keeping us there. If they succeed it will be their only success in twenty years. As they speak, so spake the selfish bureaucrats of every fallen Empire since the Roman.
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