Word: crossman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hellman says that her own feelings were perhaps best summed up by the English writer Richard Crossman, who claimed that "It took an Englishman a long time to fight for a liberty, but once he had it nobody could take it away, but that we in America fought fast for liberty and could be deprived of it in an hour." The events of the past four years have proven Mr. Crossman all too wise, and have proved that Hellman's anger is all too well-founded...
...since Bagehot's time the Cabinet's role has changed enormously. In Bagehot's analysis, the Cabinet was the most powerful and effective organ of government, or, as he put it, government's "efficient secret." When Crossman joined the government in 1964, he discovered that, like the House of Lords before it--the Cabinet had moved from the efficient part of the constitution to what Bagehot called the "dignified" part, where its chief role was ceremonial. The Cabinet was at the beck and call of the Prime Minister and, like Parliament, was unable to make or break him. That struggle...
...Crossman traced his change in the power of the Cabinet to the necessities of war. The great bureaucracies created to prosecute the Great War of 1914-18 and only partially dismantled in the twenties and thirties were run from the Prime Minister's office. After 1945, Clement Attlee transformed Churchill's "rather haphazard personal autocracy" into a steamlined power structure. Increasingly the real decisions were made by the Prime Minister alone or in consultation with one or two other key figures, and the Cabinet relegated to the role of a rubber stamp. Attlee, along with a small group...
...this kind of government clearly overreached itself in trying to suppress Crossman's own analysis of its inner workings. Wilson's request for an injunction was granted in November 1974 and for months constitutional lawyers worked out their arguments. The case came before England's Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, who disposed of it fairly quickly--throwing out Wilson's case and ordering his government to pay the costs. Since Britain has an "unwritten constitution" with no Bill of Rights, this decision creates an important precedent protecting the rights of the British press. Widgery, though, tried to limit the repercussions...
...Crossman saw himself, quite correctly, as performing the role of a modern Bagehot, seeking to expose the "disguised" elements of the British constitution and analyzing power as it is, not how we think it is. Crossman learned--by experience in academics, journalism, and in the Cabinet--"That there is a gap between the literary legend, the paper description of politics, and the reality. It is a gap which begins with the description given by journalists who are describing it from outside, and then confirmed by the academics who read journalists' articles and regard them as accounts of what really happened...