Graham Wootton - The Politics Of Influence: British ex-servicemen, Cabinet decisions and cultural change (1917-57)

In 18 Volumes

First published in 1963 by

Routledge

Reprinted in 1998 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

1963 Graham Wootton

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Politics of Influence

ISBN 0-415-17554-2

Political Sociology: 18 Volumes

ISBN 0-415-17820-7

The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes

ISBN 0-415-17838-X

TO

SAMUEL H. BEER

AND TO

MARY

I T is no longer controversial to say that the standard expositions of the British system of government focused too much attention on the formal institutions and too little on the forces that make those institutions work. What the commentators chose to do they often did well in many a polished essay, but in general the picture they painted was blurred and unevenly balanced. It was as if intelligent men had based their accounts of how football is played not on direct observation but on a close study of the Laws of the Game and the referees handbook, supplemented by Press cuttings and the memories of a few ageing players.

Among the grossly neglected topics was the influence of non-party (or pressure) groups in the formulation of public policy. Although identifiable groups of this kind had been active since the eighteenth century at least, no considerable description of them appeared until 1908, when A. L. Lowell, professor of government at Harvard University and later its President, published his celebrated account of our political system. As with the study of party organization, we had to wait for an outsider to reveal us to ourselves.

Lowell pioneered but hardly anyone chose to follow. Brief references may be traced, as in the works of James Kerr Pollock, Ramsay Muir and others, but no further considerable account of the activities of non-party groups in contemporary British politics appeared for another thirty years, until, on the eve of the last war, Sir Ivor Jennings illustrated their influence on Parliamentary legislation. But the book was hardly off the press before the winds of war swept across Europe and the world, uprooting Sir Ivor and covering over the path he had so recently rediscovered.

In the post-1945 rediscovery of pressure groups in Britain it was another professor of government at Harvard, Samuel H. Beer, who led the way with an article published in January 1955 and who has since done more than any other single person to keep the path open and illuminated. Professor W. J. M. Mackenzie of Manchester University followed hard on his heels, and since then several British and American writers have fallen into step. During the course of 1958 the first two general books on the subject of pressure groups in Britain made their astonishingly belated appearance.

Other works have followed, and so a start has been made in the long overdue task of correcting the traditional image of our political system. But for further progress two prerequisites at least will have to be fulfilled. One is that the great non-party associations shall be studied in detail, either individually or as a group of associations occupying common ground, and to a substantial degree from the inside (for which one need not be an insider). Considerable experience has convinced me that accounts based on the associations pronouncements, published reports, official journals and other open literature, while better than nothing, will never serve the larger purpose. For the study of pressure groups, although interesting, is, like psephology, not enough. It must serve the larger purpose, which is not, as it might sometimes seem, to banish the formal institutions (or official groups) from the standard books but rather to reveal the reciprocal interaction between these and the electorate, the political parties and the pressure groups in the decision-making process. In short, the ultimate aim must be to see our political procedures in the round.

The other prerequisite is that the conduct of such groups shall be analysed against the background of the historical circumstances and of the political culture (those values, beliefs and emotions that bear upon political conduct). To relate pressure-group activities to the culture is of crucial importance. On the one hand, the rediscovery of pressure groups, so valuable as a corrective to received opinion, will itself hopelessly mislead if, as an American scholar, George E. Vincent, observed nearly sixty years ago, it causes us wholly to lose sight of the larger unity which actually underlies these apparently endless group-struggles. It is to this larger unity that the study of the culture leads us. But the study of the culture is important for another reason. Over two generations ago, C. H. Herford (in his The Age of Wordsworth) drily remarked that in England excessive preoccupation with ideas has always been a less pressing danger than a too concrete concern with facts. In British political studies this still seems so today. Some students of British pressure groups, at least, seem to have overlooked Alfred Marshalls warning that the most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves. Fact-collecting can never serve the larger purpose. We need the facts in detail but we also need a framework within which the facts make sense. One such framework may be fashioned from the concept of a culture, which, when related to particular historical circumstances and the distribution of official and unofficial power, may help to explain not only the objectives of pressure groups and the strategy adopted for achieving them, but (what the larger purpose also requires) the very emergence and character of the groups themselves.