Ministers and Public Servants (Official Conduct)

Part of Ballot for Notices of Motion – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 3 February 1949.

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Photo of Mr John Boyd-Carpenter Mr John Boyd-Carpenter , Kingston upon Thames 12:00, 3 February 1949

if I were asked for advice by the Minister of Labour as to the particular direction in which this gentleman might be sent, I would urge him not to ignore the claims of Eton and Slough.

I pass from this gentleman's personality and from the question of his disposal, which is, of course, a matter for the Government. It is idle for us to ignore the background to this sad, sorry affair. It is idle for us to pretend that this is a case of two errant individuals and nothing more. This case must be looked at against the background of our governmental system of today, and the immense temptations which are placed in the way of precariously placed Ministers by the system of controls which operates today. It is sheer insincerity to pretend that individuals are not exposed to great temptation by the fact that, on the one hand, they are dealing daily with scraps of paper that are worth considerable sums of money to business men, while, on the other hand, they have, as we all have, to face the possibility that their power may be short-lived, that their electors may eject them from office and that their constituency may know them no more.

It is idle to ignore that immense temptation by riding off as if it were some particular weakness of particular individuals. It is much more the system we should investigate, with a view to the prevention of a repetition of this episode. If we simply wash our hands and make two sacrifices to our standards of morality and continue as before, we shall be burying our heads in the sand. There is no doubt that the welter of controls with which our system is bedevilled at the moment has diminished both public understanding and public respect for the instructions and orders of the Government, and that it has lowered the moral standards of a considerable section of the community. I believe that to be true, and I believe that the House will be doing no good service to itself or to the country if it ignores the truth of that statement.

We have to realise that these contact men and all the riff-raff who collect around them are an inevitable development of the way in which our system has been operated. The very thing that is alleged to have been done here, the pretence of having authority with Ministers of the Crown, was specifically dealt with in the Italian Penal Code under the Fascist régime. It was well recognised that the act of "vaunting of authority" was a criminal offence. It is a recognised and inevitable development of a closely centralised system of detailed control of the national life. It is useless for any of us to discuss this matter without realising that that is in the background. I ask the Government to recognise that whether they like it or not, whether the economic reasons for their policy are sound or unsound, it is that policy which is ultimately responsible for this state of affairs. This country will never forget nor forgive a Government which, for any reason, presides over, watches over and continues a policy which has already done some damage to the integrity of our national life, and, if allowed to continue further, will do irreparable damage to our honour, our reputation, our probity and our self-respect.