Openness and freedom of information are no longer valued in the UK

Last week, after the High Court in London ruled that Julian Assange could be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges, social media was at once abuzz with reactions. But the preponderance of protesting voices came not from the UK, where the case was fought and where the WikiLeaks founder has spent most of the past 11 years, but from a host of other countries, particularly in Europe.

Now there may be a number of reasons why. Whatever the rights and wrongs of his case, Assange has not been taken to British hearts. Those who gave him hospitality found him a difficult guest; his flight to the Ecuador embassy cost his bail sponsors dear, and the police guard and surveillance of the embassy ran up a steep bill for taxpayers. These sentiments have fed into a conspicuous lack of popular outrage that a journalist and free-speech campaigner is being held in one of the UK’s top-security prisons.

But I wonder whether there is not another, bigger, reason as well. Many of the social media posts opposing the High Court ruling came from Spain, Portugal and Greece, countries that have been under martial law or dictatorship within living memory. These are countries where people, especially journalists and academics, and their now grown-up children, know what it really means not to have freedom of speech. Others came from former Eastern bloc countries, where the same applies. Anyone over 40 there will have some memory, if not direct experience, of how the media functioned before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Compare – and contrast – the UK. At popular and official level, we (and I include myself here) tend to be astonishingly blase about matters of free speech and information. This complacency may stem from the common assumption that this country, with its undoubtedly vibrant, if often cash-strapped, media, is a model of free speech, with traditions of satirical, polemical and investigative journalism that go back for centuries, interrupted only by (comparatively benign) wartime censorship.

The UK’s claimed superiority in media matters was the boast that underlay the first Global Conference for Media Freedom, held in London in 2019 and sponsored by the Foreign Office. Billed as “part of an international campaign to shine a global spotlight on media freedom and increase the cost to those that are attempting to restrict it”, the gathering included sessions on trust between media and governments, on the safety of journalists, and, of course, on “countering disinformation”, the fashionable topic of our day. A very few delegates pointed out that this huge jamboree, in London’s Docklands was taking place not a million miles from Belmarsh prison, where Assange was – and is still – being held.

It might be added here that if there is any current information trend in the UK, it would appear to be towards more, rather than less, control, as enshrined in the Online Safety Bill, currently going through parliament. But the whole thing could go back to the drawing board, and it is not my chief concern here. It is rather to highlight some of the ways in which this country, a supposed model of “glasnost”, in fact falls grievously short.

Let’s start with that Assange ruling. Notice that the ruling was to be delivered was given at 4pm the previous day, not just to the public, but to the parties involved. Nor is this an exception. Court lists for the following day are mostly released only on the afternoon before. To obtain any longer notice, you have either to be in contact with a friendly lawyer or to subscribe to a commercial company that compiles the lists – even then, the standard notice is still the afternoon before.

This is absurd, not just in this day and age of instant information, but at all. Trying to find out what cases are being heard when, or when verdicts are to be announced, can be a time-consuming and frustrating struggle. Yet this is information that belongs to the public and should be open to all as a matter of course – as it is in many other countries – along with the verdicts and court transcripts or recordings (which are currently available only for a vast fee). Of course, uncertainty is unavoidable when a jury has gone out. In all other ways, though, the lack of openness effectively limits information about the judicial process to a select caste.

While in the area of open, or rather closed, justice, I would add the institution of the public inquiry that is not nearly as public as you might think. Why were the inquests into the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko (2016, nine years after the event), into the Manchester arena bombing (ongoing), and into the death of Dawn Sturgess (the only inquiry to follow the Salisbury poisonings and opening at the earliest in 2023) redesignated public inquiries? Largely to keep certain swathes of information out of the public domain.

The point is that at an inquest all evidence must be heard in public (and quite right, too), whereas at a public inquiry – well, evidence considered sensitive can be heard behind very closed doors and, on occasion, by the presiding judge alone. What does that say about the use of the word “public”, as in public inquiry? What price the conclusions of a process where a part – in the Litvinenko case, a substantial part – never sees the light of day. How open is UK justice? How open is information in the UK?

Where access to information has been expanded in recent years – to bring it roughly up to the level where more open countries, such as Germany, the Netherlands and the Baltic states already are – all manner of obstacles are still placed in the way, and any will to improve matters is decidedly lacking. Indeed, Tony Blair, whose brainchild the 2000 Freedom of Information Act was, is on record a decade later as bitterly regretting that move, as it had provided an unwelcome window on to government discussions and been used not by “the people”, but – oh dear – by journalists, in whose hands it had become a “weapon”.

So, of course, efforts have been made to close up. The stratagems used by government departments to avoid answering FOI requests seem to multiply by the year. The latest was a “clearing house” set up by Downing Street to centralise all requests and vet the applicants. And the reality is that, with or without the FOI law, the UK keeps many areas of information under wraps, with public works tenders, regulatory compliance (Grenfell Tower, anyone?), and anything deemed security-related, left opaque in so many ways.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter by clicking here

At which point, let’s turn to seasonal excess, and the Downing Street (and other) lockdown parties. Is it not extraordinary that, in a country and a city that prides itself on political scoops, the barest evidence of these lockdown parties has taken the best part of a year to emerge? And might this great lacuna in the public’s awareness have had something to do with the cosy relations between some parts of the government machine and some journalists, including the “honour code” that governs reporters who work in the Westminster lobby?

When I worked in Washington, it was well known that a White House correspondent who stepped out of line (with an awkward question or an unwelcome expose) risked being cut out of the close-knit group, thereby becoming of less use to the media outlet they represented. Perish the thought that anything similar goes on here. Then again, how else is such a secret kept for 11 months and counting?

In all, it is beyond time that openness and freedom of information were valued as highly in the UK as they are in those many European countries where for long years they were lost. Our history may be long on freedoms and rights, but there are now many countries where the courts, government departments and political processes are considerably more open than they are here. Abandoning the boasts and acknowledging our flaws would be the first step in catching up.