Assessment Of Britain's New FOIA And Academic/Historical Research
John Crace, The Guardian (London), 1/11/05
On the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, while half the country was asleep and the other half might just as well have been, Britain could finally claim to be a fully paid-up member of the world's democracies. After years of campaigning by pressure groups - not to mention governmental procrastination - the UK joined more than 100 other countries in allowing public access to some official records as its new Freedom of Information Act came into effect.
The Campaign for Freedom of Information had been working towards this moment for more than 20 years, and its director, Maurice Frankel, was understandably upbeat about the act."The new rights will help people ensure they are being treated fairly, learn whether they are being exposed to hazards, check that public authorities are doing their job and give people a better chance of influencing decisions," he said."They should also lead to more honesty in government. Giving the public the right to see the documents will make it harder for authorities to conceal substandard performance or get away with spin or misleading accounts of what they are doing."
There were some caveats, though. In the run-up to January 1 there were fears that government departments were indulging in some ruthless housekeeping by shredding awkward documents, which only exacerbated existing concerns that ministers were going to extend the right to non-disclosure from the legitimate aims of protecting national security, law enforcement and international relations to include protecting reputations and hiding cock-ups."The legislation's most contentious feature is a ministerial veto, allowing cabinet ministers to override the Information Commissioner if he orders a government department to release information on public interest grounds," Frankel continued."No one is putting any bets on ministers being able to resist its use where politically damaging information is at stake."
Discovering the really interesting information will largely depend on knowing what questions to ask. The general public might struggle here, but if anyone should know where the bodies are buried it's an academic. Peter Hennessy's postgraduate students have formed a Freedom of Information hit-squad to target documents from the late 70's - on the grounds that the government is likely to care less about their discolosure than about papers from more recent times - but it's fair to say there hasn't exactly been a stampede of researchers rushing to the post office to send off their requests to Whitehall. With more than four years to prepare for the implementation of the act, even the doziest researcher can hardly complain he or she was caught on the hop, so could it just be there may be not as much hidden treasure as one might imagine?
Anyone anticipating a similar deluge of information to that uncovered in the former Soviet bloc countries in the early 1990s is likely to be disappointed. For one thing, many records only ever existed in the minds of conspiracy theorists, and for another, the Major government had already released some 80,000 restricted cold war files in 1992 under the Waldegrave"open government" initiative. And the picture that emerged was not necessarily the one expected.
"The documents revealed a great deal about espionage in the cold war era, together with information on how and why the H-bomb was built," says Peter Hennessy, Attlee professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary College, University of London, who spent five years wading through the archive for his book, The Secret State."But perhaps the most interesting aspect has been Britain's retaliation procedures in the event of nuclear war.
"The British went out of their way to avoid confrontation. The guardians of the secret state are often portrayed as gung-ho rightwingers, but that view is quite wrong. Here they are revealed as thoroughly British good chaps, practising self-restraint. They didn't want to follow the American McCarthyist route: rather they tried to preserve due process and civil liberties."
This is not something that could be said of the Blair government, with its indefinite imprisonment without trial for terrorist suspects and the planned introduction of ID cards. Campaigners for freedom of information - including this newspaper - have applied for the attorney general's opinion on the legality of the second Gulf war to be made public, but no one seriously expects the government to acquiesce on this or other sensitive issues.
Despite the trail of emails that have plagued the government - Jo Moore, the Butler inquiry and the Blunkett affair - many academics believe that governments are becoming increasingly wary of committing any evidence to paper or hard drive."Most of the key discussions take place in informal meetings in Tony Blair's den before cabinet," says Anthony Seldon, headteacher of Brighton College and author of a bestselling biography of the prime minister."All the important decisions on the Iraq war were taken in this way; cabinet merely rubber-stamped them. So even if the papers were released, they wouldn't tell us very much because they would be so bland as to be virtually worthless."
This may be less of an interference to scholarship than might be imagined."Newspapers always make a big deal about information released under the 30-year rule," Seldon continues,"but the reality is that we rarely learn anything we didn't know already. All the important papers on Suez, the International Monetary Fund and the Falklands have just confirmed what we really knew already. This is useful for dotting the is and crossing the ts and for providing precise quotations, but it doesn't lead to a fundamental reassessment of our recent history."
Seldon maintains that interview technique is now more important for the modern historian than familiarity with the byways of the archives."We live in a more confessional age," he says."Politicians and civil servants may not want to be held to account by a written document, but they are still happy to confide in someone they trust. Not everyone is always happy with the way decisions are reached and so the truth has a way of leaking out. People are far more indiscreet these days, so government secrets tend to become public knowledge within days or weeks rather than months or years."
Greg Philo, director of the Glasgow Media Group at Glasgow University, confirms this trend."People have realised how email has made it difficult to control the flow of information," he says,"so all the important evidence is now to be gained from conversations with the people involved. What we really need to know is not what decision was reached, as that is usually obvious, but who was paying for what and whose interests were being appeased, and this kind of information will never appear in the official records.
"We got an excellent insight into this when researching food scares prior to the BSE inquiry. Many scientists were bound by confidentiality clauses but said they had decided to no longer eat beef. This was before the sale of beef was banned, so we had a clear picture that something was wrong long before the government decided to act.
"Hard as they might try, governments can no longer totally control what information is made public. Everyone is much more cynical and disenchanted with the political process than they were 30 years ago, and the culture of deference and confidentiality has all but disappeared. When we first published our book Bad News, in 1976, everyone thought it was outrageous that we should be so critical of the BBC. Now everyone takes such comments for granted and the BBC has even asked us to help out with their own staff training."
Not that there aren't pieces of information that academics would dearly love to get their hands on."For some years now, I've been trying to find out the government's plans for handling food insecurity during times of war," says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University."Each time I've been gently rebuffed. I'm happy to have another go under the new act, but I'm not expecting a different outcome."
On the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, while half the country was asleep and the other half might just as well have been, Britain could finally claim to be a fully paid-up member of the world's democracies. After years of campaigning by pressure groups - not to mention governmental procrastination - the UK joined more than 100 other countries in allowing public access to some official records as its new Freedom of Information Act came into effect.
The Campaign for Freedom of Information had been working towards this moment for more than 20 years, and its director, Maurice Frankel, was understandably upbeat about the act."The new rights will help people ensure they are being treated fairly, learn whether they are being exposed to hazards, check that public authorities are doing their job and give people a better chance of influencing decisions," he said."They should also lead to more honesty in government. Giving the public the right to see the documents will make it harder for authorities to conceal substandard performance or get away with spin or misleading accounts of what they are doing."
There were some caveats, though. In the run-up to January 1 there were fears that government departments were indulging in some ruthless housekeeping by shredding awkward documents, which only exacerbated existing concerns that ministers were going to extend the right to non-disclosure from the legitimate aims of protecting national security, law enforcement and international relations to include protecting reputations and hiding cock-ups."The legislation's most contentious feature is a ministerial veto, allowing cabinet ministers to override the Information Commissioner if he orders a government department to release information on public interest grounds," Frankel continued."No one is putting any bets on ministers being able to resist its use where politically damaging information is at stake."
Discovering the really interesting information will largely depend on knowing what questions to ask. The general public might struggle here, but if anyone should know where the bodies are buried it's an academic. Peter Hennessy's postgraduate students have formed a Freedom of Information hit-squad to target documents from the late 70's - on the grounds that the government is likely to care less about their discolosure than about papers from more recent times - but it's fair to say there hasn't exactly been a stampede of researchers rushing to the post office to send off their requests to Whitehall. With more than four years to prepare for the implementation of the act, even the doziest researcher can hardly complain he or she was caught on the hop, so could it just be there may be not as much hidden treasure as one might imagine?
Anyone anticipating a similar deluge of information to that uncovered in the former Soviet bloc countries in the early 1990s is likely to be disappointed. For one thing, many records only ever existed in the minds of conspiracy theorists, and for another, the Major government had already released some 80,000 restricted cold war files in 1992 under the Waldegrave"open government" initiative. And the picture that emerged was not necessarily the one expected.
"The documents revealed a great deal about espionage in the cold war era, together with information on how and why the H-bomb was built," says Peter Hennessy, Attlee professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary College, University of London, who spent five years wading through the archive for his book, The Secret State."But perhaps the most interesting aspect has been Britain's retaliation procedures in the event of nuclear war.
"The British went out of their way to avoid confrontation. The guardians of the secret state are often portrayed as gung-ho rightwingers, but that view is quite wrong. Here they are revealed as thoroughly British good chaps, practising self-restraint. They didn't want to follow the American McCarthyist route: rather they tried to preserve due process and civil liberties."
This is not something that could be said of the Blair government, with its indefinite imprisonment without trial for terrorist suspects and the planned introduction of ID cards. Campaigners for freedom of information - including this newspaper - have applied for the attorney general's opinion on the legality of the second Gulf war to be made public, but no one seriously expects the government to acquiesce on this or other sensitive issues.
Despite the trail of emails that have plagued the government - Jo Moore, the Butler inquiry and the Blunkett affair - many academics believe that governments are becoming increasingly wary of committing any evidence to paper or hard drive."Most of the key discussions take place in informal meetings in Tony Blair's den before cabinet," says Anthony Seldon, headteacher of Brighton College and author of a bestselling biography of the prime minister."All the important decisions on the Iraq war were taken in this way; cabinet merely rubber-stamped them. So even if the papers were released, they wouldn't tell us very much because they would be so bland as to be virtually worthless."
This may be less of an interference to scholarship than might be imagined."Newspapers always make a big deal about information released under the 30-year rule," Seldon continues,"but the reality is that we rarely learn anything we didn't know already. All the important papers on Suez, the International Monetary Fund and the Falklands have just confirmed what we really knew already. This is useful for dotting the is and crossing the ts and for providing precise quotations, but it doesn't lead to a fundamental reassessment of our recent history."
Seldon maintains that interview technique is now more important for the modern historian than familiarity with the byways of the archives."We live in a more confessional age," he says."Politicians and civil servants may not want to be held to account by a written document, but they are still happy to confide in someone they trust. Not everyone is always happy with the way decisions are reached and so the truth has a way of leaking out. People are far more indiscreet these days, so government secrets tend to become public knowledge within days or weeks rather than months or years."
Greg Philo, director of the Glasgow Media Group at Glasgow University, confirms this trend."People have realised how email has made it difficult to control the flow of information," he says,"so all the important evidence is now to be gained from conversations with the people involved. What we really need to know is not what decision was reached, as that is usually obvious, but who was paying for what and whose interests were being appeased, and this kind of information will never appear in the official records.
"We got an excellent insight into this when researching food scares prior to the BSE inquiry. Many scientists were bound by confidentiality clauses but said they had decided to no longer eat beef. This was before the sale of beef was banned, so we had a clear picture that something was wrong long before the government decided to act.
"Hard as they might try, governments can no longer totally control what information is made public. Everyone is much more cynical and disenchanted with the political process than they were 30 years ago, and the culture of deference and confidentiality has all but disappeared. When we first published our book Bad News, in 1976, everyone thought it was outrageous that we should be so critical of the BBC. Now everyone takes such comments for granted and the BBC has even asked us to help out with their own staff training."
Not that there aren't pieces of information that academics would dearly love to get their hands on."For some years now, I've been trying to find out the government's plans for handling food insecurity during times of war," says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University."Each time I've been gently rebuffed. I'm happy to have another go under the new act, but I'm not expecting a different outcome."