Order for Second Reading read.

7.57 P.m.

I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time."

I ask the House to deal with the whole of the proceedings upon this Bill today as it is one which we are anxious to get through quickly. It is very short in form. I will come to the actual form of it in a moment. The object and purpose of this Measure is to enable the Government to appoint an Economic Secretary cial Secretary. There are, in fact, already two Secretaries to the Treasury, one of whom, as the House knows, is Patronage Secretary. Now that fresh work has come to the Treasury, which formerly I was doing as Minister for Economic Affairs, it is essential that there should be another junior Minister to assist in the work. The idea is that we should appoint an Economic Secretary for that purpose.

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for West Bristol (Mr. Stanley) asked me yesterday if I would take this opportunity to explain what is the position of the Paymaster-General who has been, or had been, assisting me in my capacity as Minister for Economic Affairs. As the House well knows, our present economic situation makes it imperative that we should develop both the sale of our goods in hard currency markets and our sources of supply from soft currency countries and especially, of course, from the rest of the sterling area. It is also imperative that we should develop new sources of supply from our Colonies. That three-fold task affects the responsibilities of my right hon. Friends the Colonial Secretary and the President of the Board of Trade, as well as myself.

We have, therefore, asked my hon. Friend the Paymaster-General to undertake special work for us in this field, which makes it impossible for him to take on the duties of Economic Secretary of the Treasury. Besides assisting us in the co-ordination of the plans of expansion and development, he will, from time to time, visit overseas countries. We contemplate, for example, that he may visit South America before long, and, later, the British Colonies in Africa. We are in constant consultation with other British Commonwealth Governments on these matters, and we hope that visits to their countries may also be arranged. My hon. Friend will have at his disposal advice from the Board of Trade and Colonial Office, as well as the Treasury, and the services of other Departments, such as the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Ministries of Food and Supply. It is for the reason that he has to take this very essential work that he is unable to take up the task which he was formerly performing for me when I was Minister for Economic Affairs.

The House will know that the salaries of Ministerial offices are governed generally by the provisions of the Ministers of the Crown Act, 1937, which limits the number of junior Ministers in the Treasury to two, and lays down their salaries, the amounts being £3,000 for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury and £2,000 for the Financial Secretary. The first sub-paragraph of Clause r of the Bill amends the principal Act so as to provide specifically for the payment to the holder of the new post of a salary similar to that of the Financial Secretary. The second subparagraph raises to three the existing limit of two junior Ministers in the Treasury, and the final sub-paragraph brings about a necessary extension, to cover the new post, of the definition given in the principal Act of the generic term of Parliamentary Under-Secretary, which is there Used to designate junior Ministers who, in fact, hold a number of special titles in their own Departments.

It may, perhaps, at first sight, appear that, in spite of its long Title, which covers both salary and ability to sit in this House, this Bill is wholly concerned with the salary aspect. The disqualification for membership of this House which might otherwise be involved in acceptance of the new office is, of course, removed, by bringing the post within the scope of the principal Act. Section 9 of that Act exempts from disqualification all persons to whom a salary is payable under that Act. The benefit of that provision will, therefore, extend to the new office if we bring the holder of the new post under the 1937 Act and provide for his salary to be paid under it. I hope that explains the purpose of the Bill, and that we shall be able to get a rapid Second Reading.

8.4 p.m.

We object neither to the matter of this Bill nor to the manner in which it has been presented. We recognise that it is particularly urgent, but I am sure that the representatives of the Government will admit that it is most unusual for a Bill creating a new Ministerial post to be rushed through, as it is hoped this will be, in the course of the same Sitting, and we hope that this will not be treated, by them or their successors, as a precedent in this matter.

We on these benches feel that in a matter of this kind we cannot refuse to the right hon. and learned Gentleman what he considers necessary for undertaking the very heavy responsibilities which he now bears. We have pressed for a considerable time for some closer link between the economic and the financial sides of our crisis policy. We are glad that that dichotomy has been resolved. It does impose a very heavy extra burden on the right hon. and learned Gentleman, who is now carrying on not only his previous important work, but the work of the Treasury as well. It is quite clear that, in the Treasury, he will need more assistance then even his very loyal colleague the Financial Secretary is able to give him. The only doubt I have is whether this was not exactly the kind of work which the Paymaster-General had been doing for the right hon. and learned Gentleman in his previous office, and whether it would not be possible either for him to continue, or, if he were to be the man chosen for this work, to allow the Paymaster-General to revert to the unsalaried sinecure which he very often has.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman has given us some details of the work, and particularly the work abroad, which the Paymaster-General will be called upon to do, and I see that that does make it impossible, certainly at present, for him to undertake this task. I do, however, ask the right hon. and learned Gentleman—I do not quite know when the occasion for it would be—if the House could be given in greater detail the exact Division between the rather numerous Ministers who will now be engaged in what is rather a common field, because, of course, the duties which the right hon. and learned Gentleman said are going to be undertaken by the Paymaster-General would seem to fall very much within the sphere of activities usually allocated to the Secretary to the Department of Overseas Trade. If we could have something to set out exactly how the functions are being performed by all these various Ministers in this particular situation, it would be of great assistance to hon. Members. So far as I and my hon. Friends are concerned, we feel that, if the right hon. and learned Gentleman, with his responsibilities and his authority, tells the House that, in these grave days, he needs this extra assistance, that assistance should not be refused to him. We shall, therefore, support the Second Reading of this Bill.

8.9 p.m.

I do not intend to detain the House for more than a few minutes, but I am very interested in this question of the machinery of Government. I think this Bill is another step in the right direction. I think it has been forced upon the Government by the pressure of events, and I myself regret that the Prime Minister has not given more attention than he has done in the last two years to the whole problem of the machinery of Government, which is becoming still more urgent as problems, particularly economic problems, press upon us with ever greater insistence and complexity.

The Government, it seems to me, are being compelled by the relentless pressure of events to deal piecemeal with the problem of the machinery of Government, but one thing which we can all welcome is the end of the period of dual control over our economic affairs. We may regret the reason for its coming, but I could never see how we could possibly carry on with a Minister for Economic Affairs and a Chancellor of the exchequer, both sitting in the Cabinet and both wielding wide powers, and possibly disagreeing—inevitably disagreeing from time to time—on various vital aspects of our economic policy. It has always seemed to me, and it still seems to me now, odd that we should have one man directing the economic policy of this country in addition to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, because the Treasury is looked upon as the summit and centre of political power in this country, and the Chancellor must govern the economic policy of the country. To have one Minister deciding financial policy and another Minister deciding economic policy, possibly; against each other, seemed to me to be absolute nonsense.

Let us look at the position which we shall be reaching when we pass this Bill. We find the right hon. and learned Gentleman with eight Under-Secretaries—the Economic Secretary, an office which is just being set up, the Financial Secretary, the President of the Board of Trade, the Minister of Food, the Minister of Supply, the Minister of Fuel and Power, the Minister of Transport, and the Secretary for Overseas Trade. The Paymaster-General is a sort of kitchen maid to the party.

I have always wondered—and I think this is an important and relevant point on the Measure which we are considering—what decides the Prime Minister to make some of these particular Ministers Cabinet Ministers, and others not. I have never understood, for example, why the Minister of Food should be out of the Cabinet and the Minister of Agriculture, who deals only with English agriculture, should be in. It seems to make complete nonsense. Now that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has these eight Under-Secretaries, all of whom will have to do what he tells them—I do not complain about that; I think it is a good thing that somebody is going to tell somebody else what to do, and we can legitimately hope that is going to happen—I would like him to consider the status of those Under-Secretaries and to decide which of them is to be in the Cabinet and which of them he does not wish to see too often, and so put our whole administrative machine on a more logical and rational basis than it has been on in the recent past.

8.12 p.m.

I welcome this Bill for the reasons which have been given and also for the fact that it indicates that the Government have an open mind, so far as additional Ministers are concerned, when circumstances justify such appointments. I welcome it all the more because last week, when the Prime Minister was asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin (Mr. D. Marshall) to appoint an additional Parliamentary Secretary to deal with the fishing industry, he gave a disappointing reply, and said that we can have too many Ministers. This time it is clear that the Prime Minister, in coming to a decision, has judged the matter on its merits, and has decided that the circumstances are such—and we can all agree on that—that an additional Minister should be appointed.

I hope that will be taken as a precedent and that, in future, whenever the Prime Minister is asked to appoint additional Ministers for any particular purpose, he will consider the matter on its merits. I venture to hope that, in the light of the Bill which has been introduced this afternoon, he will give further consideration to the suggestion put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Bodmin, because I believe the important part that fish has to play in the food of the nation at this time is such as to justify the appointment, at any rate during the emergency, of an additional Minister. Therefore, I welcome this Bill for itself, and also as a precedent which I hope will be followed when the circumstances again appear to justify similar action.

8.14 p.m.

Before this Bill receives its Second Reading, I should like to remind the House of paragraph 19, Part I, of the Report of the Select Committee on Offices and Places of Profit under the Crown. I hope the House will not consider I am being tedious in doing so. In 1941 the Select Committee examined and reported on a very large number of questions, including the holding of office by Members of Parliament. It expressed concern lest the number of Members owing allegiance to the Government became too great a proportion of the whole House. I imagine that the word "allegiance" was used in rather a special sense. The report stated that one of the three chief principles which by the beginning of the 18th century had become, and have since been, and should still be the main considerations affecting the law … was … the need to limit the control or influence of the executive government over the House by means of an undue proportion of office-holders being Members of the House … In normal times, I believe it is true to say, there are 62 paid Ministerial offices, the holders of which are entitled to sit and vote in this House. All right hon. and hon. Members will agree that there is an obvious danger about the proportion of those Members who owe allegiance to the Government in this sense, becoming too large. If the Government had a normal Majority today, or if any Government had a normal majority, the position would be that rather less than one-quarter and rather more than one-fifth of the Government supporters in this House would be entitled to sit on the Treasury Bench. I do want the House to consider whether there is not a very real danger in the growth of that tendency to create too many paid Ministerial posts in the House.

I would only add that I am not sure that the Government are right in believing that when they are faced with difficulties they can solve those difficulties by creating a new Minister. I do not know what has happened to the Minister of Economic Affairs. I imagine that shortly after his birth, he died. Although we have heard during the last few minutes considerable blessings on the creation of this new Minister—with which I do not disagree—I think it is a dangerous principle to believe that problems are going to be solved by creating a new Minister. I hope I have said enough to persuade hon. and right hon. Members on both sides of the House to watch very carefully the tendency to create too many Members who are entitled to sit on the Treasury Bench.

8.17 p.m.

The hon. Member for East Aberdeen (Mr. Boothby) in his remarks, with some of which I agreed, said he could not imagine why it was that the Minister of Food was not in the Cabinet and the Minister of Agriculture was. I think the answer is fairly simple—although my hon. Friend would not realise or know anything about that side of it. The Minister of Agriculture is also the Minister of Fisheries, and that puts his place up much higher.

The Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries has nothing whatever to do with either the agriculture or the fisheries of Scotland, and that is what I am concerned about.

Perhaps that is why they are behindhand. Quite frankly, I realise that in the difficulties of the day it is almost impossible for any private Member to criticise the actions of this House. We must rely, as I would, on what the right hon. Gentleman says—that it is absolutely necessary in order to face this emergency that he should have this additional Minister. On an occasion such as this, realising, perhaps more on this side of the House than do some of the hon. Members who sit behind the Minister, how difficult his position is, we cannot oppose the setting up of this new Minister. We do realise at the same time that it is absolutely essential today to coordinate under the Chancellor of the exchequer both the finances, as represented by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and also the economic duties of the new Minister under this Bill.

Up to that point I have no disagreement, but I maintain that this endless setting up of new Ministers constitutes a real danger to the House of Commons. This tendency has been growing over a period of years, and, with the setting up of new Ministers, instead of the power of hon. Members of the House of Commons growing, it is only the power of the Executive which has grown. That power of the Executive is getting more and more remote from the actual constituencies. Having watched the House of Commons for some years and having tried to understand what goes on here, I say that whenever new Ministers are set up, we tend to weaken the power of the ordinary back bench Member and of the ordinary constituent.

For those reasons, while not wishing to hinder the Chancellor in any way, I protest very strongly against the setting up of a new Minister, not on the grounds that he may not be wanted for this purpose, but because this constitutes a danger which has been growing during the last 20 years or more and on which, I have little doubt, far better speeches have been made by some of the right hon. Gentlemen opposite than I could make. It is a matter on which every back bench Member should raise his voice from time to time. It would not, be right to accept this Bill blindly. It is necessary for the moment, but it is also one more link in the chain which binds and restricts the power of the ordinary Member of Parliament.

8.22 p.m.

In spite of the harmony which exists tonight in the House, I feel I cannot let this Bill have a Second Reading in silence. I wish to protest against its introduction in this sudden manner. I wonder why it was necessary to introduce it so suddenly. If the Bill goes through, I want hon. Members to let it go through with their eyes open. This Measure is further evidence of the "Crippsian" mentality, if I may say so. It sets up another dictator. My hon. Friend the Member for East Aberdeen (Mr. Boothby) and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Barks-ton Ash (Colonel Ropner) have both called attention to the increase in the number of Ministers who have almost dictatorial powers. The Chancellor of the exchequer himself, in the last week or so, has become the economic and financial dictator of Britain. The appointment of this further Minister; who, after all, will only be a puppet of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and will have to defer to him, is another step down the totalitarian road.

We all know that the ambition of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was to introduce and pass in all its stages on the first day of a Socialist Government a Bill by which everything could be done by decree. The Prime Minister, whose name is on the back of the Bill, when he was writing in "The Socialist Plans for Local Government," said that they would set up a regional authority who should be a commissioner, and added: He is not impartial. He is a Socialist, rather like the Russian plan of commissars. We are setting up another commissar tonight. The appointing of this extra Secretary is only part of the dictatorial technique. All over Europe today we can see that facade of democracy. Anyone, however, who has studied the thing at all, as I have tried to do, and who has met people who have come back from the Continent, knows perfectly well that this facade of democracy is just a farce. People can do nothing except with the permission of the Russian key man. As my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Barkston Ash said, if we add up the number of junior Ministers who have almost dictatorial powers, we shall find that this Government is getting the totalitarian powers of the Russian Government.

If we are really doing that, we should be shooting them rather than instituting new Ministers.

I should not have dared to raise that point, but as it has been raised, I hope, Mr. Speaker, you will allow me to pursue it. I should like to shoot the lot. The appointment of yet another Secretary means that there is going to be more and more direction of labour, of material, and of money. There was a white paper published yesterday requesting Capital Issues Committee to refer to a Government Department before they act. All that increases the power of this Socialist Government. As for the direction of labour, if they try to direct labour or money or goods from Whitehall——

That is the subject of the next Debate.

—they set in motion forces which they have not thought of and over which they have no control. For instance, this Government released some time ago all the bricklayers from the army, but they forgot to release the brickmakers. There were no bricks to be laid. Again, today, they are directing men into various industries.

The hon. Member has got the wrong Debate.

Am I going beyond the point, Mr. Speaker? I want only to show how the increase in the number of these people with totalitarian powers is harmful to the country. I want to show—this is quite a short little statement, Mr. Speaker—that we have thousands of trainees in the bricklaying trade. The Government brought them into the industry and then gave a bonus scheme to increase output, but they quite forgot that——

I think that might be a useful matter to discuss when the Economic Secretary is appointed.

I am trying to bring forward arguments to stop his being appointed. I do not want to overstep the Rules of Order, but will you, Sir, allow me to go a little further, because I have a good example and I want to finish it? It is to show you the awful muddle that State control makes. It takes much longer to train a bricklayer than, say, a plumber or a carpenter, and the result now is that we have got thousands of houses going up all over the country—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."]—well, hundreds of houses—but they are only the shells of the houses, the bricklaying part, because of the bonus scheme, and there are not enough plumbers and carpenters to make the houses fit for people to live in. Therefore, I, for one, protest most strongly against the appointment of another puppet under our financial and economic dictator.

8.31 p.m.

I rise to support this Bill in but a few sentences. I should like to ask the Chancellor if he can answer this question. If it is necessary now to appoint an Economic Secretary to the Treasury, should that appointment not have been made when we appointed a Minister for Economic Affairs? Is it the fortuitous, incidental resignation of the former Chancellor which promotes the necessity for this appointment? It would seem to me to be either too late or unnecessary. If the appointment is necessary, then it should have been made many weeks ago.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Parson.]

Further proceedings postponed, pursuant to the Order of the House this day.