One Hundred Years of Secrecy - BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 will broadcast the first in a series on 'Secret Britain' on Tuesday 16 August at 9.00 am.

Kicking off Radio 4's Secret Britain series, Peter Hennessy, the leading Whitehall-watcher, tells the story of the Official Secrets Act and explores the tension between Britain's culture of state secrecy and more open government.

One hundred years ago, in the hot summer of 1911, Asquith's Government exploited a scare about German spies and a panic over a German gunboat in a Moroccan port to rush a new Official Secrets Act through parliament. The measure was presented as being necessary for national security, but ministers seized their opportunity to extend the law much further. The Act included a 'catch-all' section that forbade the unauthorized disclosure of anything about the government's work, including innocuous matters that posed no possible threat to national security.

Peter Hennessy explains why Britain developed a culture of state secrecy and shows how politicians kept politically inconvenient information secret. He examines how reform of official secrets eventually came and explores the tension between the competing needs for secrecy that protects national security and more openness in a democracy.

Producer: Rob Shepherd.

See also:
The slow road to reform in a nation once ruled by secrecy - Telegraph, 15 August 2011

Recriminalising the leaking of official information

Letters, The Times
4 December 2008

Sir, The Damian Green case and the unsuccessful prosecution of the journalist Sally Murrer raise the question of whether the offence of misconduct in public office is now being used as a way of recriminalising the leaking of official information.

For many years any leak of official information on any subject — damaging or innocuous — was an offence under Section 2 of the 1911 Official Secrets Act. The 1989 Official Secrets Act changed this. It limited the offence to unauthorised and damaging disclosures relating to the work of the security and intelligence services, defence, international relations and law enforcement or to the obtaining of information under certain warrants, for example to intercept communications.

The 1988 White Paper that announced the reform made clear that disclosures that were merely “undesirable, a betrayal of trust or an embarrassment to the Government” would not be punishable by the criminal law. Introducing the new legislation Douglas Hurd, then the Conservative Home Secretary, explained that it “will remove the protection of the criminal law from the great bulk of sensitive and important information — including policy documents, Cabinet discussions on education, on health and on social security, and economic information and budget preparations. None of them will any longer have the protection of the criminal law.” Such disclosures might lead to disciplinary action — but not prosecution.

The disclosures that the Home Office civil servant are alleged to have made not only fall within the broad class of information deliberately removed from these criminal sanctions but in some cases are likely to be disclosable under the Freedom of Information Act. How has the clock been turned back to make such disclosures the subject of police investigations, arrests and possible prosecutions?

Maurice Frankel

Director, Campaign for Freedom of Information