A MINISTRY OF INFORMATION

The foregoing notes that I have made are an attempt to rationalise our experience at the Ministry of Information in a few of the more important aspects of our work. In some instances I have adopted the historical sequence as best illustrating our experience: in others I have been descriptive or merely critical. In all I have aimed at nothing but a hasty record of my own impressions which I recognise as likely to he often inaccurate and sometimes unjust. Their value, as I see it, is that they are the impressions of someone who was continuously associated with the Ministry's work from 1939 to 1945 and who was as much associated with its higher direction as any other single person.

These impressions are not framed for those as familiar as myself with the kind of work they relate to. To them they must seem platitudinous or else debatable. Most attempts to formulate rules about publicity are. But they are intended as a rough guide to anyone in the future who may wish to check his recollections of our war-time practices or may find himself faced with the same problem as faced the makers of the Ministry in 1939, the problem of creating a Government Department of Information without pre-existing structure or foundation. I have accordingly chosen the subjects that, as I see it, will remain the chief sources of difficulty on such an occasion, assuming that the main publicity system of this country remains that of free independent agencies.

This much said, I think that it remains to say a few things about what the Ministry of Information means in a country which is not intending to depart from such a system. I trace many of the difficulties of the 1939 planners to the circumstance that they were uncertain whether their new Government Department was to displace or supplement the existing system. This uncertainly, in its turn, was largely due to their expectation that the opening of war would bring about a set of conditions in which the ordinary publicity system could not function owing to the destruction and confusion caused by heavy air attack.

I doubt if the circumstances will over recur in which a Government Information Agency has to be created in this way out of the blue. I anticipate that, even after the dissolution of the present Ministry, there 95 - 94 -will be considerable peace-time public relations and publicity staffs in the service of individual Departments at home and even of the Foreign Office for overseas publicity. Such staffs will provide a nucleus of trained officials and the creation of a Ministry would be rather a problem of regrouping them in a new co-ordinated relationship than of starting to assemble a completely new body of recruits. But, in any event, I do strongly advise that no attempt is made to take up the new Ministry where our old one left off and that the records of our experience are regarded as material for the formulation of a general philosophy, not as a “blue print” of how these things ought to be done next time. A Ministry of Information which is not to be a totalitarian instrument must fit itself into the free publicity system of the country with as little friction or displacement as possible. To do that it must study the publicity methods and organisation of its day instead of starting from the preconceived notions of another day. Publicity is peculiarly the subject of fashions and modes, and the Government machine, if it is to be acceptable, must wear the fashions of the day.

For this reason alone the planning of such an organisation that will have to work in the full light of day had much better not be done in secret. Above all, it cannot be done in secret by persons without practical experience. If it cannot be done openly and with full consultation before the day when it is to be set in operation, it would be much better to start it off avowedly incomplete with a small staff of experts and leave them gradually to recruit and develop when the time has come that they can work in the open. It may be that one or two branches have to start off readymade on the word “Go”, but in general national propaganda can well afford to bide its time in the early days of a war, and in the long run it will do much better by building slowly on sound and acceptable foundations than by trying to launch itself fully organised to fit an academic conception of what it ought to do.

Secondly, a Ministry of Information in a democratic country should seek efficiency, but not power. It is all wrong to be bemused by totalitarian analogies. In the totalitarian system 96 - 95 -the propaganda agency is the instrument of State power at home: its one supreme duty is to dominate the minds of the citizens. For that purpose everything that can contribute to psychological influence is grist to its mill and its success is measured by the range of instruments it can use and the harmony of purpose that it imposes on them. This is an attractive conception for the professional publicist in this country, whose training in the promotion of “campaigns” makes him naturally disposed to apply the same technique. So he can, without ill effect, in the limited region of campaigns: short-term organised publicity to persuade people to do or abstain from doing certain definite practical things such as eating potatoes or burning less coal. For such harmless practical purposes unanimity and breadth of appeal are all to the good.

But, when one passes to the larger issues of politics or sentiment, it would be an altogether disastrous thing if the Government of the day, however broadly representative of political factions, were to have in the Ministry of Information an organ for successfully imposing its views on the free publicity agencies of the country. If the Ministry of Information were powerful enough to achieve this and the Government wished to use it in this way it would mean that, while we were paying lip service to the value of free opinions and free criticism, we were really arranging to create an instrument to prevent these institutions operating to the inconvenience of the Government. This is a very real danger, because Governments in time of war much too readily confuse their convenience with the public advantage and newspapers are nothing like as vigilant as they should be in defending their own independence. The forms of pressure are many and often insidious.

In my judgment therefore it is fundamental that a Ministry of Information in a democratic country does not include among its purposes turning free opinion into Government opinion. Its full duty has been performed in this respect when it has done all that it can to ensure that the materials for forming a just opinion are available to those who wish to express one.

Consonant with this, there is nothing to be ashamed of in the admission that there are important fields of public expression that are 97 - 96 -outside the range of the Ministry's influence. People would sigh over the fact, for instance, that we never tried to recruit the theatre into the service of national propaganda. How distressing to see a play mishandling some significant current theme, what opportunities for promoting true doctrine through the medium of a popular play! I am glad that we resisted these approaches. It seems to me not a matter of principle but largely a question of practical judgment to decide in what directions to advance the influence of the Government information agency. In our day the theatre was essentially a theatre of entertainment, and we decided to leave it to its own devices accordingly. If the taste of the British theatregoer had been different and our theatre had been primarily one of debate and instruction, as it might have become, I might well take a different view. Conversely, we had considerable influence on the film during the course of the war, partly because we were ourselves so deep in the business if production and distribution, and partly because we acquired a departmental responsibility for securing facilities and releases of actors. Not that the film is any less an entertainment medium than the theatre, but its protean possibilities make it much more as well.

A Ministry of Information then is not there to take over activities or to direct them: its job is to be sponsor, provider and supplementer for the free publicity activities of its country. That gives it plenty to do, especially as the strains of war deplete existing activities and create needs for some that have been unknown before. And it gives it quite as much influence and power as is good for the country It has no wardenship of the “morale” of its follow citizens: to claim it is to lose the power to obtain it. But it has sufficient privilege in being authorised to minister to the special hunger for knowledge that is evoked by war-time conditions and to demonstrate on behalf of the State the community of interest and sentiment that should unite governed and governors in time of crisis.