In Memoriam Bernard Braine

The Right Honourable the Lord Braine of Wheatley, PC died on 5th January, 2000, at the age of 85.

For over twenty years Sir Bernard Braine was the voice of alcohol prevention policy in the House of Commons and he was proud to be asked by Sir Keith Joseph, the then Secretary of State for Health, to be Chairman of the National Council on Alcoholism, the precurser of Alcohol Concern, to reorganise it and make it a suitable recipient of government funds. When he became chairman in 1973, there were four alcohol information centres in England: nine years later, when he left the post, the number had increased tenfold.

Together with this extension of information and counselling services for problem drinkers and their families, a voluntary alcohol counsellor training scheme was inaugurated which is still in existence today. In 1977 Sir Bernard was responsible for the report "Alcohol and Work" which became known as the Braine Report. The Health and Safety Executive was later to acknowledge that this report provided the stimulus for the growth of programmes to tackle workplace alcohol problems.

In 1975 the NCA advocated the "high risk offender" procedure, a measure both designed to improve road safety and to assist in the early identification and treatment of problem drinkers. Sir Bernard, both in Parliament and outside, pressed for the implementation of this policy, which was finally adopted in stages by the Department of Transport during the 1980s.

During Parliamentary debates Sir Bernard never missed an appropriate opportunity to raise the level of awareness and understanding of alcohol problems. He will be remembered for his steadfast and often single-handed resistance to measures which he thought would increase alcohol problems in society.

At the time of the 1988 Licensing Act, in representations to the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, he made the case for a coordinated governmental response to alcohol problems. As a result, the Inter-departmental Ministerial Group on Alcohol Misuse came into being.

Lord Braine, as he became on leaving the Commons, had a wide range of interests. He was a leading campaigner against abortion and was chairman of the All Party Pro-Life Committee, which spans both Houses. He was the founder and first chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Drugs Committee. He worked for many years in the cause of human rights. Throughout his time in Parliament he remained an advocate of the death penalty.

When Vaclav Havel, the Czech campaigner for democracy, was thrown into prison by the Communists in the 1970s and his Prague Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted was proscribed, Sir Bernard joined hands with the late Joseph Jostin, a distinguished Czech journalist, to found the UK Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. Together they worked tirelessly for Havel's release.

When Havel visited London as President of Czechoslovakia it was Sir Bernard who was asked by the Czechoslovak community in London to greet him.

He also fought for the "disappeared ones" in Argentina and the oppressed in the Soviet Union. He was a determined opponent of apartheid in South Africa and Chinese misrule in Tibet.

As a tribute to Lord Braine we reprint an interview he gave to Andrew McNeill and which first appeared in this magazine in 1990 to mark his forty years in the House of Commons.

AM Where did you grow up and what was your family background?
BB I was born in Ealing on Midsummer's day 1914 but during the War we moved to my grandmother's house in Kew. I suppose that my family was middle class. My father was a civil servant in the Admiralty, and my mother, though born in London, had German parents who came here in the 1880s. She died when I was six and my brother was three. My father married again and we moved to Golders Green. Later we moved back to Kew.

AM You went to Hendon School. What did you do when you left?
BB I sat for a civil service entrance examination when I was 17 and joined the Inland Revenue.

AM Had it been your ambition to be a civil servant?
BB No. I was interested in politics in my very early days. I loved history and still do, and my headmaster wanted me to go to university. But it was 1931, we were in the middle of the slump. I had a younger brother and sister and my father was bringing us up on his own. He thought that the civil service offered a secure career. So that's where I went.

AM How aware were you of the depression?
BB I was conscious that there was much unemployment and pressing social problems. Indeed, I remember the General Strike which took place when I was twelve.

AM Many people were attracted to socialism during the 1930s. Were you ever tempted to go in that direction?
BB Not really, though there was a period when I might have done so. For one thing there were family connections. My father had had socialist sympathies and my mother's family had been German Social Democrats. My step-mother's brother, Dr. T.P. Conwell-Evans, was private secretary to the Minister of Agriculture in the first Labour Government. So there were these family threads that might have pulled me towards the Labour Party. But as it was I joined the Young Conservatives in 1933 and have remained a middle ground Tory ever since. Of course, I could see what was happening and where it might lead. I was horrified by the rise of Hitler. I saw the dangers posed by Oswald Mosley who had broken away from the Labour Party to found a fascist movement. I did not like what I read about Labour's plans for state control and regulation and I became convinced that Labour's socialism was wrong for Britain. And, of course, by the mid-1930's social conditions were already improving. By 1937 I was the national Vice Chairman of the Young Conservatives and was thinking of standing for Parliament. In fact I was approved by the Party as a candidate at the age of 24.

AM Obviously your plans, like everyone's, were interrupted by the war. Did you ever fear that the war would put a permanent stop to everything in the sense that Hitler would win?
BB No. I just could not conceive that Britain would lose the war although frankly until 1944 I had no idea how we were going to win it.

AM You joined the East Surrey Regiment in 1940 and were commissioned in the North Staffords. Was your own personal war a successful one?
BB I certainly enjoyed army life. One knew that there was a grim job to be done but the comradeship made it enjoyable. I was lucky and survived. I also believed the dictum that every private soldier carries a field marshal's baton in his knapsack. The army really did offer opportunities to those of us prepared to take them. I served in West Africa, North West Europe, and South East Asia and ended as a Lieutenant-Colonel on Lord Mountbatten's staff.

AM Did you ever consider staying in the army?
BB At the end of the war I was offered an opportunity of a regular commission but I had already made up my mind to go into politics. In fact I had stood as a candidate in the 1945 general election while still a serving soldier, but I was defeated. I was determined to go on and won the next time round. It may sound odd but I felt that that was my destiny.

AM So you felt you were being called. How clear were you about what it was you were being called to do?
BB By the end of the war I had a very clear idea of the sort of society I wanted to see. It was not a class society. I never thought in those terms. Coming as I did from a modest family background there was no room for that. I believed that people get on through their own merit and should be given the chance to do so. I expressed my ideas in my book "Tory Democracy" published in 1947. Colleagues at Westminster told me in later years that it had influenced them to become Conservative.

AM You had already made a name for yourself when you got into Parliament in 1950. One newspaper published an article featuring five young hopefuls who should be watched: Reginald Maudling, Ian Macleod, Ted Heath, Enoch Powell, and Bernard Braine. Are any of these others on your list of people who have most impressed you in your forty years in Parliament?
BB Macleod and Powell were outstanding. I served under Powell at the Ministry of Health and he was a great inspiration. Maudling was brilliant but threw away his chances. But to be fair there were those on the other side who were impressive too. I was fascinated by Gaitskell and Nye Bevan.

AM You were on the front bench, either in Government or Opposition, from 1960 but your ministerial career ended in 1970. Why was this and how did you feel about it?
BB I was never sacked from ministerial office. We lost the election in 1964. Heath called me back to front bench in 1974 but never gave me the job for which I had been groomed. I went home disappointed but my wife told me to regard it as an opportunity. She was quite right: from then on I would be my own man. And I have been. But I had greatly enjoyed my ministerial career, particularly at the Commonwealth Office under Duncan Sandys and at the Department of Health and I was very disappointed at not becoming 'shadow' Minister of Health.

AM You have been deeply involved in the human rights field for many years.
BB Yes, in many parts of the world. My attitude over the Falklands crisis, for example, was determined by my knowledge of the appalling cruelty of the Argentine fascist dictatorship towards their own people. It was unthinkable that British inhabitants in the Falklands, who had lived under the rule of law, could be handed over to a cruel and repellent fascist government.

AM Do you see human rights as the link between all the causes you've espoused?
BB Yes, I do. There must be freedom if we are to improve the human condition but freedom is not licence. You don't have to look very far to see the misery that stems alcohol abuse, drugs, crime, and pressures on the family and to see that society is in peril. It's not just in Britain. The problems are worse in some other countries but we haven't got very much to be proud of here when you look at the total picture.

AM What would you most like to be remembered for?
BB What matters is whether what one has done has been effective. I would place my work at the National Council on Alcoholism high on my list because we did make an impact. We made a real difference. And when one thinks of the social cost and misery caused by alcohol abuse the work was certainly worth doing.

AM And human rights?
BB Getting people freed who have been sent to prison for speaking up against tyranny or preventing them being sent there is very satisfying. I am a great admirer of the work of Amnesty International. If it did not exist it would have to be invented. Totalitarian regimes seek to blot out the identities of their victims. Our task has been to ensure that the victims are never forgotten. Ridicule and contempt for the tyrants is a very effective weapon.

AM Can you give some examples?
BB They are legion. Sakharov was one. The brave psychiatrist Anatoly Karyagin, imprisoned for refusing to certify as insane persons whom he knew were sane, was another. They were freed finally because of campaigns waged all over the world.

AM And Vaclav Havel?
BB He had been imprisoned for no crime known to any civilised nation simply for telling the truth about the Czech Communist regime. He could have purchased his freedom at any time if he had been prepared to bend the knee to his oppressors. He refused for two reasons: he had committed no crime and if he capitulated he would leave behind in captivity his fellow prisoners of conscience. He knew that if he did that he would give credence to the lies and cruelties of the system. He knew that the only way to defeat the lie was to stand valiantly for truth. He is one of the heroes of our time. I was proud to work for his release from prison in the early 1980's. When I welcomed him on his recent visit to London on behalf of Parliament it was one of the most moving moments of my life.

AM How would you sum it all up?
BB I am proud of what I have done in the field of human rights and elsewhere, though others have done much more. I am only saddened by cases where we failed. But then, that is politics. There is no finality - the ideal we seek, as a wise man once said, is not an inn at which we can put up but a journey we must undertake.