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without prior resignation should be maintained for the whole of the non- industripl Civil Service They further recommended that industrialfemployees in the Service Departments (who, like all industrial civil servants, had hitherto been treated on more or less the same lines as non-industrials in the matter of Parliamentary candidature) should be free to stand as Parliamentary can- didates without resigning. The Committee was divided on the question whether the latter freedom should be extended to industrials employed in other Departments.
9. The Government adopted those recommendations of the Blanesburgh Report which were unanimous, and to give effect to them the Servants of the Crown (Parliamentary Candidature) Order, 1927, was made (Appendix 4), providing that "No person employed by or under the Crown to whom this Order applies shall issue an address to electors or in any other manner publicly announce himself, or allow himself to be publicly announced as a candidate or a prospective candidate for election to Parliament until he has retired or resigned from such employment.'
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CC
10. Under Clause 2 (c), exemption from the Order was granted to persons employed in an industrial capacity in establishments under the Admiralty, Army Council or Air Council, being establishments certified by the Treasury to be establishments of an industrial or predominantly industrial character, other than persons employed in such supervisory grades as may be specified in regulations made by the department concerned and approved by the Treasury."
11. As a result of this proviso, there are at the present time some 200,000 civil servants in industrial establishments certified as exempt from the Order. There are also over 60,000 employed in establishments formerly under the Army Council or the Air Council and subsequently transferred to the Ministry of Supply who, strictly speaking, became formally subject to the prohibition upon transfer to that Department, although the Ministry has never taken steps, we understand, to enforce the Order in regard to them. In the case of the remaining 130,000 or more working in other industrial establishments, the ban on Parliamentary candidature is generally enforced.
12. The position of civil servants who are Peers of Parliament was not referred to by the Blanesburgh Committee, but is regulated by Treasury Circular No. 11 of 1928, which accords with the spirit of their Report. Civil Servants who are Peers may attend in their place when their official duties permit, but may not take part in debate or vote in the House of Lords until they have retired or resigned.
13. During the 1939-45 war many of the normal rules governing employ- ment in the Civil Service were in abeyance, and several Members of Parliament and Parliamentary candidates temporarily filled Civil Service posts. Shortly before the General Election of 1945, the Coalition Govern- ment reviewed the position and decided that temporary civil servants might, notwithstanding the 1927 Order, be permitted to appear before a selection committee and, if necessary, to address a subsequent adoption meeting, whether held in public or not. They were not, however, permitted to appear on any political platform or to take part in any political propaganda or activity while they remained in the Civil Service, and, if adopted, they were required to resign from the Service not later than the announcement of the date of the General Election. This relaxation of the normal rule applied exclusively to the 1945 election.
14. The pre-war rules are now again in force.