Political commentary

Dancing in the Athenaeum

Ferdinand Mount

'I would be inclined to leave it [Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act] alone as it is. . . in the end you may draw up a different distinction and a different line, but it will not work any better than the existing one, and I see no reason why one should just alter things for the sake of it . . . I very much doubt whether you will get a better definition, as hallowed and encrusted by what has taken place in the last sixty years, with all due respect to Mr Justice Caulfield (the judge in the Nigeria secrets case who had said that Section 2 ought to be 'pensioned off') . . . Government is not like a cricket club. . . frankly half the people in this country are concerned to find things that will redound to the discredit of the Government, every day. . . It is inevitable in this case that a Government is going to have some defensive reaction and say "We are not going to tell you anything more than we can about what is going to discredit us" .. . I sometimes think we almost make it impossible for a Government to govern here.'

Splendid stuff, is it not? Who else but Mr James Callaghan (then in Opposition and giving evidence to Lord Franks's Committee on Section 2), could avow such unabashed devotion to the 'hallowed and encrusted' status quo? No giddy craze for open government was going to bowl him over. If he ever became PM, any minister who started leaking official secrets to hacks and scribblers would be for the high jump and no mistake. The only shortcoming in an otherwise flawless Act was its failure to include ritual disembowelling among the prescribed penalties.

Unfortunately, certain rotters, malcontents and Agents of A Foreign Power managed to squeeze into Labour's October 1974 manifesto an embarrassing commitment not only to repeal this magnificent Act which has served the nation so well for over sixty years but also to replace Section 2 of it with 'a measure to put the burden on the public authorities to justify withholding information' — a measure which is already law in Sweden and the United States. If that pledge were carried out, instead of being prosecuted for disclosing official info, civil

servants could be prosecuted for not dis

closing it. This was an indignity to be avoided at all costs. Hence this week's White Paper on Official Secrets— too late to be carried into law in this Parliament but just in time to be revived in Labour's next manifesto with a view to heading off more radical demands for the future.

The proposals naturally represent the barest minimum that had to be conceded to the freaks who have this inexplicable craving for open government. There will be dancing in the Athenaeum and the Reform Club tonight. Once again, the Civil Service has seen off the nosey parkers.

The most brilliant feature of this masterly delaying action has been the exploitation of the espionage theme. Mr Callaghan himself appeared to be under the impression that the 1911 Act was designed exclusively to deal with spies and was then 'extended by usage to cover a great many things other than spying.' Not so.

The bureaucracy did use the current spy scare to propel the 1911 Act through Parliament, just as it had with the scarcely less all-embracing 1889 Official Secrets Act. But the spy scare was largely a pretext. The main reason, as Lord Franks makes clear, was the desire of every government since' the mid-nineteenth century to protect all its activities from public scrutiny.

Naval treaties had been filched and copied, secret designs for warships traced and sold. But there had been many other official complaints less likely to be referred to 221B Baker Street: about the leak of a possible pay rise for suburban letter carriers, about the advance disclosure of the names of the Royal Commissioners on the Crofters' Question, about the scoop of the undelivered old age pension books in 1909 and a year later, most scandalous of all, about the leakage of the report of the Welsh Church Commission. This Could Not Be Allowed To Continue. In the words of the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury in 1873, 'the unauthorised use of official information is the worst fault a civil servant can commit. It is on the same footing as cowardice by a soldier.'

The newly emergent bureaucratic class had fought, is still fighting today and will no doubt continue to fight, to shield its operations from prying eyes, just as any other ruling class does. We are told, for example, that it would be formidably burdensome and costly to copy the American Freedom of Information Act over here. At first, the figure of $300 million a year was mentioned. Now we are told it would cost $150 million. How do they know? Serious studies have been carried out, says Mr Charles Morris, the Civil Service Minister. No, they haven't, says Mr Roger Darlington, until lately Mr Rees's adviser, who helped to draft the White Paper. The most serious study so far unearthed appears to be a single visit to Washington in 1975 by Sir Arthur Peterson, then Permanent Under-Secretary to the Home Office. Not exactly conclusive evidence that having the same sort of law over here would, in the immortal words of Mr Brynmor John, Minister of State at the Home Office, 'discredit the whole notion of freedom of information generally.'

Elsewhere, the cost of operating the American Freedom of Information Act is variously given as $22 million or $34 milli° a year — not cheap, but worth it if an improvement in the quality of governMent results. Alarmists claim that Washington civil servants now put fewer things in writ: ing and talk more on the telephone. Is tha' always so bad? You cannot at the same tinleA complain about the growth of red tape any bumf and then object that civil servants ilmv and then settle matters with a quick word in the corridors. In any case, there will he a limit to the verbals, because one of the main, requirements of both the Swedish anu, American laws is that the governalem should publish the papers on which it has based its decision. The then head of the Civil Service, Sird Douglas Allen, now Lord Croham, trie, last year to ward off this particular irriP: ition by instructing all Departments to pohla, ish as much of this sort of stuff as they dare' in the hope of boring the reformers t death. Lord Franks himself decided again!, a British Freedom of Information Act n" the grounds that such a thing might be very well for foreigners who liked washing their dirty linen in public but that it wa,5

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unlikely to suit Britain's more reticent traod itions of government. He offered instea, the ingenious idea of hiving off tr reformed and narrowed Section 2 from tdlf Official Secrets Act and calling it the cial Information Act, which makes it sonrib, nice and positive. And that, alas, will Wile ably be as far as whichever party wins the election will be inclined to go. The majority of Tories are no more eageht than Mr. Callaghan to be associated wit"„ the mixed bunch of leftists and weirdos wh", predominate in the campaign for farsr reaching reform. Nor are Shadow Ministe over-anxious to commit themselves to 'PI; paring a rod for our own backs', as ng Heath once described his party's 17 pledge to make government more ope incid more accountable to the public which to the Franks Committee and a Tory ‘P',""„ visional' commitment 'in principle' to legP late on Frankish lines which turn out to he remarkably similar to the present White Paper five years later. At this rate of progress, even to remove, the automatic presumption that all officio' information is secret may sound lilt: achievement enough for one Parlianneti But the tradition of secrecy is deeP Ycl

engrained, and a mass of mater 11

ial won'° s

engrained, and a mass of mater 11

still be kept secret under the excePti1 made in the interests not only of nationae security but also of law and order, colleetiv Cabinet responsibility and the protection °e the reserves. Besides, the lessening °f tha legal threat does not remove the threat to leaky civil servant's promotion prospeetshe always a more immediate deterrent than t possibility eh government, euteiont: there f ewree i

at about sensgrsi:eihs,,to at about sensgrsi:eihs,,to

cstite imposing ut for imsing a positive dutclose..