Sisson

The book at reference 1 was an interesting if not always easy read. 

A short book of some 160 pages of text, which I had been prompted to buy by reading the book noticed at reference 2, itself the result of a chance encounter in the Bugle of Brading. My copy from Hertford College Library of Oxford, a second edition, via Abebooks. It turns out to have been something of a standard text in the years after it was written, say the 1960s. A pity I had not come across this book fifty years ago when it might have made a difference! I got no further than Antony Sampson of reference 4, all the thing when I was young.

So I now know that there were at least four classes of civil servant: administration, executive, clerical and industrial. With examples being under secretary, the grade where Sisson landed, senior executive officer, clerical officer and postman. Plus people with typing grades, hostel keeping grades, statistical grades and all manner of other specialisms. With the first three of these classes reminding me of officers, sergeants and other ranks in the army. Not to mention their ladies, wives and women. I dare say that this has all been modernised since.

Sisson makes a good deal of the principal business of administrators being to have a story and to be able articulate that story to their Minister, who can then go on to sell it to his colleagues in Cabinet, to the MPs in Parliament and to the public at large. It being understood that under our regime it has to be possible, at least nearly all the time, to express a policy in language and in terms that the public at large can understand, be the policy in question ever so complicated. Which might mean that you do not always get that policy right – but that is better than getting into the habit of getting on without regard to what the public might think. Bearing in mind that it is easy enough to get the policy wrong for all kinds of other reasons.

In this, it is not a question of an administrator being right or clever about the subject matter, rather that he can come up with a compromise between the various conflicting interests which first satisfies enough people and second works well enough. It would be unusual for him to have to deal with a question on which everybody was agreed as to what should be done; there will nearly always have to be compromise. It would also be unusual for him to come up with anything new; to misquote Ecclesiastes, there is very rarely anything new under the sun.

I associate to the phrase invented by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to cover the child’s need for good enough parenting. People are not perfect, but they can be good enough.

At the Treasury in the 1990s, we had a Ministerial Correspondence Unit which dealt with Ministers’ voluminous correspondence. With treatment depending, to some large extent, on from whom the letter had come: the Prime Minister; some other ministerial colleague; a member of parliament – lords or commons; some important member of the public; or, some other member of the public. Some letters would be replied to by the minister himself (at least nominally), some by his private secretary or perhaps by some other civil servant ‘whom the minister had asked to reply on his behalf’. Some would be just filed away. And correspondence campaigns – perhaps in the form of pre-printed postcards – would be dealt with by daily weigh-ins. But in the round, Sissons is spot-on: processing this correspondence and preparing replies is an important part of what administrators do.

While at OPCS, back in the 1970s, the daily Hansard was in circulation, and it was quite normal for quite junior administrators, even quite junior statisticians, to turn the pages, particularly when one of their chaps was taking questions in one of the houses. At that time also, the broadsheets carried quite extensive coverage of parliamentary proceedings – which is not the case now – with lots of people now thinking that debates in the house are a bit of a waste of time and effort – which even parliamentarians do not take very seriously. Which is not good. I don’t look at Parliament on television, but I doubt whether that is much good either. Never mind all that stuff on social media.

One might get the idea from all this that Ministers are rather reactive, responding to stuff arriving in their in-trays rather than promoting initiatives or policies of their own. But this would not be fair. Initiatives and policies have to come from somewhere, usually not from the Minister himself - and as soon as people get the idea that the minister is sympathetic to this or that cause, all kinds of campaigners will be beating a path to his door with proposals for action. There is unlikely to be a shortage of correspondence.

Sisson is a bit scathing about the penchant for management and management consultants in the US, but he gives a lot of space to the rather different arrangements for administration in Europe, particularly in France and Germany. And while he is not scathing, I think he is a touch smug; perhaps at a time when the second war was not that long over, this was understandable. Perhaps now, the differences are not so great and given the various pickles we get ourselves into, another look at what others get up to would not come amiss.

He is not keen on the rather big role for lawyers in administration (particularly) in France. I do not suppose he would have much cared for the way that lawyers here seem to have accumulated (fee earning) jurisdiction in all kinds of matters in which they would not, in the good old days, have had any footing.

Nor do I think he was keen on reading a subject called administration at university, preferring candidates with a good general education. His own being English and Philosophy, followed by spells in France and Germany. He was also a poet, I believe quite a good one.

A rather inward book, mainly about administration of affairs in this country. Little if any space is given to dealing with the outside world – or to our declining importance in it. Or to all the complications of international relations and the complicated web in which we have to make our way. Sending a battleship or two over to intimidate some upstart is no longer an option – at least, not for us. Perhaps he would have argued that foreign affairs are not that different from home affairs, at least in so far as their administration is concerned. The administrators’ job remains weighing up the pros and cons and coming up with a story. I think I would argue that foreign is different, not least because it is physically scattered all over the globe. High speed communications notwithstanding – and they were not very high speed in Sisson’s day.

I suspect this book is a bit dated in other ways, but nevertheless, it remains a good introduction to the subject, to the balance of powers at the top of our governing heap. I shall give it another go in due course.

PS 1: the snap above is taken from Amazon. I guess the spine has been bleached by the light from red to a matt yellow, but that does not explain why my copy is red panel on blue dust cover, rather than the other way around. Faber’s way of distinguishing the first edition of 1959 from the second edition of 1966?

PS 2: on page 154, we get the thought from Bagehot that: ‘… the Queen was dignified; that meant she was for fools to google at … estimated the number of those who were not fools as being … less than ten thousand. These read the Economist…’. Even more dated!

References

Reference 1: The Spirit of British Administration – C H Sisson – 1959. A copy is to be found at https://archive.org/details/spiritofbritisha0000chsi/page/168/mode/2up. 

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/church-two.html. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._H._Sisson. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Sampson. I had expected rather more.