ABSTRACT
It is clear that there has been no linear progression in the United Kingdom from official secrecy to freedom of information. The fact that the principles of secrecy and disclosure still coexist rather uneasily in the British political system does not in any way remove the tensions which can arise between different vested interests in government and protagonists holding different views of government. Freedom of information is a means to an end – namely, a genuinely open and participatory process of government – not necessarily an end in itself, notwithstanding the fact that the long-running Freedom of Information Campaign treated it as such. The real conflict of interest has been between the protective, sometimes punitive role of the state in its efforts to safeguard ‘national security’ and the legitimate expectations of its subjects/citizens that they can or should be allowed to share in a more open and participatory form of politics. There is also a parallel conflict between the privacy interests of private individuals, who want confidential access to and safeguards for the security of official information about themselves, and the public interest of society as a whole which may occasionally require the sharing or disclosure of sensitive personal information at least on a ‘need to know’ basis within and sometimes beyond the institutions of government. Even if the general case for a Freedom of Information Act has been conceded by the most reluctant Ministers and officials, there have been vigorous internal arguments within Whitehall and Westminster about the particular application of this principle to particular categories of official information and about the pace of implementation.
