Sir John Anderson on Government
When Sir John Anderson gave his opinion, in his Romans lecture at Oxford, that a system of Cabinet committees is preferable to the supervision of broad spheres of Government activity by non- departmental Ministers, he spoke with authority. Yet although recent history confirms the importance of the subject he chose, it does not completely confirm his conclusion, for he himself, as' Lord President of the Council, demonstrated by his sustained and con- vincing success that supervising Ministers can do vital work so long as their main tool is sage advice rather than mere interference. The opposite case of the comparative failure of the Ministry of Production was not so much an argument against supervising Ministers as against supervising Ministries. No problem of Government is more im- portant than this. When an increasing volume of purely executive work, fed from the expanding sphere of direct Government activitY) tends to make Ministers specialist heads of Departments, some re- inforcement at the top is inevitable. But it is equally essential at the lower levels. The biggest threat to the success of the present Government lies not in its determination to nationalise a large section of the economy but in its ability to find the men and create the organisation to do the work.
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