Reflections on the Constitution (Works of Harold J. Laski)

The House of Commons, The Cabinet, The Civil Service

Harold J. Laski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317586401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work remains of interest to anyone concerned with Britain's political institutions and how they might be reformed. Laski was strongly in favour of utilising Britain's capacity for decisive government to drive through great social reforms. He was still confident that there was a majority will for such change and quite unable to imagine the kind of centralisation that was later to take place in the UK. If Laski is still important it is more for his pluralist views which counsel against such developments, but these lectures are still of interest in showing how a radical reformer could accept and defend established institutions like the House of Commons.

PART ONE THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

1 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISMS OF PARLIAMENT

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742533-1

IT is an exceptional pleasure to me to have been invited to give these lectures in the University of Manchester. It is not merely that I am myself Manchester born and Manchester bred. I owe much to the inspiration I received from men whose names are household words in this university—from Samuel Alexander, from T. F. Tout, and from Michael Sadler among its teachers, from C. P. Scott among the citizens of Manchester, who, in my youth, thought the status of this University a matter of immense importance to the quality of its civic life, and to my friend, Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, who, with Lady Simon, has, if I may say so, given to this city a continuity of devoted service not less important than the generosity he has shown it. I come to the University of Manchester from an institution which, if younger than yours, has had the good fortune to have its traditions established and given shape by one who thought, as the men who developed the University of Manchester thought, that the first task of learning and scholarship is not research for its own sake, but the achievement of a profounder knowledge of men’s relation to nature. They were, I think rightly, convinced that there was no other way in which to discover the questions we should ask in the hope of transforming Man from a rebel against a harsh and unfriendly universe into a master of its forces, and thus into that self-mastery that is one of the essential conditions of a free society.

Our age is one of turbulence and confusion, in which the large-scale breakdown of traditional values has made many doubt the validity even of the institutions which lie at the basis of our national life. I propose, therefore, in these lectures, to re-examine two great institutions, confidence in which is the obvious clue to the maintenance of a democratic society. I propose to examine the present condition of the House of Commons, and that of the Cabinet, and, in part, of the Civil Service upon the efficiency and imaginative capacity of which so much of the adequacy of Parliamentary Government depends. I do not need to tell you that, especially in the last thirty years, there has been a growing suspicion, both on the Right and on the Left, about their adequacy in relation to the immense problems we have to solve. Severe judgments have been passed upon the effectiveness of the House of Commons not only by those who have observed it merely from without, but, hardly less, by many who have known it intimately from within. We have been asked to regard it as nothing but an organ of registration for the Cabinet, a body of miscellaneous amateurs, whose discussions do not count, whose criticism and investigations go unheeded, whose independence has been so impaired by the rigidity of party discipline that it has lost the high status it once enjoyed when the whole nation watched with passionate interest the epic contests in which men like Gladstone and Disraeli crossed swords in debate. We have been told that it has delegated so much of its power to Ministers and the officials of their Departments that it can no longer protect the freedom of citizens nor safeguard their property from the inexhaustible rapacity of a ruthless bureaucracy. We are urged to regard it as in need of reforms so massive that when it emerged from their acceptance it would no longer be recognisable as the classic institution to which so many admiring tributes were wont to be paid. Nor, indeed, has the Cabinet been spared by the critics. Its influence has diminished, in the first place, as the power of the Prime Minister has grown. Perhaps no more than a quarter of its members are really influential; they constitute an inner oligarchy which has reduced the rest to a body of pale ghosts who are only less surprised at the formal eminence for which they have been selected than are their friends at the fact of their choice. In any case, it has been urged, the work of most Government Departments is now so massive and so exacting, that only a Minister, not only of exceptional power, but, also, of outstanding character, can really operate his own office in terms of a policy that is his own; the real truth is that most of them are, in the hands of their officials, little more than puppets who dance on wires the movement of which is controlled by a small number of civil servants who have exchanged the trappings of formal dignity for the reality of effective power. It is, moreover, rare in these days for a Minister to know his Department well enough when he arrives there for the first time genuinely to be able to take charge of its activities. The alternative to trusting his officials to show him the way is to make mistakes of such proportions as to make him an obvious liability to the Government whom the Prime Minister will quickly change for someone who achieves the reputation of being an asset. But to be an asset, the critics insist, either the Minister must be seen and not heard or he must place himself in the hands of his officials who will guide him to some small achievement and prevent him from making mistakes. The remarkable politician apart, a dutiful obedience to the administrative heads of his Department is much the most direct road to the reputation of a sound and knowledgeable man.

But we are sternly admonished against the danger of confidence in the bureaucracy. The little officials, generally speaking, are not only greedy for power, they have a habit of strangling themselves in their own red tape. They compose complicated regulations in a style no one, not even themselves, can understand. They do everything with painful slowness, and with a relentless search for the routine of uniformity. They lack the initiative and the directness of business men. They make irritating rules which interfere, as in industry and commerce, with practical affairs of which they have no first-hand experience. They make, only too often, a “theoretical” approach to a problem laid before them. They insist on a vast expenditure of man-power in filling out innumerable forms which consume the time and energy clearly capable of being spent to much better purpose. They are always investigating, peeping and prying into other people’s business, compelling submission to rules and orders which prevent their victims from getting on with their work. They hamper freedom, by controlling this and rationing that, and limiting what a business man can do with his own profit. Since most of them have had a training, not in the hard school of life, but in classics or history, mathematics or philosophy, they always approach the issues upon which they have to pass judgment with the mind of a doctrinaire, remote from the real world where men rely upon each other’s word, and there is little need for the irritating ways which make them insist on putting everything down on paper. There are always far too many of them, generally doing too little work; if a company were run as they run a Department, it would rush headlong into bankruptcy. They have no incentive to take risks, with the result that their caution infuriates the enterprising and audacious merchant adventurers who, when they were left alone, laid the foundation of this country’s greatness. Only those who have had dealings with the civil service can appreciate that the famous maxim ne trop pas gouverner has the status of a natural law. They become fixed, at an early stage of life, in a traditional way of doing things, so that their habits fail to get adjusted to the ever-changing pattern of the outside world.

II PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742533-2

No one would seriously suggest that the House of Commons should refuse to permit the adaptation of its habits to the new demands of a civilisation that has probably changed more intensely, since 1906, than it had done in the 218 years from the “glorious Revolution”, and the famous Liberal victory, though itself perhaps the final symbol of the end of the Victorian age, seems, even to people who remember it as vividly as I do, almost an infinite distance away. In 1906, we were far from universal suffrage. The whole of the national expenditure was little more than a quarter of what today we spend on defence alone. We had immense foreign investments, and Mr. Chamberlain’s campaign for a protective tariff had foundered upon what seemed the impregnable rock of the national faith in free trade. The Labour Party had only 29 members in the House of Commons, and a careful foreign observer was about to predict that it was destined to remain little more than an influential wing of the Liberal Party. It was hardly a year since the careful efforts of the Foreign Office had transformed our bad relations with France into that Entente Cordiale which would, it was hoped, maintain a balance of power strong enough to dissuade the Germany of Wilhelm from seeking to realise undue ambitions in trade and colonial expansion. There were no Ministries of Defence or Health, of Labour or Transport or Supply. The possession of a private income of £400 per annum was, and remained until 1919, a necessary condition of entrance into the Diplomatic Service. It was only four years since an eminent peer had been Prime Minister, and although Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman resisted the effort of Sir Edward Grey to force him into the House of Lords, neither man regarded membership of the Upper House as an obstacle to holding that office; no one dreamed in 1906 that Lord Salisbury would pretty certainly prove to have been the last peer to become Prime Minister. There was no such conception as Dominion Status; the foreign policy of those nations which are now our equal partners in the Commonwealth was carried out, on their behalf, by the Foreign Secretary in London. India was still governed much as it had been after the transfer of power from John Company to the Crown in 1858; and, as late as 1909, Edward VII was deeply dissatisfied with Lord Morley’s proposal to have an Indian member of the Secretary of State’s Council in London. The Irish members still sat at Westminster; and parties watched uneasily the exercise of power by John Redmond and his supporters without doubting for one moment that, Ulster apart, they had unquestionable authority to speak for the rest of Ireland. There was no health insurance, no unemployment pay; apart from Mr. and Mrs. Webb, and that young leader-writer on the Morning Post, now Lord Beveridge, I doubt whether anyone, least of all Mr. Churchill, had ever heard of a Labour Exchange. It is not, I think, an exaggeration to say that, in 1906, not six members of the Labour Party had ever heard of Lenin, and no one in this country had any grasp of the significance of that famous Conference in the Brotherhood Chapel at Southgate which created the Bolshevik Party. Nor must we forget that, in 1906, members of Parliament were not paid; and it was not until 1909 that the Law Lords, in the notorious Osborne case, decided, on grounds of “public policy” that it was ultra vires for a trade union to raise a political fund from such of their members as did not “contract out” of that obligation, through which they were able to pay a modest competence to their representatives in the House of Commons. Not the least eloquent or interesting speech upon the Bill which overrode the decision of the Law Lords was the one made by Mr. Winston Churchill, in which he explained his full sympathy with the trade unions suspicion that the Courts of Justice were biassed against Labour organisations.

We are told by so experienced an observer as Mr. Amery that Parliamentary government is already dead, and has been replaced by Cabinet government. The critics tell us that despite the wider social range from which members of the House of Commons are now drawn, compared, say, with the year 1832, the member of Parliament today is less able, less independent, and far less competent to form an opinion upon the matters upon which he votes than was his predecessor. Our attention is drawn to the fact that nearly all important legislation is government legislation and that those private members are few indeed who can hope to pilot a Bill of their own to the statute-book. Debates, it is argued, have become mere formalities, tolerated by the Government only because they do not affect the result in the division lobby. Far too many Bills are passed, and far too few of them are debated with sufficient amplitude. Too many are sent upstairs to have their details settled in one of the Committees which now deal with all but the most vital legislation. There are bitter criticisms of the growth of delegated legislation, and of the consequential growth of administrative law—a growth predicted more than sixty years ago by Maitland—and it is insisted that the rule of Law and the freedom of the citizen are gravely menaced by these developments. Some argue that the House of Commons sits for too many months in the year. Mr. Christopher Hollis has recently complained not only that it is useless to raise matters of debate on the adjournment, but even that question time is less significant than it used to be, and that, “a great deal more often than not,” it is far easier to get a constituent’s grievance remedied by a private letter to the Department concerned, than to raise it in the House, where the reluctance of a Minister and his officials to admit a mistake in public gets them on their dignity and makes them adamant rather than open-minded and rational. Many critics are irritated by the fact that Ministers refuse to answer questions on the day-to-day decisions taken by the Boards of nationalised industries. Others complain that the hours during which the House sits are far too long, and that the frequency of all night sittings is indefensible. If we add up all the complaints, and accept them at the face value they are given by those who put them forward, it would almost seem as though one might as well get rid of the House of Commons altogether. Yet I think that most of the critics whose good-will is not in doubt would, if pressed, admit the real alternative to the House of Commons is the concentration camp. Where a legislative assembly goes on discussing its business in the certain knowledge that in not more than five years from the first day of its first session it will have to submit its work to the free judgment of what is, I think, by far the most mature electorate in the world, I think there is real ground for saying that discussion does matter very seriously, and that the critics have set most of their complaints in a distorted historical perspective.

Let me begin with the incisive attack of Mr. Amery, perhaps the most distinguished of the critics, and certainly the one with the longest first-hand experience of the issues he discusses. He begins with a complaint against Bagehot for arguing in his English Constitution that the system under which we are governed is Parliamentary government. That is not so, Mr. Amery emphasises; we are governed by the Cabinet and not by Parliament; Bagehot mistook the real course of effective power. With great respect to Mr. Amery his strictures are gravely unjust to Bagehot. The central theme of Bagehot’s remarkable book consists of a brilliant exploration of his famous discovery that the Cabinet is the “hyphen that joins, the buckle that links” the executive power of the government to its legislative power. That Bagehot attached much more importance to the House of Commons as a body of members less organised and disciplined than they are today, is due to the fact that the first edition of his book was published before the Reform Act of 1867, even more, before that government of Mr. Gladstone in 1868, which may really be said to have given the two-party system in its present form something like its letters of credit. I venture the guess that, when he wrote, more private members had an individual importance than they have today; but I think the reason for their importance was not the lesser importance of the Cabinet, but the fact that more members of Parliament represented a select and even jealous oligarchy, hostile to those who came from outside their ranks, and far more eager to insist that the House of Commons confined its attention to the narrowest possible area of action than was to prove possible after the overwhelming changes in the character of our lives since 1906, still more since 1919, and above all since 1945.

Let us look at this statistically. The Whig Liberal Party of 1865, elected, probably, while Bagehot was writing, had 195 members who represented the land-holding interest, and 51 who were by profession soldiers and sailors; the comparative figures for the Tory Party were 199 and 65. The differences between these figures are not very striking; but, in 1865 in the Whig Liberal Party there were over 350 members who, though they might be land-owners as well, had a stake also in finance and industry, while in the Tory Party, on the same basis, finance and industry accounted only for 136. In 1865 there were 58 lawyers in the Whig Liberal Party; in the Tory Party there were only 25. Among the Radicals in the House in 1832, 18 land-owners formed the single largest group; there was no land-owner among the Radicals in 1865. Or if we take those who stood for the repeal of the Act of Union with Ireland in 1832, 27 out of 51 were land-owners; in 1865 out of 15 supporters in the House, repeal had only two land-owners among its supporters. If we take Mr. Gladstone’s party in 1868, he was supported by 197 land-owners, much the largest group; the Conservative Party had only 150; in the House of Commons of 1900, there were only 30 land-owners in the Liberal party as against 150 land-owners in the Conservative party—a larger number than at any time since Disraeli’s famous victory of 1874; while between the elections of 1868 and 1900, the land-owners among the Radicals varied between a minimum of none in 1868 and 1874, and a maximum of four in 1892, which dwindled to three in each of the two Parliaments of 1895 and 1900.

It is clear, in short, that at least up to the Reform Act of 1867 the House of Commons mainly conceived itself as a body the purpose of which was to safeguard property against the danger of numbers; in the debates on that Act Disraeli made it clear that he regarded democracy as a “thoroughly vicious form of government,” and that the government believed strongly in the need to maintain the authority of property-owners under the constitution. It is difficult, until Mr. Gladstone’s government of 1868, not to regard the House of Commons as essentially a body of property-owners—the Tories desiring to safeguard the interest of the land and the Whigs and the Liberals the interests of commerce and industry. Both sides strongly favoured a policy of laissez-faire; and despite collectivist legislation like the Factory Acts, the doctrine that the government should interfere with the life of the individual was the exception, and not the rule, in legislation. It is not really excessive to say that, up to 1868, there was practical agreement on both sides of the House that the “British people” was composed of the nobility, the country gentry, and the middle classes, and that, below them there was “the mob” which did not count. One can see in the speeches of Brougham and Macaulay, as in the writings of James Mill, not only the ardent acceptance of the “stake in the country” argument but the fear that admission of those citizens without a stake in the country would endanger the very foundations of property itself. That was why Macaulay devoted all his rhetorical powers to denouncing the Chartist Petition; and it is interesting to note that for something like fifteen years after the failure of Chartism, there were few citizens among the working-class, not belonging to a skilled craft, who relied upon either political or industrial action to rescue them from their hopelessness about the future in a community which, private charity to those termed the “respectable poor” apart, had but a faint interest in their welfare.

I suggest therefore, that one reason why, before 1868 the House of Commons seems a leisured assembly, the members of which are not tied with any rigidity to party discipline, is that the government rarely devoted its attention to those members of the community who most required it. Little time is spent on education before the Act of 1870; no time is spent on housing or on unemployment or on industrial organisation; public health only occupied members with any continuity after the Disraeli Government of 1874. After 1868 the situation begins to change. Mr. Forster put the Education Act of 1870 on the statute-book. The trade unions began to be a pressure-group of considerable power; and their legal right to conditions under which they could effectively organise became a matter of deep Parliamentary significance. When Mr. Gladstone sponsored the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869 he opened up a great range of questions it was impossible for the House of Commons to evade; and the Irish Nationalists, under the leadership of Parnell, raised the practice of obstruction to the level of a fine art. The Irish Land Act of 1870, a fiercely contested Act, occupied twenty-five days of Parliamentary time in the House of Commons; that of 1881 occupied fifty-eight. Those who speak of the “absurd hours” for which the Commons now sit, the excessive burden of all night sittings, might well reflect upon Lord Morley’s comment upon the price of the Irish question in Mr. Gladstone’s government of 1880. “The House of Commons,” he has written¹“sat for one hundred and fifty-four days and for 1400 hours; some 240 of these hours were after midnight. Only three times since the Reform Bill had the House sat for more days; only once, in 1847, had the total number of hours been exceeded and that only by seven, and never before had the House sat so many hours after midnight.”

⁽¹⁾Life of Gladstone, Vol. II, p. 222.

The truth thus seems to be a relatively simple one. As Great Britain was transformed from a mainly agricultural to a predominantly industrial state, ever more complex problems of organising so different a community emerged. Urban development in the rapidly growing towns, the growth of railways, the new dimension in which the public health had to be regarded, the call of industrialism for literacy, the resolute effort of the workers to combine for their own protection, the correlation between economic misery, nationalism and violence in Ireland, gave rise to problems which all serious observers saw could only be solved by government intervention. Once there was the need for government intervention, each party required a programme to explain the extent and character of the intervention it would attempt, if it were given a majority by the electorate. But the search for a majority required effective organisation of the party in the constituencies, and effective discipline of its members inside the House of Commons; the latter became exceptionally urgent when Parnell used ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Original Page
• Copyright Original Page
• Prefatory Note
• Table of Contents
• Part One. The House of Commons
• Part Two. The Cabinet
• Part Three. The Civil Service
• Index