Page:Longines Chronicles with Hartley Shawcross 1954 ARC-96007.ogv/11

Shawcross
Yes, but it's done in a quite different way, I suppose, because of our different arrangements and rather different tradition. And we have assumed that there are a certain number of posts, something on the order of fifteen thousand out of a million or over posts in our civil service, which are sensitive and involve security risks, and in regard to them the police and the intelligence service make the most careful inquiries about the people who are occupying them or who are appointed to them. And as a result of those inquiries we thought that suspicion was to be directed against about 148 civil servants. Their cases remain the subject of fuller investigation. They've been suspended in the mean time. At the end of the day we were able to reinstate 28 of them as perfectly loyal and honest people, we transferred about 60 to other posts which involve no security risks at all, and the rest were either dismissed or resigned. All those cases were considered by a committee of very experienced retired civil servants, but of course it was all done privately. Nobody knows except the security services even today who was dealt with under that machinery.