POLITICAL COMMENTARY
The view from Whitehall
PETER PATERSON
We are all cynics when it comes to general elections—well, most of us are—but perhaps the most cynical, world-weary and dis- illusioned members of the electorate are the civil service. Seen from Whitehall, the democratic process as practised by Messrs Wilson and Heath looks like the negation of orderly government, an invitation to chaos and a retreat from the reality that civil servants spend their time educating their political masters in. It is all rather like a headmaster called upon to provide an assessment of the character of one of his pupils who has fallen into the hands of the juvenile court: he was such a good lad while he was in the school, I really can't understand what went wrong.
The answer, of course, is temptation. From a civil service standpoint, Harold Wilson has run a very good administration. The two most important departments, the Treasury and the Foreign Office—for good or ill—have dominated the ministers placed in charge of them. In foreign affairs, George Brown for a time gave the impression of independence as Foreign Secretary, but was merely disguising his orthodoxy in his usual
refreshingly unconventional . personal approach to public relations. Michael Stewart, responding bravely to the FO desk line on Anguilla, Biafra, Vietnam and the NATO pact has shown a temperament so stolid and so impervious to the wrath of Labour's disappointed supporters, who naturally expected a touch more idealism from a Labour government, that he de- serves at least to have his portrait in granite placed in some prominent niche at the Foreign Office.
Treasury domination of the Labour government was so complete that it almost sank the ship of state. Mr Jim Callaghan's spell as Chancellor consisted of an extended teach-in, with his passing on to his col- leagues all the arguments he was giving in to during office hours about the folly of de- valuing the £. When the mandarins changed their minds, Mr Callaghan dutifully resigned and was succeeded by Mr Roy Jenkins, an adventurous and humane Home Secretary who nevertheless allowed himself to be guided from then on along the Treasury's monorail. What the Treasury required of Mr Jenkins was solid resistance to any idea of a faster growth rate, and he defended the case against his colleagues, against the Trades Union Congress and against anyone else who questioned it, with a fervour and an intellectual grace that made it almost a pleasure for the country to be deprived of something like £3,000 million of productive wealth. And for a case study of civil service influence over a government's thinking, Labour's conversion to the Common Market —a triumph of internationalism over the party's traditional chauvinism—awaits ifs chronicler.
In less exalted spheres the story was similar. Labour has consistently done what its professional advisers recommended, stepping out of line only when public opinion reached a point of hysteria in its opposition—the Stansted airport affair—or where the Cabinet divided against the Prime Minister—the South African arms deal, and In Place of Strife. This is not, naturally, intended as a criticism: you cannot have what is still considered to be the best civil service in the world and then expect a government to disregard its advice at every step and turn. But it has amplified that spirit of complacency which must imbue any successful and enduring bureaucracy.
And that spirit must be shaken to its foundations when democracy breaks out in the form of an election in which 'style of government' becomes an issue, and when ministers suddenly lose that sense of objectivity that was'so noticeable in govern- ment and conduct themselves on the hustings in a way that reduces complex affairs to the level of the shrill exchanges we have all recently been treated to. If you take in- flation as the most pressing problem facing the country at this moment, proceeding at an annual rate of about 7 per cent against the customary British level of 3 per cent, you don't as a policy-maker in the civil service really welcome the `yah, sucks, boo' ex- changes between the two gentlemen compet- ing for charge of the country's economic destiny after 18 June. In fact, you deplore the absence of an intelligent public debate on inflation which might help to adapt people to the unpleasant decisions that will have to be taken as soon as possible after that date. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that some extremely senior civil servants are worried out of their wits by the course of the economic debate at this election, and that, both sides having ruled out a wages freeze, thoughts are turning to bizarre solutions like compulsory savings to tackle the wages end of the inflationary pressures that threaten so much danger.
And Whitehall is also worried about Mr Heath's assault on the style of government under Labour. On one level, of course, this is merely an attack on Mr Wilson as a shifty, evasive fibber with a flair for catching the headlines. In another sense, however, it is being taken as an advertisement for Mr Heath's ideas on how the upper reaches of the civil service should be strengthened. A good summary of what the Tory leader has in mind is contained in George Hutchinson's new biography of Heath, in a previously un- published speech he made to the shadow cabinet last December. The implementation of the Fulton report, he said, s was leading to an increasing emphasis on delegating re- sponsibility and to the development of accountable management units within the Service.
Fulton thinking had political importance for the Conservative party, which was dis- turbed about the centralisation of power in the modern state. Long-established official
(i.e. civil service) assumptions would have to be challenged, and 'detailed proposals for re-allocating central government responsi- bilities on sound organisational principles' would have to be prepared 'if they were not to be defeated by administrative difficulties at the outset'. It would be difficult to devise phrases more terrifying, and in a way, more slighting, to a happily settled civil service than these. But Mr Heath went on to spell out his plan to bring businessmen into the ministries 'on the basis of real responsibility for the management of clearly defined pro- grammes'. Again he seemed to anticipate opposition, insisting that the feasibility of his dollar-a-year shock troops scheme would rely on a favourable political and adminis- trative climate. The overall success of the next Conservative administration, he said, could depend heavily on their ability to establish this additional degree of control over the administration and to use it effec- tively to carry through their policies.
It is difficult not to feel sorry, in these circumstances, for the civil service. On one side they have a government storing up the most tremendous trouble for itself by dis- guising the seriousness of the economic situation, aided and abetted by an opposition which seems to want to direct the debate into a highly personalised vendetta against the Prime Minister. (And, as an aside, they have the startling apparition of a new Minister of Housing, appointed the day after Parliament was dissolved, publicly repudiat- ing an important principle in existing policy before he had even visited his new office. Mr Mellish, who I am sure will make an excellent housing minister, will, I am equally certain, have explained what he has in mind to his advisers when he paid his first call at the ministry on Friday.) If Labour loses, the prospect is of a re- forming Tory administration (no longer a contradiction in terms) eager to get to grips with a civil service it has long denigrated on a jokey tea-drinking level. Its proposed changes could impair the authority of the existing management strata in the service, possibly reducing promotion prospects and certainly blunting morale among career civil servants. And in case anyone feels that only an elite at the head of the service would be swept by the new broom (if the nation buys it) the Tories have given the unfortunate impression that their idea of an incomes policy is to allow industrial unions to continue competing with each other in the size of their wage settle- ments while imposing restrictions, if not a complete freeze, on workers who have the misfortune to be on the Government's pay- roll.
The leaders of both our major political parties have been members of the civil ser- vice, Mr Wilson as director of economics and statistics in the wartime Ministry of Fuel and Power, and Mr Heath as an assistant principal in the Ministry of Civil Aviation immediately after the Var. Their attitude to- wards the civil service is therefore informed by inside experience, even if that experience is a little dated. It would be tragic if, either from a careless disregard for people they have come to take for granted in Labour's case, or from a reforming zeal and a desire to import some conception of business efficiency into the civil service on the part of Mr Heath (infhienced it seems by the un- dimmed passion of Mr Ernest Marples for scientific management techniques), the nation should find itself in the hands of a civil ser- vice as debilitated and demoralised as the bureaucracies of Peking, Brussels and Wash- ington.
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