Official information

My title is intended to cover two related matters which have excited much public interest over the last few months—official secrets and freedom of information. The Official Secrets Acts and particularly the notorious section 2 of the Act of 1911 have of course been matters of public concern for many years. The Act of 1911 was passed through Parliament with scarcely any discussion during a spy scare, but as the Franks Committee has long since pointed out, its all‐embracing character was not the product of inadvertent haste, but the culmination of twenty years of effort in Whitehall to get Parliament to take the problem of protecting official information seriously. The security of the realm was, and remains, the most effective argument for extending a blanket of secrecy over all official information, however trivial. The difficulty for those who want to remove part of the blanket has been to convince the doubtful sympathizer that the blanket is divisible, or that some of it can be turned back without revealing all. The alternative, very satisfactory to Whitehall, ministers and senior civil servants alike, is that the release of official information should be entirely at their discretion. It is of course necessary for government that a great deal of official information be published as a matter of routine. The problem with the discretionary system is that some information needed for effective parliamentary scrutiny and public debate is not made available until after its publication could have affected government decisions, or indeed, at all. And the government, in deciding whether or not to publish, is apt to confuse its own political position with the national interest.