Clause 5. — (Transfer from Navy, Army, and Air Force Insurance Fund to Exchequer.)

Part of Orders of the Day — Economy (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill. – in the House of Commons at on 14 April 1926.

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Photo of Sir George Butler Sir George Butler , Cambridge University

I think of all the parts of the speech of the right hon. Gentleman who has just spoken, and who always speaks with great authority on matters of organisation of government, that which appealed to me most and that. with which he was in greatest agreement with the right hon. Baronet the Member for the Scottish Universities (Sir H. Craik) were those parts in which he was most human, for I believe his is a problem which can only be approached with success from the human point of view. The right hon. Baronet has demonstrated without possibility of denial that there has grown up very recently certain definite tendencies in the Civil Service about which we are waiting with considerable anxiety to hear an expression of view from the Treasury Bench.

Let the House be quite clear what exactly the right hon. Baronet did say and what he did not say. He never for a moment suggested that we should abolish Treasury control in that direction in which Treasury control is not only necessary but axiomatic, that is, on the financial side. But if Treasury control is not in dispute, surely there are two. different ways in which that control may. be exercised. It may be the control of the First Lord of the Treasury or the other political chiefs of the Treasury acting, of course, through their permanent advisers; or, on the other hand, it may be the control of the permanent advisers acting on behalf of the First Lord and the other political chiefs. There is a great difference, for the one is a defining and limiting control which says to this Department,"You shall do this," and to that Department, "This shall be your scope." It says to this office,"You may have so much money,"and to another office,"You must draw in your horns." That is quite a different thing from a, pressure steadily exercised by permanent and unifying forces making for uniformity within the whole of the Service. I do not for a moment want to embark on the large question of the advantages of unitary or decentralised control, but I think any Member of the House who has read any of those very fascinating histories of the various Government Departments which have been recently published must have risen with a very vivid sense of the diversity of the history of our various Government Departments—the two original Secretaries of State for the Northern and Southern Departments, their successors the many Secretaries of State, the Presidents of the various Committees of the Privy Council, and so forth.

While one admits that financial control is necessary, and that it may be necessary to have an interchange of officials between one department and another, there is a certain glory in these diversified activities of our various Government Departments, and a stimulus and pride which comes from it to those who work in them. It was, I think, one of the unfortunate results of the War that we had a large number of new departments that were endowed with the abominable foreign name of "Ministry," which was never known before in that sense in our Constitution. What advantage at all do you get from calling the Board of Agriculture the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries? I have never been impressed by that title. I once spoke to the Noble Lord who is now Viceroy of India, and suggested to him that, to counteract it, he might insist that the stenographers and typists in his department should be dressed as shepherdesses with crooks. Although I do not remember that any definite promise was given me by the Noble Lord on the point, I remember him saying that he was interested by the suggestion. Let us seek diversity rather than the dullness which comes from such centralisation as is not immediately necessary from the purely financial point of view.

This tendency to centralisation is not making the life of the ordinary civil servant more pleasant, and it is not too pleasant a life at the best. He is much and ignorantly attacked, but he is not immune from that inspiration which comes from the esprit de corpsof belonging to a Department which has a tradition of its own, in which he hopes to reap the proper rewards of promotion, and which he believes is engaged upon a perfectly definite task in the Government of our country. I do not think;hat my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury can deny the existence of the tendency to which the right hon. Baronet has referred, although, of course, he may explain it, and we are awaiting his explanation.

I have, in the past, been a very humble member of no fewer than three Government Departments, and have taken a very humble share in controversies with the Treasury; and it always struck me that, to individual civil servants, controversies with the Treasury provided that kind of discipline and medicinal advantages which the tourney had for the Knights of the Round Table in the days of yore. One did embark upon those controversies, in those days, assured that there was an element of hope that you might win your fight; and, if the controversy came to a deadlock, if you were up against a definite refusal of the Treasury, you always had your political chief or Secretary of State, who, if he thought the matter was important enough, might take it up with the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Financial Secretary, and, if it were a really serious matter, it might become a Cabinet question. I mention these personal matters because I think we want to look at this subject from the point of view of the individual civil servant, and I do hope that the explanation of this new tendency will not be such that that kind of operation will be made a very unusual and occasional practice. If so, I think there will be a certain deadening effect upon the individual members of the various departments which are concerned. It is not true to say that this is a case in which he who pays the piper calls the tune, because the Treasury does not pay the piper; it is the public that pays the piper, and if the Treasury is the channel through which the piper is paid, that does not give the Treasury an unchallengable control over the executive operations of the Civil Service, any more than you might argue that the Stationery Office has an unchallengable control over the length of minutes because it supplies the paper upon which they are written.

You can go to the very greatest authority, none other than Lord Welby himself, who was, as we are now taught to say, the Head of the Civil Service, and who, in 1886, put it on record that the Treasury did not claim more than financial control, and did not wish to flow over beyond financial control into executive control. This headship of the Treasury is a very small point, and it is not a new title, but the trouble of what I may call this Byzantinism is that it grows. Why do we want the tinsel of Byzantium in the bespatted corridors of our simpler Whitehall? It is the Head of the Treasury now; what may it he in 50 years? The mind goes through a terrible and awful succession of developrnent—the Elder Brother of the Bank Rate, the Lion of the Consolidated Fund —these are titles that our descendants may find claimed by the Head of the Treasury, and what can stop him unless now we definitely take the line that we are going to insist upon more austere and more Roman virtues and practices?

The right hon. Baronet has performed a very great service, I consider, in putting himself to the trouble of bringing this matter forward, not only in the House to-night but on several occasions before and in the public Press. I think ho has met with a response, so far, that has about it. those larger and bolder elements which the world acclaims as genius, because what Columbus did with the egg, n. Newton with the apple, the Treasury has done with the loss of the file of 1867. I would ask hon. Members to re-read history, furnishing the historic characters with the enormous engine of this new machine in controversy—the donation of Constantine, the forged Decretals—genuine, but lost —the use by Von Bethinann-Hollweg of the clumsy expedient of talking of the "Scrap of Paper" when he might have said that he had lost the Belgian Treaty. At such methods of controversy the victims of them are aghast in admiration. I would only ask the Financial Secretary the practical question whether the search for this paper is still continuing? I have no doubt that it is. The Financial Secretary himself seems to be feeling a strain to a certain extent, and I am sure there are anxious clerks down at the office at half-past eleven in the morning, and that passers-by see at five o'clock p.m., the lights of the Treasury still flaring while this relentless pursuit of the paper is still continuing. The right hon. Baronet and myself are not furies determined to press this pursuit. It may be a waste of public time. Let the paper be lost, but do let us have a declaration which will put it on record that the Government are abandoning a position which is unsound in law and apparently unsound in history, a pronouncement which will, I believe, bring relief to the House, to the Civil Service, and to the nation at large.