---

Ministers and Civil Servants

It is the role that is key. Numbers are neither here nor there. In a sense, everybody ought to have a special adviser, but after one has taken the advice, they should deal with the civil servants. Special advisers should not come between the leader and the civil servants, or give direct instructions to civil servants to ensure that a line is followed. I think that the situation is changing now. I would like to think that the present Prime Minister has recognised the problem. I had a welcome report yesterday from a fellow member of my party who said that the Prime Minister has recently been asking civil servants for their views. Apparently, that shocked quite a few civil servants. When a group of them were first asked for their opinion, they sat in silence. They did not know what to say because they were so used to taking instructions rather than giving views. That may be a slight exaggeration, but it was reported to me as being genuine by someone who has worked inside Downing street, and I would like to think that it is the case. It is not so much that civil servants have been politicised or selectively appointed because of their politics, but that there has been a tendency to change the political culture from the very bottom. I believe that that started with Mrs. Thatcher. If someone wants to bring about a revolution, they have to start at the bottom and work upwards. For example, Keynesian economics was considered out of fashion in universities. If one goes back to Mrs. Thatcher's time, the Cambridge Department of Applied Economics used to make forecasts of the economy and get it right time and again. The group that got nought out of 10 for its forecasts was the London Business School, but Mrs. Thatcher withdrew funding from the Cambridge department and took all her advice from the business school. My hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) said that it was not a question of being right but of being in fashion. The economic fashion for neo-liberalism started a long time ago, and even in universities one could not find people who taught Keynesian economics, yet Keynes is suddenly acknowledged as having been right. Many of the remedies that he would have proposed are now being considered. Keynes, of course, is dismissed as an extremist who talked nonsense, but apparently Bertrand Russell used to defer to him because he was intimidated by his intelligence, so he was not daft. I am not saying that Keynes was always right, but his was a counter-voice. We should have people with different economic views debating the future so that we can test ideas to destruction before they are put into practice. My hon. Friend the Member for Pendle said that in his speech. We have to challenge the whole culture. We have to develop a genuine debate about politics within parties—parties are a vital part of our constitution, and part of our pluralistic world, too—within the civil service and within the universities. People must not be viewed as on or off message, or as one of us or not one of us. Those authoritarian undertones have to go. In future, we must have a much more open debate about policy, and we must listen to some of the voices that have been regarded as dissident or out of fashion. The civil service is still relatively safe compared with some of our other institutions. I believe that my party is much less healthy than the civil service, but I would like to think that it will improve considerably in future years. I could speak at greater length, but I think that I have said more than enough.