GENERAL STAFF

Evening Star, Issue 23499, 13 February 1940, Page 10

GENERAL STAFF

FOR ECONOMIC FIELD WEAKNESSES OF PROPOSAL The vital officials of the State, we are told, are overwhelmed by the burden of their departmental duties, writes Harold J. Laski, in the ‘Manchester Guardian.’ They have no time for that co-ordinated planning that is essential to a proper perspective and thence to successful achievement. Exactly as an army has a general staff to lay down the larger aspects of its policy so we ought to have a civilian general staff which could co-ordinate the large outline of policy within which the different departments concerned with economic planning should function. Its members ought to be free from departmental duties; they should have the task of formulating not the day-to-day decisions, but the long-term views, and they should be able to sec.ur© attention for their views from the Cabinet.

The analogy between the General Staff and an army and the proposed Economic General Staff is, I suggest, a wholly false one. The former, within the range, of policy to which it is confined, has a pretty specific function, and each of its members has within that range a function, as it were, within a function,_ for which he must assume responsibility. This is not the idea of an Economic General Staff in the minds of its sponsors. Its members are to shape the ends for which at least seven different departments now directly collaborate, in in which also the contracts branches of at least four others are vitally interested. They are not to be in and of these departments but above and beyond them.

INTERMEDIATE BODY. Two criticisms at once occur. Is it not clear, first, that such an Economic General Staff could only be, at best, an intermediate, body, presumably of wise men, advising the. War Cabinet}' They could not plunge into, the details of all departmental work; if they did, by definition, they could not have the time to concern themselves with taking large, general views, valid for a considerable ■ period of time. But, if this is the case, are they not at once in two major difficulties? (a) Either they must themselves choose the issues about which they, are to co-ordinate and plan, in which case there is, on all experience, the certainty of immense and continuous friction with the departments actually concerned with the execution of measures; or (b) they deal' with those larger issues only which the departments choose to submit to them for advice. If the first principle is to be the basis, every difference between the Economic General Staff and a department will become a Cabinet question if it is profound. If the second principle is to apply, because the Economic General Staff is then only interstitially relevant to the range of economic policy, it cannot possibly fulfil the function of planning and co-ordination. The first principle means an enormous addition to the burden of the War Cabinet, as anyone will testify who knows the ingenuity and persistence with which a department will defend ground it has chosen to occupy. The second abandons altogether the conception of an Economic General Staff in the sense in which its advocates defend it.

AN ALTERNATIVE. i believe, therefore, that the proper technique for economic co-ordination arises directly out of a proper struc-

ture of the War Cabinet. The essential decisions must bo made by the War Cabinet itself: no lesser executive body can hope to formulate them with adequate authority. Below the War Cabinet there should be an Economic Affairs Committee, presided over _by the Minister of Economic Co-ordina-tion. Its members would be the Ministers in charge of the different departments, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or his nominee, to represent the Treasury view. The- preparation of the materials for the questions the committee would discuss would lie with a committee of the permanent heads of the departments concerned.' From this angle the effective co-ordina-tion of policy would at each point be in the hands of those who were directly responsible for its execution. This structure will be familiar from its obvious resemblance to the central defence pattern of Great Britain. In 'each case at the apex of the administrative pryamid is the Cabinet, Below I it is a committee, headed by the Minister of Economic Co-ordination and including all the Ministers directly involved, which corresponds to the Committee of_ Imperial Defence, with the Prime Minister as its chairman; I think the Minister, like the Premier, would need a small secretariat of his own, but this, like the Cabinet secretariat, would he a clearing-house for,' and not a maker of, policy. ADVANTAGES OF PLAN. Below this, again, would be tbe Committee of Permanent Heads of Departments, which would correspond to the Committee of Chiefs of Staffs. All of them, no doubt would form from time to time their appropriate sub-commit-tees for investigation and report. The advantage of this scheme lies, X think, in its refusal to separate policy from administration, especially where the separation gives the right to be consulted to men who have no responsibility either for political or executive decisions. It avoids a friction that is the cause of endless delay. It makes, at each'stage, the source of responsibility clear. It makes the unification of policy the business of those who build its component parts. And since I believe that the effectiveness of an administrative whole is rarely more than the sum of the effectiveness of each of its separate parts, I believe that this scheme meets the needs implied in coordination by making those who direct the separate parts responsible for their integration into an effective unity. Coordination, in short, to he real, must grow from within; it cannot be imposed from without.