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The British Civil Service and the War Economy. Bureaucratic Conceptions of the ‘Lessons of History’ in 1918 and 1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2009
Extract
Sir Edward Bridges, when he was trying in 1952 to guard against the dissolution of an official inquiry into economic organization which he hoped would establish a set of principles for civil servants to follow, sent a minute as Head of the Civil Service to the Cabinet Secretary which included a powerful rhetorical question: ‘If those of us who have lived all our working lives in Whitehall, and have studied the Whitehall organization, give up as hopeless all attempt to reform it from inside, then what hope is there of any reform in our time?’ In the context of Winston Churchill's return to power in October 1951, Bridges was implying that the new Prime Minister had unilaterally imposed his own conception of Cabinet organization on his official advisers, and ignored their claim that they could effectively design what was required. Churchill had in some sense broken a convention that senior civil servants were primarily responsible for the official side of what they called ‘the centre of the machine’.
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- Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1980
References
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