Secrets and Lies

An odd waking yesterday to hear 93 year-old Dennis Healey demanding that Civil Servants be tried for treason. Apparently when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the ’60’s he had not been told by the then Cabinet Secretary of a decision to spend many millions replacing the Polaris nuclear weapon system. 

It brought back a remark from Tony Benn, who as Minister for Technology in Harold Wilson’s ‘white-hot’ government, was not told anything by senior civil servants about the 1957 Windscale fire and its aftermath. For those not familiar with ‘Windscale’ it was given a make-over and re-named Sellafield. Very resonant today with developments developing in Japan. Absolutely mind-boggling. Once Healey found out he had been livid. It was not, he declared, the job of unelected senior Civil Servants to  decide how the UK defended itself. 

The nuclear industry has form on this sort of thing. The Russians tried very hard to cover up Chernobyl. It was scientists in Northern Sweden who first announced the presence of a huge plume of highly radioactive material in the upper atmosphere. It took a while for Soviet intransigence to finally admit they had ‘a bit of a problem.’

In the UK the linkage of nuclear power with nuclear weapons immediately wrapped everything up in the strictest security blanket. Why on earth should a relevant Minister of the Crown need to know anything about a disaster in Cumbria which had massive public health implications? “Benn? Bit of a lefty old boy....”

Civil Servants in the 50’s and 60’s regarded themselves as a political class with a patrician approach to governance. Thatcher began to politicise them in the 80’s with her, “Is he one of us?” remark about a senior civil servant. They were (are?) supposed to be neutral. 

We have travelled some way from patrician to spinner. Damian McBride, one of Brown’s aides, was officially a civil servant, paid for by us the taxpayer, to spread his lies, half-truths and insinuations. Cameron’s choice of Andy Coulson as Communications chief says things are just as bad as ever.