I have been often asked why the Government, foreseeing the inevitable
increase of Departments, had not the elementary imagination to build a
colossal sky-scraper to accommodate them all.
The objections to such an act of apparently obvious intelligence may be
briefly enumerated.
(1) With such a landmark whoever had business to conduct with a Government
Department would know where to find it, for which reason alone the system
of huts and hotels is to be preferred. The hotels are widely scattered and
the huts hidden away in odd corners of public gardens and parks, and even
in the bed of a lake. By the use of motor-cars (petrol being for official
and not for private consumption) such co-operation as cannot be avoided
between Departments is assured.
(2) Even in a single Department too close co-operation is not desirable. An
hotel, divided into hundreds of small rooms and flats, enables the occupant
of each room to be isolated, and each self-contained flat to have almost
the status of a sub-department. Thus the vexatious supervision, the easy
intercourse and rapid decision which are so disturbing to official routine
are avoided.
(3) The express elevators, by which the visitor is shot up to the higher
storeys of a sky-scraper, would suggest a certain directness and celerity
in official methods that is calculated to arouse false hopes.
(4) With many or all Departments in one building there would be the
temptation to place the entire clerical staff under Mr. Neville Chamberlain
as Director-General, who would transfer them from one office to another
according to the necessities of each day's work. Such mobility would be
unpopular, while the inevitable creation of a central Press-Bureau,
Publicity and Information Department would afford the Press a satisfaction
that it has done nothing to deserve.
(5) On the top floor of a sky-scraper is usually a luncheon-club; here the
various Ministers would meet daily, and could only with difficulty escape
the exchange of ideas.
(6) If all Government offices were in a single building the PRIME MINISTER
could make daily visits to each, and would find it hard to avoid comparison
between the organization and methods of his various Ministers.
These considerations alone finally dispose of any merits which the plan for
a national sky-scraper may seem superficially to possess.
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