Government Archives and Official Histories

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the debate initiated tonight by the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers. I want to make one simple point very strongly in favour of official history and about wanting to make official history more contemporary, not less. I believe that history is vital to people when facing difficult decisions. In the years that I spent as an adviser in government, one thing that struck me a great deal was the lack of institutional memory in government departments. Even in a long-serving Government such as the Labour Government from 1997 to 2010, Ministers changed jobs frequently and, except in one or two cases, it was very unusual to have Ministers who had a long period of office in one department.

Apart from the ministerial merry-go-round, there were frequent changes in the Civil Service. For instance, one of the most striking things in the book by my noble friend Lord Adonis on education is that, in the case of the academy programme, eight different people were in charge of it in the Department for Education in nine years when he was the relevant person at No. 10 and a junior Minister in the department. There is far too much changing around and as a result there is a lack of institutional memory. I remember when my noble friend Lord Mandelson came back from Brussels and went to BERR, I think it was called, and started to think about industrial policy, there was very little available that one could turn to that analysed the strengths and weaknesses, from the perspective of government records, of government policies in the past.

More history and more contemporary history would be good for us. The most recent official history that I have read is Sir Stephen Wall’s excellent book on Britain and the European Community from 1963 to 1975. It made me reassess what was probably a rather too jaundiced view of Harold Wilson. Stephen has given us the benefit of the minute books of the Cabinet Secretaries, so you know what each Minister said in Cabinet meetings, and you come to admire Wilson’s skill in handling questions such as the Common Market at Cabinet. The lessons for what we are currently going through—the renegotiation that the current Prime Minister proposes—come out of that book extremely strongly.

Taking the Europe example again, the reason why I would like some more contemporary examination of the records is that many of the issues that will be raised if there is a renegotiation in the next Parliament were raised during the European convention in the period from 2000 to 2003. Many of these issues about competences, repatriation of powers and the legitimacy and accountability of European institutions were thoroughly gone through then, yet I suspect that there has been no proper examination of the lessons of that experience by officials internally and certainly none by historians externally. So let us have more official history, and let us make it more contemporary.