The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy by Heather Brooke

Heather Brooke’s work is a marvellous, informative and emotionally engaging read, but essentially it is a polemic, rather than a thesis. One can describe what she says and advocates; one can agree with almost all of it. But the book is, essentially, a good natured, well-sourced, perhaps slightly overegged rant on the power inequality between paying citizen and bloated state, replete with instances of the latter’s grabbing informational power at the expense (democratic, personal and economic) of the former; specific failures of transparency as regards the courts, Whitehall and of course Parliament; and an account of her famous and, from her perspective, ultimately futile attempts to use the Freedom of Information legislation to counter these problems. From a jurispudential perspective, it’s a slightly crude book, in that it assumes the primacy of free information in a democracy without examining its parameters. She doesn’t, for instance, seem to have contemplated what the right reaction would be if a court ordered a journalist to hand over a State-sponsored source. She rejoices in having obtained a Conditional Fee Arrangement to defend her Information Tribunal victory over MPs’ expenses in the High Court without the risk of bankruptcy, but doesn’t examine the consequences of the CFA regime for newspapers defending a defamation action against a rich powerful claimant. She doesn’t set out to explore the balancing exercise to be done in those circumstances where a failure to protect information might ultimately result in the availability of less reliable informationindeed, that that exercise may ever need to be done does not seem to have occurred to her. She strongly deprecates the State’s seeking more and more data from the citizens, but on the grounds that that is the cart leading the horse, rather than that it is informationally counterproductive. She can be critical at p41 of the state for not keeping enough information on children being taken out of schools, eight pages after saying, “In a free society the family is sacrosanct. The state only intervenes where there is a risk of harm or negligence to a child.” Occasionally, too, she lets the populace off the hook rather easily; that “about half the country had no idea who their MP was" is indeed a"shocking fact”, but perhaps one for which that half of the electorate should take responsibility and not just Parliament’s resistance to the Up My Street website’s finders’ proposal to make this readily available free online. But it is churlish to carp at “The Silent State” on these grounds, because Heather Brooke is not setting out to delineate the parameters between the public and the private in a healthy democracy. Sometimes she makes concrete proposals which could most usefully be the basis of legislationfor example, a requirement that public bodies publish line item budgets, staff directories and organisation charts. For the most part, however, she is pointing out undeniable, expensive, bureaucratic secrecy in areasaccess to information about criminal trials, say, or following the public poundwhere one would not have expected there to be much doubt as to the relevance or appropriateness of openness. And yet there has been, which is what makes this book so readable and so valuable. Her description of the High Court proceedings over the MPs expenses Freedom of Information request is extraordinary in a supposedly mature democracy: