REVIEWS
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1984.tb00580.x |
| Published date | 01 December 1984 |
| Date | 01 December 1984 |
REVIEWS
GOVERNMENT
AND
THE
GOVERNED
(BBC
REITH
LECTURES
1983)
Douglas
Wass
Routledge
&
Kegan Paul,
1984.
12Opp.
323.95.
The very title of last year's Reith Lectures implies a real concern about the meaning of
popular consent to the authority of government; they are the nearest thing we have to
a French 'Cnarque' talking about relations between 'I'administration' and 'les administrks'.
But in many
respects
these lectures look more like a rearguard action to preserve the
spirit of a career public service under the Crown than a vanguard advancing towards a
new
set
of doctrines on the meaning of 'consent'. Nearly
all
Sir
Douglas's
principal proposals
for reform
are
aimed at strengthening the 'crossbench and 'neutral' elements within the
authority of central government. He would like to see (p.
35)
some form of restructured
Central Policy Review Staff that could look across issues affecting a number of departments,
because ministers will always
be
loathe to interfere in departmental business outside their
own personal appanages. He would like to
see
(p.
51)
a
senior
official making
his
position
known
to some parliamentary body, if he considers that
his
minister has acted perversely;
Sir
Douglas does not wish to
see
civil servants fighting by underhand means for the policies
they believe to be right.
Sir
Douglas would like to see (p. 79) the experiment of seconding
a small number of civil servants to work for the Opposition, on the understanding that
they have a fixed period of not more than five years and that they are posted on their
return to a managerial post rather than one close to handling policy advice. Such an
experiment, he thinks, would avoid the dangers of politicization inherent
in
the alternative,
setting up a Department of the Opposition, which would encourage a newly appointed
minister, tab office after a period of opposition, to insist on taking his advisers with
him into government.
Sir
Douglas welcomes (pp.
88,
92) the idea that there should
be
auditors empowered to report to Parliament any examples they discover of governments
not publishmg factual and analytic material to which the public might have a right of
access, because he thinks it unwise to leave decisions about publislung entirely to ministerial
discretion. He also suggests (p.
115)
that there should be a single large and permanent
royal commission from which panels would be drawn to cany out specific studies.
This
would be a device to create
'exciting
new opportunities for independent and statesmanlike
investigation of issues of public importance'.
The essence of
Sir
Douglas's message is that the problems of government, which are
long-term, need the attention of a tenured full-time career service. His remarks look like
extrapolations from a sense of the continuity of the Crown. His message continues to be
in sharp contrast with that of
Sir
John
Hoskyns, with whom
Sir
Douglas was thought
to have crossed swords in public
(see
Public
Administration
61,8-20) in December 1982.
Hoskyns was not mentioned
in
the lectures, but his advocacy of a greater politicization
of senior official positions may have set the tone of the debate and the forms
of
reply.
Sir Douglas's proposals rest on the assumption that the partisan interests of ministers
can
be
reconciled with the promotion of a greater informed understanding of issues by
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