Should Civil Servants Have Political Freedom?

Northern Advocate, 19 December 1949, Page 9

Should Civil Servants Have Political Freedom ?

(By Robert Brown) LONDON (By Airmail).—Controversy on the degree of political freedom which civil servants should be allowed, which has raged intermittently here for nearly half a century, has flared up again. The House of Commons and the Trade Union Congress have been the scenes of the liveliest debates so far, but echoes are also heard throughout the country, in local trade union and political party branches.

Tlie most controversial issues have now been shelved by the Government. The final battle is not now likely to be joined until after the general election, probably towards the end of 1950. Until then skirmishing is likely to be confined to guerilla activity. For the present, the Government has committed itself to limited decisions which give wider political freedom to about half of Britain’s 1,200,000 civil servants.

the report, last June, Sir Stafford announced that the Government had decided to accept its recommendations. These recommendations were, briefly, that industrial civil servants, that is, the “minor and manipulative grades”, should get the wider political freedom which the Government has now, in fact, granted them.

CAUSED STORM For the higher civil servants, the Masterman committee p-nposed that the ban on anyone from ? typist upward standing for Pai iiament should remain and that the general rule forbidding too active a political role should be more precisely defined and applied rigorously in all departments.

Postmen, workers in Government offices in Whitehall are among those who have gained complete freedom to join in any political actrv'ty—including the right to stand foi Parliament.

MUST RESIGN If they are elected to Parliament, they must resign their posts, but there are special provisions fer re-instate-ment if th&y cease to be members within live years.

It was this section of the report which caused a storm. The trades unions, who had been hoping for wider politico l freedom all round, made immediate objections. They took the matter to the annual conference of the 8,000.000-strong Trades Union Congress. This forum of Britain’s organised workers, against the advic of its leaders, pledged its suppoit to the Civil Service Unions "in then demands for the fullest measure of civi freedom”. The resolution asserted that the Masterman proposals would take away “much civil liberty that custom and departmental rules have given” to the higher civil servant. This attitude was endorsed shortly afterwards by the Liberal Party.

Altogether, about 600,000 of the employees of the state will benefit from these decisions.

Officially, they rome under the heading “Minor and Manipulative Grades,” but the controversy has not turned on granting this extendec political freedom to these workers.

The debate is concerned with the treatment of the nearly 500,000 higher grade civil servants, ranging from office typists to top-ranking men who advise on important decisions of policy.

ONLY OTHER RULE In the past, these higher civil servants have not been allowed to stand as Parliamentary candidates unless they first resigned their posts. Apart from that, the only other rule was a general exhortatio i that they were “expected to maintain at all times a reserve in political matters and not put themselves forward prominently on one side or the other.” The interprtation of this was left to the head of each Government department and a certain amount of flexibility proved possible. Trades unions organising civil servants showed strong feelings about these rules and in 1947 a deputation interviewed the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir Stafford Cripps) to ask for greater civil liberty for civil servants. CASE RECOGNISED Sir Stafford told the trade union leaders that the Government recognised there was a case for reconsidering whether the rules required modification. As it was a difficult and controversial question, the Government would set up an independent committee to make recommendations. This committee sat und • the chairmanship of Mr J. C. Maste-man, novelist and historian and provost of Worcester College, Oxford

While the pros and cons of the Masterman report were hotly debated, the Government made it known that it would defer action. Now, the recommendations have been shelved for 12 months.

THE TWO SIDES Two recent statements sum up the two sides in the controversy: The Times wrote in a recent leading article: “If a senior civil servant, responsible' for advising the Government on the shaping of his department’s policy, were free publicly to attack the Government and in doing so to make use of all the inside information which he could, without violating the Official Secrets Act or his own sense of propriety, governments would take good care to appoint politically reliable men to senior posts, and the way would be open for transforming the service into a party organ".

Mr Douglas Houghton, Labour Member of Parliament, well known broadcaster and geileral secretary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation, wrote: “On political activities generally, the unions nave pressed for the removal of all specific nstructions and prohibitions contained in existing staff rules, believing ! t to be wrong in principle, out of tun- with current thought, unwise in present-day conditions, and unnecessary in practice, to prescribe detailed 'ines of conduct for civil servants in the matter of civil rights.”—(Reuters)

It took evidence from all who cared to give it and last April handed its report to the Government. Simultaneously with publication of