PLANNING AND ITS DANGERS.

HL Deb 26 May 1943 vol 127 cc648-71

LORD ELTON rose to call attention to certain dangers involved in the application of too rigid a policy of planning to postwar conditions; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, in asking you to consider some of the dangers inherent, as it seems to me, in the present cult of what it is now fashionable to call planning, I am certainly not seeking to raise again the faded banner of laisser-faire. For good or ill, and, on balance, I believe, myself, decidedly for the good of the country, all three great Parties in the State have long since committed themselves to the principle of State interference, which is the term used, instead of the word planning, by the Victorians, who, despite their reputation, were sometimes able to call a spade a spade. Disraeli committed the Conservative Party to the principle of State interference in his great Administration of 1874–80. The Labour Party embraced the new principles almost immediately after the foundation of the Party in 1900; and, although the Liberals were the last-comers, and did not abandon the principle of individualism, which had formed the philosophic basis of their Party for so long, until shortly before the last war, they have for a good many years now displayed all the traditional enthusiasm of converts. I suppose that at any time during the last twenty-five years it would have been virtually impossible to deduce from a mere examination of the Statute Book which Party was in power, so consistently did the legislative machine, whoever had control of it, continue to grind out much the same piecemeal extensions of the authority of the State.

The pendulum has swung fast and far during the last fifty years, and fundamentally the danger to which I wish to call your Lordships' attention is merely the danger of any swing of any pendulum—the danger that it will swing too far. I do not suggest that it has yet reached by any means the limit of the are through which it can safely travel. I am quite prepared to believe that there are basic national services, and industries so integrated that they have virtually eliminated competition, which could profitably become, not State Departments administered by the bureaucracy of Whitehall, but at least public corporations on the model of the London Passenger Transport Board or the British Broadcasting Corporation, subject in the last resort to Ministerial authority and owned by the State, but for practical purposes and from day to day entirely self-governing units. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that there are grave dangers inherent in the advance of State interference in the stage which we have at present reached, and I think that the first and most obvious danger comes from that perhaps not very numerous but certainly powerful and influential section of public opinion which has by now persuaded itself that any increase in State interference is in itself a synonym for that progress which so many worship and so few define.

Many worthy men and women do now palpably believe that any suppression of private enterprise, however adventurous and successful it may have been, and any extension of State control, however grandmotherly and unimaginative it may prove, is necessarily an advance. I could not help noticing, when a noble Lord on these Benches expressed the hope last week that, after the war, private enterprise might recover its freedom, that a sudden shadow passed across the benevolent and expressive countenance of the noble Lord, Lord Snell, almost as if the mere suggestion that private enterprise might survive the war was in itself somehow retrograde. I may be maligning the noble Lord, for whose moderation and judgment I have the very deepest respect, but the fact remains that there are very many who are now enrolled in the singularly comprehensive ranks of the planners for whom any and every advance towards State interference is necessarily progress.

These are the men and women who, if they could have had their own way, would probably by now have founded Ministries of the Fine Arts and of Sport. After all, one remembers how the early Socialists firmly believed that if only State control could be advanced sufficiently fast and sufficiently far, before long it would have got rid of greed and pride and bad taste in the arts and untruthful journalism—yes, and, as some believed, also of religion and of carnivorous habits. I even came across last week a suggestion in the Press of a Ministry of Leisure, by which, presumably, outside the strictly-controlled factory to which he has been directed by some planning official, the unfortun- ate citizen would have his scanty hours of leisure carefully planned, so that they should be serviceable to the State. There are plenty of advocates of the all-embracing State who would by now, I think, have given us, if they could, a Ministry of Automobilism. If we had had that, we can be quite certain that we should not have had the Austin or the Morris car, and we should not have had cheap motoring, just as without some private enterprise there would certainly have been no Spitfire, and therefore by now, in all likelihood, no Britain.

This is the first and gravest and most obvious danger—the danger that after a century at the beginning of which man was summoned to trample on superstition and breathe the free air of the modern age, we should end by marching through bureaucracy to the Servile State, every stage of that drab journey being hailed with short-sighted enthusiasm by whatever section of the public saw some advantage to itself in the extension of compulsion to somebody else. That takes me to my second point. I am arguing against excess in what is in itself a salutary principle, against that excess by which, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, every virtue is in danger of degenerating into a vice. I do not think that it is sufficiently recognized that the mere word "planning" is in itself a euphemism, since all planning must involve compulsion. Now, "compulsion" is a word with an authoritarian and aggressive ring, which may well awaken some inhibitions in the breasts of those whom it threatens. The word "planning," on the other hand, suggests an altogether rational and inoffensive process, to which the conscientious citizen ought to take no exception. Under the influence of the rational suggestiveness of the title "planning", we are even apt to forget that planning need not necessarily be wise. After all, early in the war somebody, and presumably an irremovable civil servant, planned our coal output; only, as we have since discovered to our cost—and this is the sort of thing which the enthusiast is so ready to forget—he planned it wrong.

Now, compulsion surely is inevitably an element in the basis of all planning, for there can be no plan unless the planner can rely upon his materials, human and inanimate, being at the right place at the right time, and in the right quantity. He must know that so many workers, so many machines, so much raw material will be at the appointed place at the appointed time. The General cannot afford to express a pious hope that the division will be at the appointed map-reference at the proper time: if he is to win his victory, he must give his order. And so in the long run must the planner. That is why an element of compulsion seeps imperceptibly through compartment after compartment of the elaborate structure which the unofficial planners are designing for us. That is why the element of compulsion lurks, often unsuspected, behind the most prepossessing and benevolent façades, and may even, as I think myself, be detected in the recesses of the Beveridge Plan itself. After all, the Emergency Powers Act in war-time, with its children the Defence Regulations, and its grandchildren, the Orders under the Defence Regulations, is rapidly and silently extending compulsion far beyond the control or the ken of the Parliament which passed the original Act. And many of this multifarious progeny are already, it would seem, being groomed for post-war permanence by whose who gave them birth. In particular, one cannot help feeling, the Essential Work Order, under which last week a young man who had expressed every desire to enter one of the Armed Services and who suffered from claustrophobia, was sentenced to imprisonment for not wanting to be a miner.

All that, of course, is excellent and necessary in time of emergency, but the next danger which I would ask your Lordships to consider is that there is likely to be no clear-cut transition from emergency of war to no-emergency of peace, that no sudden armistice will sound on the Home Front, after which we might shake off the burden of our war-time controls. Indeed, the thoroughgoing planners, the men who invented planning about a dozen years ago, have always, I think, envisaged their plans being put into operation in an atmosphere of emergency and tension. For example, Mr. G. D. H. Cole frankly puts it in a pamphlet on the control of industry, written four or five years before the war—these are his words— Nor can we put limits to the degree of dictatorial power which under stress of emergency our Socialist Government may have to assume. And in another pamphlet, comprehensively entitled A Plan for Britain, the same writer explains—again I quote his words—that We shall have to take power in a brief comprehensive Act of Parliament to bring under the completest public control any industry or service which it may be necessary for us to administer publicly in pursuance of our national economic plan. You see, the procedure there envisaged is the war-time, the emergency, procedure of one empowering or enabling Act and then a series of administrative orders. In fact, in another passage of that same pamphlet Mr. G. D. H. Cole, who is certainly a leading planner, actually says that "it will be best for Parliament to meet as seldom as possible, leaving the Socialists to carry on." That would be the kind of procedure under an enabling Act which is only possible when there is a real sense of emergency. And, of course, when the author of that pamphlet envisages such procedure, one understands all the more readily his rather engaging observation a little further down, "I rather fancy myself for a place on the National Planning Commission."

But the emergency will not, of course, end with the sounding of the bugles for the "All Clear" after the war. And the more thoroughgoing the plans and the more imminent seems their application, the less likely is the sense of emergency to end—and this seems to me a point which is by no means always recognized. The further the State invades all human affairs so that a man's whole well-being comes to depend upon the policy of the Government of the day, Or upon the issue of one General Election—in proportion as that happens so do men begin to regard their political adversaries in a different light. They begin to see them not as fellow-citizens who happen to differ from them on this or that limited issue, but rather as deadly adversaries whose success would spell the destruction of every fair hope, as enemies of the State, in fact as the Fascist or the Communist. And that is where you have the vicious circle: the excess of State interference breeds tension, the sense of emergency, which in turn justifies the thoroughgoing amateur planners—those who think with Mr. G. D. H. Cole—in declining, in his words, to "put limits to the degree of dictatorial power which under stress of emergency" we may have to assume.

And finally, apart from these dangers, apart from the danger of regarding all State interference as progress simply because so much of it is obviously progress, apart from the danger of the compulsion which is latent everywhere, it seems to me, in the structure of planning, apart from the danger that the compulsion of the war-time emergency may pass insensibly into the compulsion of tae peace-time emergency—apart from all this, there remains one final and fundamental danger which, it seems to me, we must beware of in all planning for the future. And that is the danger, the simple danger, that we may purchase security at the price of liberty, and may at last find that we have lapsed insensibly into a modern variant of the Servile State. Now, this danger surely is latent almost everywhere in the designs of the most benevolent of unofficial planners, and even in the best known and most popular and most able of all the plans, the Beveridge scheme itself. There it seems to me you have running through the Report many indications that unless we are careful a thinly-veiled industrial conscription may prove to be one of the first of its results. Your Lordships may remember paragraph 130 of the Report, where the author writes of the enforcement of the citizen's obligation to seek and accept all reasonable opportunities of work, to co-operate in measures designed to save him from habituation to idleness, and to take all proper measures to be well. It would not be difficult behind those quiet sentences to deploy all the apparatus of bureaucratic tyranny, directing a man into any work anywhere, reconditioning him into the kind of employee whom the planning official considers useful, and subjecting him to such medical and surgical treatment as may render him a useful workman.

Of course that is very far from being the object of the authors of such plans, but that such dangers are latent is apparent, particularly, perhaps, to observers at some distance. This is what the Swiss critical journal La Liberté observed in its issue of April 14, which dealt with the Beveridge Report: Beveridge sees no other alternative to the reign of money in society than the reign of the State. And it went on a little lower down: Revolution is a violent scourge, but bureaucracy spreading itself is a powerful, if slow, poison for the whole social organism. Its end is the ant-heap where all true human ties are dissolved. We all know that the curse of laisser-faire was economic insecurity, and we know that State interference was needed to exorcize that spectre, and is now in process—the process is not completed—of exorcizing it. But the danger of State interference which we are all much more apt to overlook is that in the last resort it will give us the Servile State. The danger that even the Beveridge scheme will expose us to that contagion may seem remote, but I do not think any of your Lordships would consider it so remote if you chanced, as I have, to hear the scheme being enlarged upon by some of its most qualified exponents in language which strangely reminded one of that in which some enlightened Virginian slave plantation owner might have defended himself against a New England abolitionist in the last century—arguing that, after all, he provided complete security from the cradle to the grave, that he guarded against every contingency and danger, and only asked in return for faithful and contented service as long as the negro was able to work!

Of course all depends upon the spirit in which we set about the task of reconstruction. I am only harping, admittedly, on one theme. It is possible to make of reconstruction a fountain of eternal middle age, hopelessly alien from the spirit of the young men who will have to live under it and who are now too fully preoccupied to take part in the discussion of their own future. But it is also possible to make of it a salutary and worthy advance which will be entirely in consonance with our past history—always provided we are aware of the dangers which, now that we have come so far, are bound to be thickly sown about our path. That, my Lords, is why I venture to call your attention to the dangers of State interference which we are apt to overlook, while saying so little about its undoubted merits, of which most of us are by now pretty well aware.

Surely, with our history, our destiny is likely to be some sort of compromise midway between the rigid bureaucratic authoritarianism (shall we say?) of Russia and the thoroughgoing individualism of pre-Roosevelt America. After all, the men who made us founded their efforts upon free enterprise. Nobody planned the British Empire. It grew because men and women went where adventure and opportunity beckoned, while for the most part civil servants wrung their hands in impotent alarm or passed their memoranda on the parish pump "To You, Please," in sublime indifference. All our great rivals were States which closely planned and controlled their Imperial enterprises, and we out-stripped them all. Every mortal challenge to the Empire came from some authoritarian and bureaucratic Government—from Spain of the Armada, from France under the Bourbons, from France under Napoleon, from Germany of the Hohenzollerns, and now from the Germany of Hitler—one more version of that authoritarian and bureaucratic society which we have so often overthrown before. The men who made us—and there is no better title for them than their own—were merchant adventurers. They did not fill up forms. Nobody "directed" them to the East Indies in the seventeenth century, when the expectation of life of a factor in the East India Company was a little under three years. They went because they were merchants and because they were adventurers. We, too, my Lords, were merchants, and that is why we were able to build the Spitfire; we were adventurers, and that is why we found young pilots to fly it to victory. By all means let us plan, but in our plans for the future age let us leave some room for merchants and some room for adventurers. I beg to move for Papers.

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

My Lords, like all your Lordships, I am certain, I have immensely enjoyed listening to the noble Lord. I should like to say that with his broad conclusion I found myself in entire agreement. I was slightly alarmed to see the terms of the noble Lord's Motion on the Paper because I frankly confess I do believe in the necessity of what I call planning. I am happy to say that I find what I call planning is not entirely what the noble Lord sets out to attack. I found, as I listened to him, that the objects of his wrath appear to be, first, Socialism and, second, the Beveridge Report. I am not concerned at the moment to defend either of these things. I am bound to say, to be quite fair, that the Socialism which the noble Lord attacked—and I anticipate noble Lords opposite would say so—is rather an out-of-date Socialism; but that is their quarrel, not mine. I am only too happy to hear the noble Lord attacking Socialism from these Benches. Nor have I any quarrel with his comments on the Beveridge Report, but I feel he is not entirely fair to what I call planning.

His method is the time-honoured one of setting up bogies for the pleasure of knocking them down again. I have not heard anybody actually advocating a Ministry of Sport or Automobilism or Fine Arts. It is unfair to planners of the kind to which I belong to say that that is the sort of thing we advocate. The noble Lord began talking about coal by saying—this is another bogy he set up—that somebody planned the coal business during this war. Of course that is quite wrong. The whole trouble about the coal business during the war is that nobody planned it. What happened? When France went out of the war the whole industry was dislocated, and all the miners were taken into the Army. It seems to me most unfair to say that that was planned—not unfair so much as untrue. Of course it was not planned. The whole difficulty we are in about coal might have been overcome if there had been foresight and organization, which are the two words I associate with planning.

The noble Lord approves of State interference in so far as it is beneficial, and he said, quite rightly, that it had gone a long way to get rid of economic insecurity. Just think for a moment what is involved in getting rid of economic insecurity. The noble Lord is optimistic if he thinks that the State interference we have had as yet has done anything permanently to get rid of economic insecurity. We had the advantage of listening to the noble Lord, Lord Keynes, the other day on the proposals for the International Clearing Union. That is suggested to your Lordships as a first step towards machinery which will help to control the trade cycle, help to get rid of booms and slumps, which I imagine to be the first requisite of getting rid of economic insecurity. How is that to be done without control, without what I call planning? That is the only bone I have to pick with the noble Lord—in emphasizing the dangers I think he may be leading people to suppose that economic security will come without planning and without foresight. The noble Lord went right to the root of the matter when he said the final danger is that we may attain security at the price of liberty. That is to state the problem exactly as I would state it myself. We have got to have control and can we get it without sacrificing our liberties? The noble Lord I think is on the right side, though—I say so with great respect—he gave some ammunition to those who are not so farsighted as he is.

VISCOUNT LEVERHULME

My Lords, I would like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on having introduced this very timely Motion this afternoon and also, if he would allow me, I would like to congratulate him on his manner of doing so. The Motion is timely because, I suppose, there is no word which is more frequently met with to-day in conversation, in debates and in newspaper articles than that short and sweet word of four letters, "plan." So fashionable is the word that any proposal to do anything, whether it is made in a speech, in a White Paper or in a Report, comes to be known as "the so-and-so plan." In many cases we accept the word without demur. The noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, has told us that what he assumes by the word "planning" is very much wider than the aspect of it which dominated the introductory speech by the noble Lord, Lord Elton. But I do feel that the words "plan" and "planning," as they have come to be used to-day by those who call themselves planners and who advocate what is generally known as the planned economy or the planned society or the planned State, have a much more specific implication, and it is in this extreme and specialized form of planning that the dangers mentioned in the Motion are particularly to be found.

We all accept at the present time, and cheerfully accept, restrictions upon individual liberty. We are geared up to the pitch of total war and the sole criterion by which everything is judged is, will it help us to win the war? Some people talk and others write as if at the end of the war there will be a hiatus, as it were, in the passage of time and that quite a different world will dawn upon us. Of course, at the end of the war we shall, as it were, turn over the page to begin a new chapter; perhaps it would be more accurate to say a new volume. It will introduce many new features, but it will be another volume of our island saga, it will not be an entirely new story, a totally different tale. We shall not be like the schoolboys, who, so the story goes, were assembled one day by the headmaster who said to them: "Boys, as from next Monday the school will begin an entirely new tradition." We shall have to continue to draw upon all that has been best in our past heritage, to add to it in our own day and to pass it on.

The strongest among all our traditions has been that of liberty, freedom of choice on the part of the individual, and the fostering of those conditions which enable the individual to develop his personality and to show initiative and enterprise. We have held to the belief that the State exists for the individual and not the individual for the State. The individual has been our unit and our group-unit has been the family. This concept of liberty has flourished wherever conditions of government have encouraged its growth. I think it has never been more forcibly expressed than it was by that great South African statesman, General Smuts, in his rectoral address at St. Andrew's University a few years before the war, when he said: We decline to submerge the individual in the State or the group, and we base our organization of the State and society on individual freedom and the free initiative of the citizen. We all accept encroachments on our liberty in time of total war and I do not wish to suggest for one moment that immediately the war ends those controls and restrictions such as rationing and so forth can be immediately removed. The process will have to be gradual but, if I may paraphrase a saying which will not be unfamiliar to some noble Lords present, there must be an inevitability about the gradualness. The speed at which we can travel along the road must be governed by circumstances, but we must be certain where the road leads to.

In the complicated world conditions of to-day, Government certainly plays a larger part than it did in the past, and there will be an increasing contact between Government and industry, but there is a marked difference between State action and State control. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, said he did not wish to raise the banner of laisser-faire and I do not wish to march close behind that banner myself. I may be just a little bit nearer to it than the noble Lord, but, if I remember rightly, in that very interesting book of his St. George or the Dragon, he says that if the pure gospel of laisser-faire ever did exist it has never existed 100 per cent. If it has never existed 100 per cent. in the past, certainly it does not exist to that extent to-day and is not likely to in the future. But in the already accepted functions of Government there is a wide field where Government can do more to stimulate and encourage industry, to increase production and employment. By its Budgetary policy, by timing its expenditure on public works and no doubt in many other ways, Government can help to forestall and reduce the ups and downs of the trade cycle. But there is a vast difference between creating conditions in which industry can flourish, under which its progress can be steady, and stepping into industry itself, first here and then there, with Governmental controls of various kinds, with rigid plans for fixing prices, and with plans designed to restrict the entry of newcomers into particular industries and branches of trade and commerce.

It is a peculiarity of most "planners"—I use that word as it were between quotation marks—that they see a particular sphere of human activity which they wish to plan as the one essential thing that matters. All the economic and social ills of the world, so they feel, can be traced to the one cause to which they propose to apply their plan. But a plan to control one part of the economic structure often creates disequilibrium in another part of the structure. Then, of course, another plan is suggested to deal with the new problem that is created. The planner no doubt believes he can press a button when some nicely adjusted point of balance is reached between freedom and control, but this process of aggregation may be far from easy to stop once it is under way. One plan needs another plan And a third plan to unite em And then, the first time things go wrong, Another plan to right em; And that plan calls for other plans, And so ad infinitum! The noble Lord has referred to the dangers of regulation by Orders in Council, and I would like to endorse the view he has expressed. I think the same applies to Acts of Parliament which may contain a clause with wide discretionary powers for a Minister to regulate all sorts of things. Drugs administered by a physician to pull a man through a dangerous illness may become a vice if the patient resorts to them after he has regained his health. If I have emphasized the industrial aspect of this matter, it is not because I am not fully aware that there are many other aspects of equal importance. There are many other phases of life which rigid planning can invade to the detriment of liberty, and perhaps in many of these the danger is even greater because liberty of thought and what I may call spiritual liberty are at stake. Education is certainly one of those spheres. Here rigid planning may well result in a uniformity which would destroy all that has been derived from the past, instead of enlarging the opportunities for entering into that heritage. There are those who would take away from parents all free choice in the matter of schools for their children, who in fact, I rather suspect, look upon the parent as having a certain nuisance value in the world of education. The parents having produced the babies, these educationists would like the State to do the rest.

A new Education Bill will shortly be before us. I hope it will be found possible to have an extension of the school-leaving age and some measure of part-time education to follow. The kind of education to be given is, of course, even more important than the quantity. But the educational structure will matter too. Will it be rigid or flexible, will an attempt be made to force all education into one Government pattern, or will there be scope for variety? Certainly we can no longer leave to chance those highly important and formative years of adolescence, those years between school-leaving age and the age of, say, 18 or 19. To drift through them is fatal. They call for discipline, guidance and an opportunity of learning something about citizenship. Then the war has familiarized us with a mass of pre-Service organizations. Some are old and have been given a new impetus, some are new. These organizations have a double value, a value to the young people themselves and a value to the Services for which they are trained. There is a general feeling, quite apart from the war, that it would be a pity to see these organizations disappear, and I believe in some form or other they will survive. In time of war there may be a very good reason for putting these youth organizations under Government Departments, but while many of these have been created by Government action, there are others which have been of voluntary spontaneous growth.

I think one of the dangers of rigid planning is that the voluntary organizations will tend to come more and more under Government control. They would be given a "ceiling"—a word dear to the planner's heart—beyond which their numbers would not be allowed to increase, and in the end if we were not careful we might find that the regimentation of youth had become a reality. It may be said that: the Englishman is too individualistic and has too deeply ingrained a love of liberty for anything very dreadful to happen here. I think such things are less likely to happen here than in many other countries; but can we say that it is impossible for them to happen here? We should not only look at each proposal to which the label ''plan'' is attached from its short-range standpoint, but we should consider also its long-term implications. Let us take our bearings. During the long journey along our historical highroad, whenever we saw a signpost marked "Progress" we were able to assume that in that direction lay the ideal of freedom. The necessities of war have involved the taking down of many of these political signposts, just as the threat of invasion has led to our taking down the actual signposts on our highways and byways. We must be certain that in putting back our political signposts we do not make them face the wrong way. How often we remind ourselves, and tell the world, that we are fighting this war for freedom. May this freedom never prove to be what Tennyson described as: "Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name." At any rate, let us remember the warning contained in the two lines which follow this quotation: Step by step we gained a freedom known to Europe, known to all; Step by step we rose to greatness—through the tonguesters we may fall.

VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE

My Lords, everyone who listened to the erudite, eloquent and thought-compelling speech of my noble friend Lord Elton, must have, at least, been impressed by the fact that the art of oratory has not wholly disappeared from the British Parliament. I had hoped, and indeed I expected, that at least some representative of the Labour Party would have risen in his place to tell us whether, and to what extent, the Labour Party differs from the views so forcibly and eloquently expressed by the opener of this debate. But I have noticed with some surprise that all the occupants of the Front Labour Bench have, in the course of the debate, disappeared, and that the whole Party is represented by a smaller number of representatives than I can ever remember being the case at so important a discussion as this.

I was particularly glad to hear the noble Viscount, Lord Leverhulme, address us with the forcible arguments to which we have just listened. The old Liberal Party has always been to me somewhat of a conundrum in its modern manifestations, and I was delighted to hear my noble friend Lord Elton stress the fact that, whatever may have been the laisser-faire doctrine of the old Liberal Party in days gone by, emphasis upon the doctrine of the Manchester School is laid far less by the Liberal Party in presenting its policy to this country than it was even in the days when I had the experience of occupying a seat in the House of Commons. I am going to venture to say this, if my friends of the Liberal Party will not take exception to it: I believe the greatest handicap to the Liberal Party during the last generation has been the fact that it has been open to their opponents—and I freely confess that I was one of them in the old days when I spoke as a candidate for the House of Commons—to suggest that the text of the Liberal Party was: "Each for himself and the devil take the hindmost." To-day, thank God, we find all Parties, apparently, more or less agreed as to their political objective in regard to social reforms.

VISCOUNT SAMUEL

My Lords, may I interrupt my noble friend to ask whether the days to which he was referring were the days about thirty years ago when the Liberal Party introduced national health insurance and national unemployment insurance, and the Conservative Party so violently resisted both schemes?

VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE

That is the very reason why I ventured to say, at the outset, that the doctrines of the Liberal Party were always, to me, an incomprehensible conundrum

VISCOUNT SAMUEL

They were not understood, perhaps.

VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE

I would only say, as I ventured to remind the noble Viscount before when we were discussing the Beveridge Report, that, contrary to the view which he then expressed, the National Health Insurance Bill was given most sincere support by all the chief spokesmen on that Bill on the Conservative Benches.

VISCOUNT SAMUEL

They divided against it in full strength on the Third Reading.

A NOBLE LORD

And they obstructed it all through.

VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE

My Lords, I am certainly not one who desires to quarrel with my noble friends on the Liberal Benches on these matters now. I was venturing to say to all those who are sincere believers in the gospel of social improvement in this country that we are bound to welcome the fact that all three Parties to-day are, so far as one can ascertain, in hearty sympathy in regard to all practical measures designed to that end. May I venture to suggest to my noble friend Lord Elton that the influence of our Dominions overseas has been not inconsiderable in affecting the policy of all Parties here at home, and that from no quarter has that influence been stronger than from those Dominions that are located beneath the Southern Cross? In our oversea Dominions a good many of the old pioneers, with their spirit of adventure, are still alive. They are men who carried out magnificent work in the process of being merchant adventurers in various parts of the globe. Those men, though for the time being they may appear to adopt an extreme political outlook, are in my judgment as individualistic in their desire to maintain personal enterprise as anyone to be found in the old country. I feel that, because there is that spirit of pioneering and adventure still abroad in those countries, there is less fear of the sort of results that Lord Elton has anticipated developing in those countries than would be the case here.

In this country, I am sorry to say, as the Government assume greater control, and indicate a greater tendency to participate as a competitor in industrial enterprises, there is a tendency for the individual adventurer to feel that the Government are a serious competitor, and that is apt to result in the stifling of his enterprise or, at any rate, in his not developing to the fullest extent his natural abilities as an industrial or commercial pioneer. Excessive Government control stifles the sense of individual responsibility, and Government industrial enterprise, owing to the fear of competition aided from the public purse, is "apt to militate against personal enterprise in the fields of industry and commerce. The agent of bureaucracy is, after all, not necessarily more competent than the individual pioneer or entrepreneur whose activities he threatens to stifle or supersede.

I cannot help referring, in this connexion, to the present-day control of agriculture. There is no more individualistic occupation than that of agriculture, and yet the need for control and the advantages of control have been amply demonstrated during this war period. If the improper and unprofitable use of the land did not imperil our national security, I should hesitate to advocate the continuance of control after the war period; but, after all, the land is limited in extent, and the wise use of it is of vital importance to the safety and well-being of the nation. On that ground, I for my part unhesitatingly support the idea of a limited amount of Government regulation and control of agricultural activities in this country after the war is over.

One word in conclusion. Successful planning must be based on clearly ascertained knowledge and science. If the bureaucracy is going to take even greater powers of control than in the past, the scientific staff of Government Departments must be materially strengthened, and that staff must be given a proper status and adequately remunerated. It is a sad fact to-day that in every Government Department the scientific staff occupy a lower status and are worse remunerated than the administrative officials. That should not be the case. It does not occur, so far as I know, in any other civilized country; and, if planning is to be successful, and if bureaucratic direction is going to be continued, let us at least see that the scientists have a proper status in the various Government Departments and are adequately remunerated.

LORD SNELL

My Lords, I feel that I am entitled to receive, and I feel sure that I shall receive, your Lordships' sympathy on this occasion, because you know that I have to enter into a verbal encounter with my noble friend Lord Elton with one arm tied behind my back. I am enormously tempted to follow him in some detail in regard to much that he said, but that is a privilege which, on this occasion, I must deny myself at all costs. Judged by the terms of the noble Lord's Motion, he was entirely loyal to his distrust of precision, because the Motion gave me no definite guidance as to the nature of the dangers that he foresaw. For example," too rigid a policy," to quote his own words, might be taken to mean that any definite policy in regard to planning constituted a danger. But, placing a very generous interpretation upon the noble Lord's speech, what he appeared to feel was that there were great dangers involved in planning too rigidly. His view would be that the Government should not prematurely commit themselves to a policy of planning which would make it difficult, and perhaps impossible, to deal with unforeseen opportunities should they arise.

First of all, we had better try to make up our minds about what we mean by the word "planning". It might be considered as a merely physical thing, such as town planning or the rebuilding of devastated areas; but on a wider interpretation, which is what I think my noble friend had in mind, it would include the making of plans for dealing with all the major problems which may arise in the post-war period. Planning, as His Majesty's Government understand it, means taking thought for the morrow, and as far as possible ensuring that future needs shall be estimated and prepared for. We have an example of that foresight in what is now taking place at Hot Springs in Virginia. There His Majesty's Government, true to their vice of planning beforehand, have suggested that world food surpluses should be pooled, in order that they may be available for distribution 1:0 famine-stricken people at a later period. This very striking and, as it seems to me, entirely commendable step, is not altogether a new experiment. For instance, there was a far-seeing planner in the land of Egypt many thousands of years ago, known as Joseph. To quote the story: He gathered up all the food … and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. And I have no doubt that he was at that time accused of interfering with individual liberties, that he was regarded as a nuisance, in fact, as a new social orderer, to use the words of my noble friend Lord Elton himself. But the people did not take that view. They did not come to him and say: "You have taken away from us the right of private enterprise, of private liberty." The people came to him and said: "Thou hast saved our lives." And that is the purpose of planning: as far as we can to save misery and perhaps life itself.

Lord Elton called attention to the grave dangers that exist in regard to excessive interference by the State, but there is a grave danger in everything that is overdone. There is grave danger in over-eating, but eating is still necessary if you are to live at all. We know what happened when private enterprise was almost entirely unrestricted in this country, which is a theme I should also like to dwell upon if my position here allowed me to do it. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, said that planning needs compulsion. Well, perhaps it does, but does it follow that all compulsion is wrong? We have to apply compulsion to secure isolation in the matter of infectious diseases, and in many other things. It is all a question of degree, the extent to which you use an entirely justifiable weapon. There seems to me to be growing up in this country a new superstition that every act of the State is wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, was, however, good enough to say that we are now aware that the State can act beneficently, but I remember that it took the nation two generations to persuade the State to take these virtuous actions. My noble friend Lord Leverhulme, in what, if he will allow me to say so, was a most balanced and useful speech, was also very concerned about the preservation of liberty. We all arc. But what does liberty mean? It means among other things freedom from want, it means freedom from anxiety, it means freedom from disease, and, if happily it may be so, freedom from war. Well, those things are not produced by private enterprise alone, they are produced by a national will, properly organized with balance and foresight, with creativeness and with restraint.

All agree that there is a danger in any premature policy that cannot be varied to meet occasions as they arise. I am not sure that my noble friend Lord Elton would agree even with that. He seems to be so afraid that the dragon of bureaucracy would slaughter St. George that he would leave our patron saint to find his own way in a confused world without either map or compass. It so happens that I have not to say with Job," Oh that mine adversary had written a book," because my noble friend Lord Elton has obliged in that respect, in a commendable and worthy book in which his thought is carefully expressed. In that he says: In its instinctive reaction to crisis, a society such as this, mellowed by centuries of organic growth, can draw upon profounder resources of instinctive wisdom than any planning committee of experts. I cannot help wondering whether, judged by what happened after the last war and before the present war, the profound sources of instinctive wisdom were adequate to the occasion. It did not, I submit, save the nation from the most grievous suffering and economic peril; it did not provide either homes for heroes or work for the needy or always food for the hungry; and it did not prepare the defence of its own life against a visibly growing external danger. Indeed, the most satisfactory aspect of that grim period was that the nation had previously planned and carried out a scheme of unemployment insurance which saved thousands of homes from disaster.

Lord Elton's fear seems to be that a system of planning would endeavour to substitute a minute and rigid regulation and State control for individual moral qualities and for the instinctive wisdom which resides in our people. This really, I suggest, boils down to the application of common sense to each of the problems with which we may be faced. Lord Elton dislikes generalizations apparently, but what is his own thesis except a generalization of the vaguest character—that instinctive wisdom is sufficient to carry us through? Certain principles, I suggest, are always applicable both to men and to nations. In planning the education of a boy, for example, I imagine, though I have never had it to do, account has to be taken of his natural capacity, of his personality and temperament, before you can do justice to the boy's career. So with a nation. Each nation has its own qualities, its own traditions, and no universal rule is applicable.

Lord Elton's willingness to rely upon the instinctive wisdom of the commonalty rather than on the informed preparations of the far-seeing few seems to me to ignore day-to-day experience. Reforms of a constructive character rarely, if ever, spring from the multitude, but usually from pioneer individuals and groups. The wise statesman is he who, foreseeing the need, makes preparations accordingly to meet it. Our own people are the easiest in the world to provide for and to plan for. Their steadfastness and experience are the surest basis upon which we can build, and we need not be afraid that their independence of character will be undermined. They have an instinctive dislike of being over-governed, and they do not let any of us live under the delusion that we are indispensable. Therefore I do not feel that anything which the State has yet done or proposes to do is likely to strike at the roots of our national character. People have certain disadvantages. We are not very quick in the uptake in regard to new ideas. If we met a new idea in the street we probably should not know it, and if we did we should hate the sight of it! That has certain advantages. This strong individualism represents a barrier against excessive regulation.

Lord Elton's criticism represents a kind of new attack on the Government, for it is not very long since I stood at this Box defending the Government against the criticism that it was not planning quickly enough, when the Beveridge Report had actually been presented for twelve weeks and only sixteen out of its twenty-two propositions had been accepted. The criticism then appeared to suggest that a wrong decision would be better than a delayed decision. If the Government stand between these two positions, perhaps after all they are more or less right. What is the position of the Government in regard to planning? It is stated very quickly thus: There must first of all be victory. We must emerge from this crisis as a sovereign nation, or planning and reconstruction will be entirely useless. The Minister without Portfolio, Sir William Jowitt, who is concerned in this matter, has said: Planning is good if it enables our own people to develop their own personalities. It is. bad if it reduces us all to the level of ants in an anthill. That declaration should do something to assuage the anxieties of my noble friend Lord Elton. Again the Minister said: Clearly we can lay down no hard-and-fast rule. Each measure of economic control and the question of its continuation must be looked at in the light of post-war circumstances. There is thus every indication that the Government also deprecate a too rigid policy in regard to planning, and that the decisions will not be taken until the war is over, although estimates and calculations can be made, and are being made, of what the position is likely to be.

The Prime Minister, in his broadcast on March 21 this year, said that for the present, during the war, our rule should be "No promises," but every preparation, including where required preliminary legislative preparation. Where at the present time, then, have we got in this matter? To use further words of the Prime Minister: Nothing could be more foolish at this stage than…to prescribe the exact groupings of States or lay down precise machinery for their co-operation. It is nevertheless true that intervention by the community as a whole is essential, and this cannot be appropriate, effective or well directed without the most careful attention to detail. Careful attention means foresight; it means, in a word, planning. The Government share Lord Elton's dislike of rigid or over-elaborate planning. Their attitude on this matter has aroused the hostility, first, of those who say, "Do not prepare at all, improvise, let things happen, trust to the instinctive wisdom which resides in the population," and, secondly, of those who feel it is possible and advisable, in advance of knowledge, to make decisions regarding future needs. The position of the Government is between those two positions—to advance as far as we can see our way, and to prepare, as far as we may, for what lies beyond our knowledge.

LORD ELTON

My Lords, I quite realize that a Motion such as mine, couched in the most general terms, scarcely permitted the noble Lord who replied to say anything very pertinent to my own fears, and I cannot therefore complain if, with all his usual charm, he has not really met the main questions I tried to suggest to your Lordships. I realize also that if one submits to your Lordships a Motion in which one devotes oneself almost one hundred per cent., to drawing attention to the demerits of something which one recognizes to possess many merits also, one leaves oneself open to the method Lord Snell has so engagingly employed, and that is to emphasize the merits, which I would never deny, but with which I had no time in my opening speech to deal, while really doing very little to meet criticisms as to the possible excesses which were mainly present in my mind. One difficulty is that the noble Lord necessarily speaks in one breath as a representative of the Government which has one definite view, and in another, as we all must do in our private capacities, speaks as one interested in public affairs, as one who will interest himself in, and back, some scheme quite outside his Government duties. Of course confusion arises because a planner, of whom we mostly think as an amateur, devises schemes which may or may not later on be sponsored by the Government.

The nearest I think Lord Snell came to defining planning was "taking thought for to-morrow," and if that is what planning means there is, of course, no one in your Lordships' House who would not endorse it completely. As Lord Snell said, Joseph was one of the early planners. It was very delightful to hear him giving those quotations from the Old Testament for I had been puzzled by the passing of a Bible so steadily up and down the Front Bench during the last two or three speeches. I must say I do not think Lord Snell met the fundamental difficulty, which I had attempted to put, and which was put with very much more force and lucidity by my noble friend Lord Balfour of Burleigh. The fundamental dilemma is: Can we get security without servility? That is the dilemma latent in the Beveridge Report, and, with all respect, I do not think that the noble Lord attempted to meet it.

I am grateful to him, however, for two quite precise statements which he did make on behalf of the Government. One is that they do not propose to make any definite plans until they are in a position to see the actual circumstances under which the plans will have to be carried out. For that I am sure we shall all be grateful, for it was not clear, or so it seemed to me at least, in the debate on the Beveridge Report that the Government were not planning vast expenditure without any knowledge of the circumstances under which that expenditure would have to be undertaken. I am also grateful for Lord Snell's adoption of an attractive phrase from Sir William Jowitt, the Minister who is specially concerned with these affairs, in which he himself referred to the dangers of a society of ants. If that is the spirit of the Government I think that we all look forward to the future with reasonable confidence. And I hope that, in spite of his constant references to my unfortunate book (which I do humbly submit were largely irrelevant both to their context and to the present debate) Lord Snell will feel that this debate has not been entirely wasted. I thank him very much for his reply and beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.