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Taking on the control of industry - the Production Council
“The thing that impressed itself upon me when I entered the Ministry was the lack of organization of the State’s man power. Here let me say this is not the fault of the staff or of the department, because I am going to say at the outset that while I have had to try to construct one of the biggest industrial machines, covering nearly 13,000,000 people, inside of a fortnight, I have had a staff the like of which I have never met in my life. There has been a lot of nonsense talked about the Civil Service. I have had experience of the Civil Service this last fortnight from the humblest clerk to the Permanent Secretary. I have called for hours of labor, thought, energy, and creative work; and the moment I have come to a decision (and I find that is what the Civil Service wants—decision), they will do the job. The moment I came to a decision the train of activity was put in motion at once, and I have been amazed at the way in which they have clothed the bones, so to speak, of anything I have attempted to create. I am not going to indulge, and this is not the time to indulge, in the holding of inquests on anything that has happened. We will wait until victory is assured. I found that with regard to the organization of the man power of the State—and I emphasize the word ‘organization’ in its fullest sense—there was not very much in existence. I felt that it was no good attempting to try to handle the labor side of the problem unless there was quickly brought into existence a machine which would allow all the other functions of production to work in cohesion. Nothing is worse than to be calling upon men to do something, and find the raw materials and tools are not there to do it. Neither is it right to be moving about the country calling for dilution, calling for women, calling for all these services, unless the rest of your productive machine harmonizes and moves together.
“I therefore immediately examined the problem on the first day. You will appreciate one had to move quickly. I went in at two-thirty on the afternoon of Tuesday; and on Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock I produced at least the outline of the basis of my scheme. Then at three o’clock the staff gathered round me and examined it in all its details; and by Friday night we had circulated it to the rest of the Departments. I could not move much faster than that. But it was a big task. The first thing I had to do was to get the War Cabinet to agree to the principle of taking industry over or controlling it. You cannot in the middle of a war, with the enemy at your gates, be too nice as to the methods that you have to adopt, or sit down and work out with meticulous and mathematical precision exactly how you are going to do this, or exactly how you are going to do that. But I felt it would be unfair and unwise, and psychologically wrong, to ask me to appeal to the workmen to give a bigger output unless at the same time they immediately agreed to the policy that no other citizen could profit as a result of that increased output.
“You will have noticed that on Monday the Order in Council is to be issued. We shall move as fast as we can consistently with resisting the enemy, because you have to remember these two things have to go on at the same time. We cannot stop for a lot of negotiations. Hitler decides the speed—we do not; except that our speed must be faster than his. The thing that impressed me when I considered this problem was not whether we could do it, but whether things had gone so far that there was time to do it. This is the great anxiety that I have had the whole of these last ten days.
“The second point was that I felt there must be a Production Council, and that Council must be in possession of the strategy of the war. You could not have Departments like the Army and the Air Force ordering this and ordering that and ordering something else, and expect me to supply labor to the whim of every command and the idiosyncrasy of every general, whether there were materials or whether there were not. And so the War Cabinet agreed that this Production Council should be established. And it will be their duty to survey consistently the raw materials of the country, the most urgent production, and the swinging of production from one form to another according to the vagaries of the war. And we ask our people in the workshops to accept our decisions, if they will, as to which is the most urgent, when we cannot always tell you at the time.