Dare to Be a Daniel (21 page)

This realisation is already widening the gap between the people
and
the Parliament they elect; it could explain the falling turnout at elections, which in itself could undermine the democratic legitimacy of future governments and encourage people to believe that direct action – and even riot – may turn out to be the best way of securing political objectives.

If that view were to prevail, it would entail the death of parliamentary democracy and the consequences would be very serious – not only for the people, who would lose their representation, but also for those with power, because we should not forget that democracy was demanded by those who wanted their rights, but was conceded because it was safer for those in authority to retain their power by consent than by force.

I think that the English revolution so frightened the British establishment that, unlike the French establishment, which risked a revolution and the guillotine that followed rather than make any concessions, the powers-that-be here would see that conceding certain limited powers could defuse the opposition before they took to the streets.

Shocking though it is to say so, I have concluded that one of the reasons why the powerful continue to boast of parliamentary democracy is because they see it as the most effective means of defusing their critics. One way is to claim that we are a perfect democracy and that the people can remove governments they do not like and elect ones they do like, and that is what democracy is about. But for the reasons I have set out above, that is not strictly true, although the capacity to get rid of a government without killing anyone is an important power that many people around the world would give their life to possess in their own country.

So when pressure for change builds up to the point where it cannot be resisted, the British establishment has developed a way
of
dealing with it, by withdrawing in an apparent desire to concede some of the claims and then decapitating some of the radical movements by appearing to give them power. For example, by promoting the leaders of these movements and putting them in the House of Lords, some militant trade unionists of earlier years (some of them ex-communists) sit on the red benches and feel they have been rewarded for their work, when actually they have been politically castrated by their ennoblement.

The limitations on the power of MPs are also very severe, arising mainly from the crude use of patronage by the leader of their own party and by the exercise of the royal prerogative by the Prime Minister of the day, which of course goes far beyond patronage.

A young MP who wants to be promoted must not displease his party leader, and a member of the government faces dismissal if he angers the Prime Minister who appointed him. Older members hoping for retirement in the House of Lords also know that it is the Prime Minister who commands the honours lists and who can grant or withhold their wish.

Within the party, the leader nowadays has immense powers that can lead to the expulsion of MPs, or he can exercise his influence to make reselection as a candidate more difficult, if not impossible. Then there is the crude use of loyalty by a party leader to secure policies he wishes to carry out through a blanket threat – that ‘defiance’ of the leader could lead to overall defeat for the party in an election.

In saying this I am not opposed to the party system, because I believe that individuals cannot make much progress without the strength of the collective. But MPs could do far more to assert the authority which their own constituents have given them over the executive; they have been far too compliant in bowing to the
wishes
of the Whips and the orders of Downing Street, as with the recent three-line whip, first to oppose a referendum on the European Union’s proposed constitution and then to support it.

If the House of Commons were to decide (as it could) to exercise far greater control over the executive – as, for example, in making the exercise of the royal prerogative subject to the approval of the Commons – Parliament could work much more effectively and public confidence in it could be restored in part.

Also Members of Parliament should speak more boldly and clearly, and should not fear that a word out of place could endanger their position, so long as the speeches made are not personal or offensive in character.

I have always divided MPs into two categories – signposts and weathercocks – and I admire signposts more than weathercocks, the latter having no opinion until the polls have been scrutinised and the focus groups interrogated to show the way forward.

What is required is a much more radical approach to the meaning of democracy, which must be about people’s own conception of their role and their determination to force any government to listen. When the pressure is off, the system reverts, as it is now doing, to a medieval monarchy in which the King governs and Parliament merely advises.

Looking back therefore, after many years in Parliament and with many friends in the House of Commons, I am confirmed in my belief that it is an instrument capable of making important changes for the betterment of the community. But the pressure to do so must begin at the bottom, be advanced by those who sit in the Commons and implemented by governments that see themselves as servants, and not as masters.

2

Whitehall Behind Closed Doors

IT IS WIDELY
believed by many members of the public that all politicians, and especially ministers, are untrustworthy and self-seeking. And it is assumed by some on the left that all Labour governments have betrayed their commitment to socialism, as if every Labour MP begins life as a dedicated socialist and gives up ideology when he or she gets to Parliament or becomes a minister.

This is not my experience of my colleagues at all, and cynicism is utterly destructive of the democratic process – unlike argument, which sustains democracy.

Therefore to make sense of what is going on we have at least to see ministerial office in its true light, since being a minister is one of the most interesting, difficult, challenging and exhausting jobs that an MP can have. Most MPs would like ministerial office. Without the experience, it is extremely difficult for anyone to understand how governments work, the limitations under which they have to operate, the choices they have to make and the responsibility that rests upon their shoulders.

I was lucky to get my first appointment as head of the Post Office – the now abolished position of Postmaster-General – when I was thirty-nine years old. I found myself thrown into the headquarters of the Post Office at St Martin’s le Grand, which employed a huge number of people, including all the postmen, counter clerks, telephone operators and engineers at what was the centre of Britain’s communications system. And this job was combined with that of being the sponsoring minister for the broadcasting organisations.

Harold Wilson had dropped a hint when we were at the Durham Miners’ Gala in the summer of 1964 that he might appoint me, so I had a bit of time to prepare my thoughts. I had written an article about the future of the Post Office, suggesting that it was a model for the way a public service might develop and expand.

On assuming a government job for the first time after a General Election, every minister is handed a thick brief composed by his department, prepared in two drafts. The minister is given the appropriate one, depending on whether Labour or Conservatives have won the election. These briefs, written by officials who have read the party manifestos, tell you what the department would like you to do. I always kept them because they throw light on the subsequent minutes submitted to me with recommendations for future action.

My dad had always warned me to be careful, if ever I became a minister, because the officials would be very friendly. He particularly had in mind some MPs who within five minutes of becoming ministers were calling the Permanent Secretary by his Christian name and letting him get on with his job exactly as before.

In essence, the Civil Service offers an incoming minister a deal that sounds like this: ‘Minister, if you do what we want you to do,
we
will help you to pretend you are doing what you said you would do.’ And those who accept this deal have given up their basic right to take control of the department they purport to lead.

Certainly that was exactly how the Post Office was run in 1964; it was not a department at all, but a self-governing organism over which the Postmaster-General presided, receiving and automatically approving minutes from the Director-General of the Post Office – the equivalent of the Permanent Secretary.

I remember my private secretary, on coming to collect me from home for the first time in a giant Austin Princess limousine, asking me, ‘How would you like to play it, PMG?’ I very soon learned that my predecessor Reginald Bevins had turned up on Tuesdays and Thursdays at his office, where a long oblong table was covered in minutes from officials, which he would read and sign as he moved round the table, before going off to the House of Commons. My private office expected me to continue in that tradition and never to be there during parliamentary recesses. The Postmaster-General was seen as a sinecure position.

I naturally read the history of the Post Office from its earliest days and discovered from the memoirs of my predecessors, including Clem Attlee (who had held the job from 1929 to 1931), that they all felt it was absurd that the Post Office should be tied to the Treasury, paying all its receipts to it and receiving in return such money as was necessary to run the service. I suppose it would have been possible for me to continue on that care-and-maintenance basis and hope for promotion. I chose another path.

As any minister soon discovers, his most immediate allies are in the private office, whose job it is to help him deal with this vast permanent establishment which views each minister in much the same way as the staff of a luxury hotel would view an incoming
distinguished
visitor booked into the royal suite for an extended holiday. I had other ideas and began a series of intensive meetings to discuss the future of the Post Office, including a decision to convene the Post Office Board – which, like the Board of Trade, had not met for years but over which, in theory, I presided.

At these meetings I raised the issues I wanted to discuss and began issuing a series of numbered minutes of my own, making suggestions and asking questions. This was unusual, in that paperwork in the Civil Service starts at the bottom and is signed at the top; it doesn’t normally start at the top. That must have been unsettling for the officials. I also appointed as my PPS a Labour MP called Charles Morris, who had himself worked in the Post Office and was a member of the Union of Post Office Workers. I was warned by the Director-General that, because of his trade-union background, this would be an inadvisable appointment.

I went and visited the UPW headquarters, which had never been done by a PMG before. And, guided by what Stafford Cripps had done as President of the Board of Trade after the war, I decided that wherever I went, I would hold a mass meeting for the staff to explain what I was trying to do, and would invite them to comment. This simple method, which included a huge gathering in the Royal Albert Hall concerning the future location of the Post Office Savings Bank, destabilised the mandarins, who felt they were ceding to the minister control that previously they had exercised themselves.

It was an immensely rewarding experience and I came to love the Post Office and its traditions, which represented the finest in Britain and which of course had been developed by Rowland Hill in the nineteenth century. The invention of the penny post had the same impact then as the Internet has had today, in that it allowed people to communicate with each other cheaply and introduced a cheaper
printed
paper rate, which allowed newspapers to go by mail.

I set all this out because the first experience of office, followed by appointment to the Cabinet two years later, gave me an understanding of the way that Labour ministers could shape policy, which could not have been learned any other way. Also, I learned the enormous value of having genuinely collective decision-making in the Cabinet itself, where key questions were discussed at length and decided sometimes by a vote; on one occasion a vote went against the manifest wishes of the Prime Minister. The Cabinet then comprised people of immense ability, including Wilson, Callaghan, Jenkins, Crosland, Castle, Crossman, Gardiner, and other giants of the period.

As far as I can make out, that tradition of discussion has been abandoned now in favour of much shorter meetings, in which the Prime Minister tells the Cabinet what he has decided and there is no real collective feel about it any more. Cabinet papers are no longer submitted by ministers to focus attention on issues that might not otherwise have reached Cabinet level.

Clearly, the question sometimes arises, ‘Should a minister resign?’ if his view in Cabinet is rejected. That question was often in my mind, and on one occasion I asked the Bristol South East Labour Party whether it would be right for me to resign, and I undertook to be guided by their decision. After a long debate they decided that they wished me to remain in Cabinet, but to argue my case as strongly as I could, which I think was right.