ABSTRACT
A.H.Birch Representative and Responsible Government (1964) It might seem unnecessary to have to argue that a modern democracy should have a commitment to openness as one of its basic ingredients. Certainly it should be unnecessary. It may not be quite the case, as Francis Bacon famously put it, that ‘knowledge itself is power’, but that they are intimately connected is something of which there can be no real doubt. That is clearly the view of governments and the powerful, since they have always regarded the control of information as a major preoccupation. In this matter too, though, the general case has a distinctively British application and, because of that, acquires a particular significance.
