POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY

A consequence and a cause of the greater size and complexity of governments and corporations, of projects and of endeavours, of weapons systems and of wars, has been the apparent diffusion and diminution of personal responsibility. This diffusion and diminution is only apparent — nothing can alter the fact that it is individuals who make decisions and who support, resist or acquiesce in other individuals' decisions — but that it is apparent rather than real does nothing whatever to lessen its very great convenience for those who benefit from it. For most of the people most of the time the diffusion and diminution of personal responsibility is a comfort. It may well be that without the growth of corporation law and the development of the notion of limited liability companies, the present material comforts enjoyed by the rich and industrialized nations would not have been mass-produced. To many, if not most, the wealth and power enjoyed by those who control the great corporations is of no great concern : provided the corporations produce the goods and pay the wages and dividends that are thought to be desirable, the largely unknown men who are responsible for the conduct of the corporations will not be called to account. Civil servants who likewise manage the far greater affairs of the state are, by venerable and orthodox tradition, generally held to be unaccountable and thus not bearing apparent personal responsibility. The doctrine of Cabinet responsibility encourages in this country a further obfuscation; and this, together with the very great predilection for secrecy shared by almost all our rulers, has meant that it has very rarely been possible to discover who precisely has been responsible for what decisions until the decisions have long since been taken and their consequences become irreparable. The Nuremberg trials were an attempt to attribute personal responsibility to, and to inflict personal punishment upon, a group of German war criminals, but at no time then was it , seriously or officially sug gested that the same standards of justice and punishment should be applied to the victors as to the defeated. Lieutenant Calley is tried for murder; a general is indicted; but the civilians in the Pentagon whose initials upon slips of paper may have issued in far more deaths than Calley's guns or a field general's orders, stand in no danger of retributive punishment, and the only judgments Presidents will suffer are those of history.

From time to time individuals have perceived clearly that they possess an unavoidable and untransferable responsibility for their own actions. A handful of scientists have displayed such an awareness more often than soldiers or administrators. This may be because they can understand more readily than their officials superiors the consequences of their inventiveness. There is little evidence that politicians or administrators or soldiers understood much or cared about the atomic bombs they dropped on the Japanese except that they were very much bigger bombs than had been dropped before. The use of chemical warfare in Vietnam does not appear to have occasioned very great intellectual, let alone moral, debate among those responsible for utilizing scientific discoveries. And within the great and growing body of scientists, there are few who do not find it possible to contrive some excuse or evasion whereby the feeling of responsibility for what they are doing can be done away with. Some scientists go further, and discover in the concept of ' pure science ' an end in itself, in which the pursuit of knowledge, wherever it may lead, is sufficient justification and declare "the responsibility will not be mine for the uses to which such knowledge may be put by the politicians," etc. Industries in like fashion are capable of arguing that the effluents of their factories or the dangers of their products are the consequences of supply and demand and of claiming that it is up to the politicians if they can to enact laws to control such pollutions : " our duty " say such industrialists," is to our shareholders, our workers, our customers," and, once more, responsibility is diffused and diminished.

In the last few days we have been given, with vast publicity, a great deal of evidence which should have the effect of pinning down personal responsibility for the causes and the nature of the war in Vietnam a good deal earlier and a good deal more precisely than is customary in such matters. This evidence appears to have been supplied by Dr Daniel Ellsberg as the consequence of a personal decision that it was his duty to reveal what he knew and the documents he possessed. Dr Ellsberg now faces serious criminal charges following his actions; and it may well be that he is _in technical breach of some law. He certainly would be in this country. But there can be no doubt that he has performed a most valuable public service, whatever temporary inconveniences he may have caused for the United States government, especially in its dealings with other governments. The effect of his intervention has been to assist in the process of attributing responsibility to whomever it should be attributed.

Dr Ellsberg writes : "It is not, after all, only Presidents and Cabinet members who have a powerful need and reason to deny their responsibility for this war. And who succeed at it. Just as presidents and their partisans find comfort and political safety in the quicksand image of the President-as-victim, so Americans at large are reassured in sudden moments of doubt by the same image drawn large, America-as-victim. It is no more real than the first, and neither national understanding nor extrication truly lie that way."

We may put the matter slightly otherwise, and harking back to the famous parliamentary motion but in so doing referring not solely to ministers but also to legislators, soldiers, scientists, industrialists, trades unionists and all others who exercise power, assert that the attribution and the acceptance of personal responsibility has diminished, is diminishing and ought to be increased.

Upon the Prime Minister's selection to represent Britain in the Admiral's Cup, I extend my warmest and quite unmixed congratulations. To have moved so swiftly from playing around with dinghies to international standing in ocean racing is, by any standards, a remarkable achievement. There used to be sniggers in his dinghy days from the big boat people, then when he made the jump upwards there were those who said that he was no sailor, that he was out of his class (in more ways than one), that he'd never manage to get together a good crew or to keep it if he ever found it, and so forth. Ted Heath's Sydney-Hobart victory and his selection as 'Yachtsman of the Year' stifled most of the melicious chat, and now his unanimous and deserved selection for the Admiral's Cup team should shut up the rest. He now, I hear, has even managed to challenge if not to usurp Max Aitken's place as uncrowned king of Cowes.

I have found myself wondering whether any previous Prime Minister has represented his country in a sporting capacity while still in office. I can think of no one. Those who say he should stay in London and look after the shop, instead of spending the end of July and early August at sea racing, are jealous fools. I wish him excellent sailing and victory (at sea).

Expansive times

A strange kind of consultative document has been going around the Times, I hear, detailing how that once great newspaper proposes to conduct itself should we enter the EEC. The intention of the Times, according to its editor, Mr William ReesMogg, is to become "Europe's first national daily newspaper."

In that event, the Times, obviously believing that the European nation already exists, might as well go the whole hog and transfer itself to wherever Mr Rees-Mogg thinks the capital of that nation might be — Brussels, perhaps, or Rome?

Mr Commissioner

There are other contingency plans afoot. Both Mr Harold Lever and Mr George Thomson, so it is gossiped, have been fancying themselves as British Commissioners, Harold Lever, perhaps: he is clever enough. But not George Thomson. His remarks that had he secured Rippon's terms, he would have recommended their acceptance to a Labour Cabinet imply that the Labour Cabinet was committed by its 1967 application to accept the terms should they be regarded as satisfactory. This is not the case, although Mr Thomson may not know it — he was not in the Cabinet when the decision to apply was made. Those who were agree with the interpretation that entry could not be opposed until the terms were known and that the only way to discover the terms was to make the application. Both proand antiMarketeers in the Cabinet agreed to defer the major decision, and no commitment either way exists so far as that Cabinet was concerned.

Furthermore, the recent introduction by the Six of their common agricultural policy long after the Labour application is in itself quite sufficient ground for regarding terms which might have been acceptable before the introduction of the CAP as quite unacceptable after its introduction.

Steely future

The very powerfully argued article on the steel industry (page 34) suggests that British steel may itself be the greatest single industrial casualty should we enter the EEC. The article was written within the state Corporation whose chairman, Lord Melchett, although otherwise an ardent defender of nationalized steel, evidently allows his marketeering fanaticism to obscure his industrial judgment. He is, of course, a banker.

We have concealed the authorship for the likeliest consequence fo its being known would be instant dismissal.

Why bother to make steel?

It would not particularly surprise me were the Government to take a pretty lofty view of the whole question of British steelmaking capacity. A fairly senior minister argued to me a few weeks ago that a strong case could be made out for treating steel as a raw material, to be imported much like oil, and that it did not make much economic sense to import iron ore in order to turn it into steel here. Far better to buy it from Japan or somewhere, he suggested. It came as a considerable shock to me to hear a Tory minister talk so cavalierly of the steel industry of this country.

Don't smile, say "cheese"

I enjoyed Geoffrey Rippon's way of dealing with President Pompidou's remarks to his cheese-making constituents that there was a great opportunity for them in the British market now that British imports of New Zealand cheese "would decrease and tend to disappear." Geoffrey Rippon argued that every politician speaking on his home ground had to put the best face on things and that President Pompidou was no exception. Quite so. And Geoffrey Rippon and Prime Minister Heath are no exceptions either.

President Pompidou is doubtless amazed at the terms he has got the British government to accept, and is naturally eager to let his cheese-making constituents be the first to know of the benefits that will flow to France should Britain join the EEC.

Of fish and flesh

Sitting outside The Mill' at Cambridge last Sunday noon I saw two things I had never seen before. Youths and one or two men have taken to fishing in the turbulent water where the Granta has rushed down the weir to become the Cam. Over the years I have casually watched youths and men do their coarse fishing in the Thames and in gravel pits and at the end of piers, and I have always been intrigued by their wicker boxes filled with tackle and their rusty tins filled with maggots. Of course they never caught anything; but that, I presumed, was not the point. Anyhow, on this occasion a youth caught a fish, and what's more I saw him do it.

Not only was I astonished, but so were his fellow fishermen who all crowded around the triumphant lad and the floundering roach (or dace) inquiring what miraculous bait had been used.

My second novelty, immediately afterwards, was provided by a fondling couple. She was very white, her make-up excessively pale, her blonde hair bleached, her blue eyes blued all around. Her partner was probably Indian, very dark, and dressed in dark clothes. The pair made a great point of publicly caressing each other, moving up and down in front of the people sitting at ' The Mill,' and I felt no compunction about looking at them closely. At first, I had assumed that the lovely dark Indian was male. Then I looked again, more closely, and thought that I perceived that it was female. I looked again and again but could not make up my mind.

Many times I've not been sure, at a glance, of the sex of young people. But this was the first time I'd found myself remaining ignorant even after a fairly long and close inspection. However, when one of the fisher lads asked, of the one who'd caught the fish, "Roach or dace?" 1 realised that I couldn't tell the difference between dace and roach either.