Word: crossman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...secret in reality....No description of it, at once graphic and authentic, has ever been given. It is said to be something like a rather disorderly board of directors, where many speak and few listen--though no one knows." A century later, the situation had not changed. Richard Crossman--Oxford don, psychological warfare chief, Labour M.P. and editor of The New Statesman--complained of "how little is normally revealed of what goes on in the modern Cabinet, and how much information is available about these secret proceedings, if only someone who knows the truth can be stimulated to divulge...
...following year Crossman was thus "stimulated" when he joined the Cabinet himself. For the next six years, until Harold Wilson's Labour government was unexpectedly turned out of office in 1970, Crossman learned about Cabinet government from the inside. His conclusion--after serving successively as Minister of Housing, Lord President of the Council, Majority Leader in the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Social Services--was that the Cabinet had little effective power and that Britain had drifted into a "Prime Ministerial" form of government. Crossman presented these views in his 1970 Godkin lectures at Harvard, which...
...Crossman died in 1973 and left behind him a set of political diaries that presented a "graphic and authentic" picture of behind-the-scenes workings of the Cabinet intended to expose the myths of Cabinet government with the same devastating accuracy Walter Bagehot had levelled against the myths of constitutional monarchy a century earlier...
...Crossman arranged for the publication of these diaries and before he died had been assured by lawyers that there were no legal obstacles. As his chief literary executor he selected Michael Foot, a fiery figure of the Labour party's left and someone strong enough, Crossman felt, to stand up to Harold Wilson. The Sunday Times of London published two series of excerpts from the diaries before Wilson intervened to quash them. Claiming that he acted on the advice of impartial civil servants, Wilson instructed his attorney-general to seek an injunction against further publication of the diaries...
...legal issue involved in the Crossman case was the common law issue of prior restraint, an area in which British courts tend to be less concerned with protecting public acess to information than American ones. Hovering in the background, though not officially invoked, was the Official Secrets Act of 1940, passed under wartime conditions and giving the government broad powers to muzzle publication...