During the past eight years particularly, the management of the Foreign department has become avowedly and frankly autocratic. Parliamentary discussion of foreign policy has become so restricted as to be perfunctory. It is confined to a few hours’ roving debate on one day in each session. The eliciting of information by means of questions, never satisfactory, is rendered extremely difficult by the ingenuity employed in evading the issues it is attempted to raise. Advantage has been taken of the wholesome desire that discussion of foreign policy should not partake of mere party recriminations, to burke discussion altogether, and this process has received the endorsement of both Front Benches. A claim to “continuity” has been further evolved to stifle debate on foreign affairs, whereas in point of fact, if one feature more than another has characterized British foreign policy of recent years, it has been its bewildering fluctuations. Parliamentary paralysis has had its counterpart in the country. The present Government’s tenure of office has been marked by an almost complete abstention from public reference to foreign affairs. The public has been treated as though foreign affairs were outside—and properly outside—its ken. And the public has acquiesced. Every attempt to shake its apathy has been violently assailed by spokesmen of the Foreign Office in the press. The country has been told that its affairs were in the wisest hands, and that mystery and silence are the indispensable attributes to a successful direction of foreign policy. The caste system which prevails in the diplomatic service, and which has survived unimpaired the democratizing of the majority of the public services, facilitates these outworn political dogmatisms. Appointment is made by nomination and selection. Candidates are required to possess an income per annum of £400. The natural result is that the vast bulk of the national intelligence is debarred from the diplomatic field of employment. A study of the Foreign Office list will disclose the fact that over 95 per cent. of the British diplomatic staff is composed of members of the aristocracy and landed gentry.
Connection between politics and business is ignored.
Inevitable exile from their country results in our diplomatic representatives abroad losing touch with the center of affairs and living in a mental atmosphere remote from the popular and progressive movements of the time. Another pronounced characteristic of the system is the indifference displayed by the Foreign Office to the business interests of the nation. Our vast commercial interests, so intimately affected by our relations with foreign Powers, are regarded as lying outside the orbit of diplomatic considerations. The connection between politics and business—and by business we mean the entire framework of peaceful commerce upon which the prosperity of this country depends—appears to be ignored, or, at least, treated with indifference and something like contempt. The services of our Consuls abroad are not sufficiently utilized, and the Consular machinery requires complete overhauling. Such questions as, for instance, the effect upon British commercial interest of British diplomacy supporting the acquisition of undeveloped areas of the world’s surface by a Power like France, which imposes differential tariffs upon British goods, and opposing the acquisition of such areas by a Power like Germany, which admits British goods on terms of equality, does not appear to enter into Foreign Office calculations.
Policy is framed by military experts without Parliamentary control.
In the last few years also has been added another institution which modifies national policy without coming under Parliamentary control, the Committee of Imperial Defense. Its influence upon the Cabinet is nominally indirect, and its activities confined to the discussion of hypothetical events. But no one can doubt that its recommendations exercise a powerful effect on the executive decisions of the Government. No criticism of the advice given by the Committee is possible in Parliament. Momentous military and naval schemes are prepared there on which hang the issues of peace and war, as in the case of our recent relations to France. It is an intimate and powerful means of framing Government policy according to the ideas of military experts, without the knowledge and control of Parliament.
In the various ways indicated, opportunities of evincing an intelligent concern in its foreign policy has been increasingly withdrawn from the nation. The work of the Department escapes all outside control, loses all sense of contact with national life, and tends more and more to become an autocratic institution, contemptuous of the efforts of a small group of members in the House to acquire information, and utilizing a powerful section of the press to mold public opinion in the direction it considers public opinion should travel.
The nation awoke with a shock to the evils of this state of affairs in the summer of 1911, when it suddenly found itself on the very brink of war with Germany over a Franco-German quarrel about Morocco, and became cognizant of the existence of diplomatic entanglements of which it had no previous intimation.
It is obviously impossible to attempt here a full presentment of the Moroccan crisis of 1911. But the story is inseparably intertwined with the avowals to the House of Commons on August 3rd, 1914, of the secret understanding with France which has played so capital a part in bringing about British intervention in the present war.
Nation must participate in direction of foreign policy.