To leave the executive sole master of the field is to invite the kind of purblind folly which resulted, in 1919, in the police strikes of Boston and London.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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Here, certainly, the fact that the governments concerned were the judges in their own cause made it impossible for the police to get either attention or justice without drastic action.
And I draw your attention to the fact that although in each case the original strikers were defeated, their successors obtained the terms, and even more than the terms, for which they fought.
Their union, therefore, with persons in private firms seems to me justified in order to raise their general economic level; and I do not see the justice of prohibiting it as was done by the Baldwin Government in the Trades Disputes Act of…
But it shows also the unwisdom of leaving the government free to determine the substance of the contract of service.
It is just as likely as any private employer to extract the most it can get for the least it needs to give; and it is no more fit than any other employer to be left uncontrolled in this field.
The more labour conditions in government service are determined finally by an independent authority, the more reasonable they are likely to be.
We must not be led away by false claims to a special majesty born of its sovereign character to regard the state as entitled to a peculiar and uncontrolled power over its servants.
History shows that it is just as likely as anyone else to abuse an unlimited authority.
The civil servant is not merely an employee of government; he is also a citizen.
Certainly there are few rights for which the rank and file of officials press so strongly as for this; and they regard the limitation of their political opportunities as an invasion of civic liberty at once unnecessary and unjustifiable.
If a high official of the Foreign Office in England could be elected to Parliament, spend a term there in bitter criticism of the Foreign Secretary and then, on defeat, return to work with the minister whom he had sought to destroy, the…
There is, that is to say, a class of civil service work the very nature and associations of which involves exclusion from political life; and if those engaged therein desire a political career, they must terminate their connexion with the…
I see no reason why all the industrial employees of the government, postmen, for instance, or shipwrights in a national dockyard, should not enjoy all ordinary civil rights.
I see no reason, either, to expect any deleterious consequence if civil servants below what we call in England the executive class are allowed ordinary political rights, so long as a decent discretion in their exercise is observed.
Those engaged in the making of policy must, in my judgment, accept a self-denying ordinance in this regard.
Unless government can be assured that its chief officials are aloof from political ties, it cannot trust them; and all the considerations which create a “spoils system” will then come into play.
Since experience makes it evident that a spoils system is incompatible with either honest or efficient administration, a restriction upon the liberty of public officials is, I would argue, justified.
The state is justified, in the interest of the community, in placing an absolute embargo upon the political activities of all their members.
For unless this liberty is restrained, their allegiance becomes the possession of a party and they cannot give that neutral service which is the basic principle of their existence.
There are American cities where the relations between big business and the police mean that the authority of the latter is certain to be abused in an industrial dispute.
The proper conduct of political life is clearly impossible, if the armed forces of the state are free to take a definite part in its formation.
No one would endorse the Russian principle that a soldier’s quality is a function of his agreement with the political faith of the government; yet once relations are established between the politician and the Army a movement towards this…
Sooner or later, in this condition, the Army, like the Praetorian guard, determines the personality of the state.
When that occurs, no one can hope for the enjoyment of political freedom.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
