Qualification

Thinking about it again this morning, I thought I needed to qualify yesterday's post about fracking (reference 1).

I am not against secrecy in general, even leaving aside the need for secrecy in many military and commercial matters, which last might often be characterised as secrecy of fact. One does not want this or that fact to escape into the public - or the enemy - domain. There is also plenty of need for what might be characterised as secrecy of process - a need which I believe is recognised in the exemptions written into our Freedom of Information Act.

By which I mean that if, for example, one has a difficult but important decision to take, it can be made much harder if the process of coming to that decision has to be conducted in public. Suppose for example one has a board which actually makes the decision, supported by a team of officials who prepare the papers on which the board bases its decision. It is going to make the work of those officials much harder if that work, if that work in progress is apt to be spread over public media. The fact, for example, that this or that controversial or tricky option was under consideration. Or that this or that bunch of people needed to be paid off for something or other. Officials who are perhaps not well suited to doing their work out in the rough and tumble of the media world. Politicians sign up for that kind of thing, not officials. A world which, one might add, is these days increasingly driven by the need for (advertisement) revenue generating clicks rather than by the need to provide information.

Similar considerations drive the privacy of jury rooms. And there is an analogy of sorts in medical matters. If I go to the doctor, I don't want to hear all the gruesome details, I just want to hear a nicely packaged story. To hear what I need to know. And from the other side of the fence, I dare say doctors much prefer to have time to concoct such a story, to have come up with a way forward, rather than have the patient get all those gruesome details in real time, fresh off the scanner as it were. I dare say also, that patients vary a good deal in what and when they want to be told.

But for the public to allow such secrecy, there has to be trust. The public has to trust the bosses to be working in the public interest, not to some undeclared, private agenda. Trust which, these days, is all to often lacking.

PS: there is also the question of time. Public record keeping has long recognised the principle that most secrets become public in time, when interest and passions have waned. And some secrets have quite a short shelf life, perhaps only until managed publication. So the Budget used to be terribly secret until the moment that the Chancellor sat down. Perhaps silly, but that was the custom.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/fracking.html.