RELATIONS WITH PARLIAMENT AND M.Ps.

1. In the early years of the Ministry there is no doubt that its general relations with Parliament were bad. This was caused principally by its home activities which were neither popular with nor understood by most Members. The Ministry unfortunately started the war with the belief that one of its main functions was to “safeguard the morale” of the people of this country. Quite apart from the fact that no Government Department could achieve this by its own operations, this was a fatal claim to make, and it had a particularly bad effect in the minds of M.Ps.

Members suspected that in some vague way the Ministry of Information was coming between them and their constituents and they resented the idea that the activities of this new Government Department might be trenching upon their prestige or their constitutional position. I do not think that there was ever any real ground for this suspicion, though it died hard. But the home activities of the Ministry, which mainly contributed to it, were the arranging of public meetings and the organisation of what we called “Home Intelligence”.

At the beginning of the war separate political public meetings were in effect discontinued and the Ministry was expected to organise public meetings supported by all three political parties at which speeches should be made in support of the war effort. I note, in passing, that the Ministry's interest in meetings of this kind, which were mainly hortatory, declined very rapidly as experience showed them to be largely futile and we turned increasingly to a policy of confining ourselves to the supply of speakers to meetings, either organised by us or readymade, who could give genuine and useful information to their audience about some aspect of war activity. But the Ministry's responsibility for organising these public meetings and for selecting speakers meant that a Member would find that a meeting was being organised by us in his constituency at which all parties were supposed to be represented and at which the main speaker 3 - 2 -might be far from congenial to him. He might also think that he was the natural and proper person to take the main part in addressing his constituents on his own ground. The dislike which many Members had for this side of our work led to all sorts of Parliamentary difficulties in the early days and to some quite unreasonable restrictions upon it, such as Mr. Duff Cooper's agreement that the local Member should have a right of veto upon any speaker to be sent by us to speak in his constituency. There were further complications in towns consisting of several constituencies. A great many MPs contracted out of the right of veto, and it is fair to say that after about 1942 we heard very little of difficulties caused by MPs objecting to Government speakers. I think that this was mainly due to the fact that the speakers provided had come to be experts on particular subjects and had ceased to be mainly public figures.

Home Intelligence was, of course, a natural hunting ground for trouble. It was intended to give the Ministry, and through the Ministry the Government, a weekly glance at movements of feeling in the country more spontaneous than that provided by the newspapers. It was worked by a system of questions put to contacts in the various Regions, the answers being collected and summarised at Headquarters. It was the unfortunate propounders of these questions who were denounced by the “Daily Herald” in 1940 as “Cooper's snoopers”. There was never any reliable evidence that they were unpopular or resented locally but the Press were naturally suspicious of them and MPs were no less hostile. Some of the latter claimed that it was their constitutional right to be the interpreters of local feeling to the Government and that the Government were going behind their backs in organising their own arrangements in the matter. It often happened that this system threw up particular local complaints or grievances which the Ministry's officers were able to bring to the notice of the Government Department concerned and sometimes to have rectified. Some MPs felt that this, again, was depriving them of their traditional right and duty to champion the grievances of their constituents and do what they could to have them corrected. I feel myself that the Home Intelligence system violated no constitutional 4 - 3 -practice and that the Government was quite right to organise a system of this kind for informing itself about the current movements of feeling: but there is no doubt that in the early days the Ministry officials were not sufficiently careful in framing their questions or in their methods of enquiry and a satisfactory basis of working was not arrived at until we had learnt the extreme care and delicacy that were required in operating a running enquiry of this kind.

By and large Members of Parliament did not know what we were doing in the early days or why we were doing it and what little they did know they did not much like. A good deal of this misunderstanding was due to the failure of our Parliamentary representatives to be adequately firm or adequately explanatory as to what we were trying to do. I must stress that this work of explanation can only be done in the House itself and by means of constant contacts. It cannot be done by any arrangement for an Advisory Committee of a few MPs meeting the Minister from time to time in his Ministry. Two or three separate ventures of this kind launched by successive Ministers all came to grief partly through a lack of any common understanding as to what the meetings were to be about. Even Mr. Bracken, who reconstituted an MPs Advisory Committee despite the misgivings of his officials, failed to make a success of this particular institution and its meetings faded away into desuetude.

2. During the course of the war a certain number of MPs wished to go abroad to make visits, partly for speaking purposes. These related almost exclusively to visits to the U.S.A. and Canada. As they could not get out of the country without the grant of an exit permit, which had to be positively supported by some Government Department, nor could they obtain an allocation of the scanty transport available without similar support, they naturally turned to the Foreign Office and ourselves and claimed that we should act as their sponsors. It was in the nature of things that their visit should be concerned with public speaking and the Foreign Office therefore made it its practice to refer all such questions of sponsorship to us. We could only give our support if we could conclude that the visit and the anticipated 5 - 4 -consequences would be beneficial to British publicity (in the widest sense) in the country concerned and, although most of the MPs who went across gave useful broadcasts and talks when they were on the other side, it was obvious that there would be great difficulty in our expecting good results from every Member of Parliament who might wish to cross the ocean at a particular time. Yet to refuse to give our support to an M.P. was always an embarrassing thing for the Department and embarrassing for the Minister to whom he appealed. It was regarded not as a failure to sponsor but as a refusal to permit and all sorts of sinister conclusions were drawn. In the end we found ourselves sponsoring, even against our better judgment, in nearly every case and I feel sure that the right policy in a similar emergency would be the one that was finally adopted by the Cabinet after the end of the European war, namely to conclude that there is an over-riding advantage in permitting Members of Parliament, as such, to visit and make contacts in foreign countries and that no Government Department should be required to take the onus of certifying a particular advantage in the case of a particular individual.

3. The Ministry also came into contact with MPs in their capacity as journalists and writers of articles. During the war the Overseas Features Section of our Publications Division conducted a very large business in purchasing articles, either already published in this country or commissioned specially for the purpose, and distributing them either to individual posts abroad or to groups of posts for placing in local papers and magazines. Certain MPs are regular journalists of standing, e.g. Mr. Vernon Bartlett: others write on occasions. In the result, quite a number of MPs became recipients of fees for their copyright or for their services and the Treasury Solicitor was consulted on more than one occasion by the Ministry in order to make sure that there was no legal or constitutional impropriety in what we were doing. He was satisfied that there was nothing to prevent the Ministry paying money to MPs for this purpose and he was also of the opinion that an MP would not incur a penalty or disqualification from receiving such fees.

However, Mr. Bracken came to the conclusion that the practice of paying money to MPs in this way was undesirable in itself and contrary to the spirit of the Parliamentary rule that persons holding offices of profit under the Crown should not be eligible for seats in the House of Commons. He accordingly decided that the only services that we should accept from MPs by way of writing or granting us copyright must be voluntary services and a proposal made by one Member of Parliament, whose articles we had used till then, that he should be allowed to donate to some charity at our expense the equivalent of what we should have paid him, was turned down as unacceptable.

The Government's practice in this matter is not uniform and at least one other Department, notably the War Office, who were users of MPs articles for Army publications, though not on the same scale as ourselves, stated that they did not intend to adopt our self-denying ordinance for themselves.