PZ 1070/40(2) ‘Transmission of F.O. secret packets to & from Consulates etc. abroad’ [‎33r] (66/835)

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Service to represent His Majesty’s Government and this country in foreign
countries, to try to put across the policy, whatever it may be, upon which the
Cabinet is determined in those countries, to try to promote British interests, of
which international peace and international understanding are the most
important, and to do that within the limits set out, not by Foreign Office
officials, but by the Cabinet. I say within those limits advisedly, because,
"obviously, if it is the policy of the Cabinet to appease a foreign country, nothing
that the Foreign Service official can do can alter that policy, and, equally, if it is
the policy of His Majesty’s Government to be firm, there is nothing that the
Foreign Office official oan do to placate. The function of the Foreign Service,
therefore, is in the main interpretative rather than positive. The foreign service
man is not a principal; he is only the agency An office of the East India Company and, later, of the British Raj, headed by an agent. of His Majesty’s Government.
I do not think it is possible to over-emphasise that point, for it is a point of
which the House is aware, but of which the public is not fully aware.
If that is the position, if the Foreign Service is not responsible for the
formulation of foreign policy, one might ask: “ Why all this fuss and bother;
why bother to reform the Foreign Service at all? ” I will try to give some of
the reasons of my right hon. friend. My right hon. friend is not proposing
Foreign Service reform because in his view the Foreign Service is inefficient. In
the view of my right hon. friend, in my view, and, I think, in the view of
everybody who has seriously considered the problem, the Foreign Service has been
and is extremely efficient. The reason is simply that time marches on, that
conditions change, that even the best machine has to be brought up to date ahd
remodelled from time to time. The Foreign Service is a very good example of
that. From the day in 1782 when the Foreign Office first began, when the
Secretary of State for the Southern Department and the Secretary of State for
the Northern Department were abolished and their places taken by the Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs, there has been a considerable series of reforms, the
last of which was made at the time of the last war. If there has been a necessity
in the past to reform the Foreign Service, in the sense of bringing it up to date,
there is more necessity to-day, because in the lifetime of the youngest member of
this Parliament world conditions generally have completely changed, and in
particular the conditions with which the Foreign Office is called upon to deal.
It is said that the human body renews itself in every tissue every seven years.
Something like that has happened in the last generation to the whole structure
of human society. It is vital that every one of our services, and especially the
Foreign Service, should be remodelled to take account of those new conditions.
I conceive that there are two main changes which have taken place and
which vitally affect the conduct of our international affairs. The first is the
disappearance of what, for lack of a better term, one might call the governing
class. That class has disappeared everywhere. Until relatively recently, in every
Western country there was a small and restricted class which was responsible for
the government and for the policy of that country. In every country that class
was the same. It had the same traditions, the same outlook, the same standards
of education and of values. In those days it was necessary only that our
diplomats should be members of the governing class. Indeed in those days it
was essential that they should be members of that restricted class, because if they
were not, they would have had very little influence in the countries to which they
were accredited. Then the hunting ground of the diplomats and the Foreign
Office officials consisted of a few drawing rooms and a few old chancellories. The
general field of human affairs in the country in which he worked was something
beyond his ken and beyond his responsibility. I would mislead the House if I
tried to suggest that members of the Foreign Service to-day were drawn from so
restricted a class, or were so restricted in their ideas. For a long time the net
has been cast very widely. But tendencies which were well-marked before the
war will certainly become even more definite in the post-war period, and it would
be desirable that every member of our Foreign Service should be in the fullest
possible sense representative of our whole nation, of every class and section of the
community, and that he should be able to deal in the country to which he is
accredited with the whole nation, irrespective of class and outlook. That is one
great change.
There is another, perhaps an even greater, change that has come about.
I mean, the fusion of politics and economics in foreign affairs. That is very
much in the public mind and is very widely discussed in the press. In one sense
there has never been any distinction. The influence of economics has always been
imposed upon politics.' Indeed, it is just a little more than 100 years since
Mr. Disraeli introduced into this House a motion advocating the amalgamation
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