and need it badly enough, they will provide it even if only for themselves. But
as itiscommon, everyone can enjoy it; so it is actually in the interest of such
others not to pay their share. The financial contributions made by member
nations ofNATOhave been a case in point. The smaller nations seldom paid
their share of the costs; they knew that the USA needed NATO, and that it
could, and if necessary would, provide an adequate defence for Europe even
when it had to pay more than its ‘fair’share. One reason for the end of thecold
warwas a growing sense in the USA that it did not need to protect a Europe
unwilling to contribute sufficiently to its own defence, leading to an increasing
interest inisolationism. Such a defence had been believed to be a common
good for all the Western European nations, and advantage was regularly taken
of the fact. Many other practical examples could be given of this paradox,
which illustrates in political terms the proverbial strength of the weak. In
common parlance the problem is often referred to as ‘the free rider problem’.
Collective Responsibility
Collective responsibility is a constitutional doctrine more or less peculiar to the
Westminster (British) model of government, and of decreasing reality even in
the United Kingdom. It means that decisions taken by a collective executive,
such as the Britishcabinet, are collective responsibilities: anyone involved in
making the decision is expected to support it without reservation in public,
and generally to act as though they were themself solely responsible for the
decision. This is supposed to apply even where the individual in question has
always opposed the decision and actually voted against it: as long as they are not
prepared to resign from the decision-making body, they must accept the
consequences along with the majority.
In recent years this doctrine has been increasingly disregarded in Britain. On
a few crucial issues, notably constitutional questions such as membership of the
European Union, some prime ministers have allowed cabinet members to
campaign publicly against decisions taken by the cabinet of which they were,
and remained, members. In the 1960s the conventions of Britishcabinet
governmentbegan to change. Individual ministers felt freer than before to
reveal the substance of what had occurred in cabinet; and this movement
towards a more open style of cabinet government culminated in the publica-
tion by a former cabinet minister, Richard Crossman, of a detailed set of diaries
which revealed cabinet proceedings and many of the aspects of government
previously supposed to be confidential. Crossman’s diaries have been followed
by a number of political memoirs covering cabinet proceedings, providing
their writers with a means of distancing, or even disassociating, themselves
from earlier cabinet decisions. More immediately damaging is the tendency for
cabinet members to leak details of cabinet debate, allowing them effectively, if
Collective Responsibility