[246] Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, March 6, 1906, p. 323 and following.
[247] 281 in number.
[248] Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, March 6, 1906.
[249] Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, March 9, 1906, p. 847.
CHAPTER XIV
The House of Commons, Under Pressure from the Civil Service Unions, Curtails the Executive’s Power to Dismiss Incompetent and Redundant Employees
The old practice of intervention by Members of Parliament on behalf of individual civil servants with political influence has given way to the new practice of intervention on behalf of the individual civil servant because he is a member of a civil service union. The new practice is the more insidious and dangerous one, for it means class bribery. The doctrine that entrance upon the State’s service means “something very nearly approaching to a freehold provision for life.” Official testimony of various prominent civil servants, especially of Mr. (now Lord) Welby, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 1885 to 1894; and Mr. T. H. Farrer, Permanent Secretary to Board of Trade from 1867 to 1886. The costly practice of giving pensions no solution of the problem of getting rid of unsatisfactory public servants. The difficulty of dismissing incompetent persons extends even to probationers. The cost of “reorganizing” incompetent persons out of the public service.
Personal Bribery replaced by Class Bribery
The intervention of the House of Commons in the details of the administration of the Post Office Department and the other State Departments, is by no means confined to the raising of salaries and wages. It extends to practically every kind of question that arises out of the conflicts of the interests of the State servants and the interests of the public Treasury. The intervention is due to the organized action of the “civil service unions;” and it is exercised primarily on behalf of classes of employees, but not exclusively. The latter day spirit of the civil service unions is to make the cause of the individual the cause of the class, and that brings about much intervention through the House of Commons, by the organized civil service, on behalf of individual State servants. The ancient form of intervention on behalf of the individual who had claims that were based on personal influence or family influence, on family ties, or on friendship, has been abolished. In its place has been developed intervention on behalf of the individual, prompted by the fact that the individual in question is a member of a civil service union that seeks to enforce certain ideals as to the terms and conditions that shall prevail in the public service. Of the two forms of intervention, the latter is the more pernicious and demoralizing, partly because it is—or will become—more pervasive, partly because it rests on class bribery and class corruption, as distinguished from the individual bribery and the individual corruption upon which rested the old form of intervention. Of those two forms of corruption, the bribery of classes is the more difficult to eradicate.