Shroud of Official Secrecy Clouds British Democracy

On a chilly Sunday last month, plainclothes police kicked in the front door at the home of a prominent investigative journalist and moved in to sift the contents of his house.

On successive weekends, other police teams raided the offices of the prominent weekly, New Statesman, in London, and the British Broadcasting Corp.’s Scottish headquarters in Glasgow, seizing tapes, film and reams of editorial material.

The raids, conducted with a heavy-handedness more typical of a nation in Eastern Europe than a free society, were ordered to determine and perhaps prosecute those who told the reporter about a defense satellite project that he had disclosed in print.

To many civil libertarians here, the raids were the latest example of a historic, deep-seated penchant for government secrecy that has left Britain, once the cradle of liberalism, as the most secretive of all Western democracies.

To foreigners who tend to view Britain as the land of the Magna Charta and home of the Mother of Parliaments, such stringent restrictions on the flow of information constitute a puzzling contradiction, but few who live here doubt the reality.

Consider:

-- The trade magazine, Railway Gazette, is raided by police and its editor threatened with prosecution after revealing government plans to cut services on the national rail network.

-- A Glasgow mother, asking the National Health Service to forward her family’s medical records to a prospective family doctor in the Netherlands where she plans to resettle, is informed that the documents are confidential and thus can be released to no one, not even her new doctor.

-- An opposition member of Parliament questioning the defense minister on a new aspect of Atlantic Alliance strategy is told that the details are confidential. She later finds the information in the previous day’s edition of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.

-- A consumer protection group is refused information about safety defects on British Leyland cars held by the government, but eventually receives data from a U.S. government survey on defect-related accidents involving foreign cars.

In more sensitive defense areas, the extent of secrecy is virtually total and the consequences for breaching it severe, as those involved in last month’s journalistic expose of the $750-million British spy satellite project discovered.

So far, however, government efforts have centered on finding the civil servant who leaked the information rather than pressing its case against the reporter who received and published it.

BBC Bowed to Pressure

It became apparent last week that even the parliamentary committee responsible for monitoring public expenditure was unaware of the satellite project until last month’s furor over a film being produced by the BBC on the subject.

The report eventually appeared in the New Statesman after the BBC bowed to government pressure and canceled the program.

Ironically, the program was to have been part of a six-part series that focused on the unusual extent of secrecy in Britain, which the BBC still hopes to air next month, minus the controversial segment.

“I believe we are the most secretive society in the Western World,” said George Theiner, editor of the Index on Censorship, a London-based organization that monitors restrictions on the press globally. “No other democratic country is so bad.”

‘Part of the Landscape’

And Peter Hennessy, a co-director of the Institute of Contemporary British History, said: “Secrecy is as much a part of the English landscape as the Cotswolds. It goes with the grain of our society.”

The principal legislation that allows the government to conceal so much of its work is the Official Secrets Act, rammed through Parliament without a murmur of dissent on a single afternoon in 1911 amid pre-World War I hysteria about German spies.

The Draconian act makes it a criminal offense for any public servant to divulge any official information, no matter how innocuous, to anyone without express authorization.

Receiving unauthorized information is also a criminal offense under the act, a provision enabling the government to prosecute reporters who obtain confidential material as well as the editors who publish it.

Law Is Always Handy

While routine briefings and informal contacts that are technically in violation of the act are everyday occurrences, the law always is always close at hand if British officialdom should find it useful.

Nearly 100 other laws that have accumulated over the centuries also limit the flow of official information.

For example, the Privy Counselor’s Oath of Confidentiality, which former Labor Cabinet minister Richard Crossman was accused of violating with his candid memoirs in the last decade, dates from the 13th Century.

Although the laws are intended mainly to safeguard national security, both central and local governments have found the unusual degree of secrecy a useful way to conceal developments that are either politically sensitive or potentially embarrassing.

At Times Irresistible

Consequently, political parties that have frequently advocated repeal of secrecy laws while in opposition find them irresistible once they are returned to power.

The Official Secrets Act, for example, has enabled local governments to reject public demands for them to reveal the location of toxic dumps thought to contain deadly chemicals, to suppress a report that asbestos workers were exposing themselves to a high health risk and to try to conceal unpopular policies such as the planned reductions of rail service.

Marie Staunton, a legal officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties, noted that such laws as the Official Secrets Act make exposing government shortcomings extremely difficult.

“It squeezes investigative journalism,” she said. “People are afraid to come forward, only a handful of journalists are willing to listen and only a couple of editors are willing to back their reporters.”

Not ‘Just Another Law’

In an interview, she described what she called “the enormous difficulties” in advising a police officer who wanted to go public with the knowledge that his colleagues were seriously manipulating crime statistics.

“He was risking both his job and opening himself up to criminal prosecution,” she said.

Aside from restricting information, some argue that the secrecy creates unnecessary distance between the public and the bureaucracy.

“The Official Secrets Act isn’t just another law on the shelf,” maintained Maurice Frankel, director of the three-year-old national Campaign for Freedom of Information. “The first thing young civil servants do is sign the secrecy oath and learn they can be prosecuted for breaking it. It creates a mind-set that it’s counterproductive to help any member of the public.”

Public Not Important

Those who have studied the problem list a variety of reasons why the shroud of secrecy persists. Some argue that while Britain has generated many democratic ideals, its governments have never encouraged widespread public participation.

“The country has always been governed by elites either from the right, which has viewed government as a kind of benevolent maternalism, or from the left, which sees its role as imposing a paternalistic welfare-state socialism,” said Staunton. “Certainly, gains in civil liberties have been made, but never with a commitment by politicians that the governed should know how they are governed.”

A senior government official recently explained it bluntly: “To hell with the public right to know. The game is security of the state. There’s no freedom of information in this country, no public right to know as such. There’s a common-sense way of how to run a country and Britain is full of common-sense people.”

Others point to Britain’s unique, centuries-old political continuity, which has provided the country with unusual stability but also slowed the pace of change.

Pressures for Change

In recent years, however, public concern about the levels of secrecy has grown and the pressures for change have gradually grown.

Those involved in the campaign for an American-style freedom-of-information law point to several indicators of a new mood. They note the outcome of a 1985 trial in which a jury refused to convict a Defense Ministry official for leaking documents embarrassing to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government, despite clear evidence that he had violated the Official Secrets Act. They also note that a growing band of former senior civil servants have joined the campaign, adding respectability and influence to the cause.

Last year, a new law expanded public access to local government meetings, and limited progress has been achieved in other fields, such as establishing the right of public housing applicants to check that information they provide to authorities has been accurately recorded.

Next month, a Liberal member of Parliament, Archy Kirkwood, will introduce a bill that would give individuals access to the government files kept on them. With the main opposition Labor Party on record as supporting the principle and the ruling Conservatives still uncertain how to vote, parliamentary observers believe that it could pass.

‘Second-Rate Police State’

“I believe the bill has a legitimate chance,” Kirkwood said in a recent interview.

A stormy parliamentary debate early last week also rekindled sentiments against such actions as the police raids on the BBC and the New Statesman.

Former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins accused the Thatcher government of making Britain look like a “second-rate police state,” while Liberal Party leader David Steel asked, “Is the knock on the door in the middle of the night going to become commonplace in this society?”

Despite the level of rhetoric, few predict any immediate lifting of Britain’s secrecy laws.

“All the opposition parties are against these secrecy laws, so maybe if they win the election, the laws will finally go,” said Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

Cynics say they’ve heard such sentiments before.