Embarrassment, rather than fear for public safety, is behind this government's stream of attacks on whistle-blowers and journalists

In the late summer of 1997, around the time that the government first began pursuing the renegade MI5 officer David Shayler, the Observer made a request to the Department for Education and Employment for some apparently innocent information. We wanted the figures for the number of children who took free school meals.

The Observer's editor at the time, Will Hutton, believed that the raw league tables produced by other newspapers were too crude a measure of a school's performance. He wanted to produce the country's first "value-added" league tables to show how well schools were performing when you took away the inbuilt advantages of class, wealth and geography.

Free school meals are a rough-and-ready measure of poverty, but they are just about all we have. Advisers to the Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, have subsequently accepted the value-added principle themselves; at the time, the DfEE press office was also helpful, and agreed to approach civil servants to obtain it.

Then the problems began. The disclosure of this information was clearly in the public interest. Yet the civil servants argued that, if this information was released to the press, it could prove deeply damaging. What they meant was that it could be deeply embarrassing to them: the department's line under the Tories, as parroted by Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools, was that poverty made no difference to school performance. Our tables risked exploding the myth, and this was not acceptable to the civil servants. The situation was resolved only when Blunkett intervened personally to have the information released.

A small row over the release of arcane school statistics may appear to have little connection to the case of David Shayler. Free school meal statistics are not official secrets, however much civil servants in the DfEE might wish them to be. But the same guiding principle applies. The British government has always had an instinct for secrecy and its civil servants have made a fetish of it. Only in exceptional circumstances do ministers intervene as Blunkett did.

The recent Phillips report into the BSE crisis showed just how dangerous a fetish secrecy can be. It was clearly in the public interest to be told of scientists' suspicions that BSE could jump the species barrier and that therefore the food we were eating might not be safe. But civil servants connived with ministers to keep information hidden. It is what they are trained to do.

In a letter to the Times last June, Nigel West, the spy author, wrote that the British government had "an appalling record of trying to classify as 'top secret' mere political embarrassment". West should know: under his real name, Rupert Allason, he served as a senior intelligence officer; he has written widely on security issues. He was also a Conservative MP in 1989 when the Thatcher government introduced the latest Official Secrets Act - a vicious attack on freedom of speech and the right to blow the whistle on official wrongdoing.

West's words are quoted in the preface to Secrets, Spies and Whistleblowers, a pamphlet published by the human rights group Liberty and Article 19, the campaigners for freedom of expression. West has identified a fundamental truth about the secret state: that it is driven by fear of embarrassment and ridicule, rather than a genuine desire to protect national security or public safety.

When this government came to power, there were hopes that it would usher in a new era of openness in public life. Commitments to introduce legislation on freedom of information and a human rights act showed a genuine willingness to draw a line under the worst excesses of the past. In opposition, the Labour Party had vehemently contested the Official Secrets Bill as it passed through the House in 1988, on the grounds that it did not provide a public interest defence for whistle-blowers.

Yet, by August 1997, when Shayler made his first revelations, it was obvious that the new prime minister, Tony Blair, and his Cabinet would be just as obsessed with maintaining Britain's culture of secrecy as their predecessors.

The Liberty/Article 19 booklet lists the recent cases of crackdown on whistle-blowers and the journalists who investigate their claims. It makes horrifying reading.

On November 7, the satirical magazine Punch was fined £25,000 for publishing an article about David Shayler's claims that the 1993 bombing of the Bishopsgate area of London could have been averted. The Guardian and the Observer also found themselves in court over Shayler's claims about a plot to assassinate the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi; the papers are now fighting attempts by the Crown Prosecution Service to hold Shayler's trial behind closed doors. Meanwhile, Richard Tomlinson, the MI6 officer who was sacked from the service in 1995, continues his battle to take his claim for unfair dismissal to an industrial tribunal.

A second group of cases involves alleged wrongdoing and incompetence in Northern Ireland. Again, the intelligence services have targeted journalists and their sources. So far, thankfully, there has not been a single prosecution in these cases. The order against Ed Moloney, a Northern Ireland journalist who refused to hand over his notes of an interview with a loyalist informer, was quashed last month. On November 1, the prosecution of Lieutenant-Colonel Nigel Wylde was stopped on the orders of the attorney-general, Lord Williams of Mostyn. Wylde had been accused of passing confidential documents about intelligence operations in Northern Ireland to the journalist Tony Geraghty for his book The Irish War. The prosecution against Geraghty had already been dropped and Williams decided there was not enough evidence to continue the pursuit of his source.

Still outstanding is the strange case of "Martin Ingrams", the pseudonym of a member of the Force Research Unit, a clandestine group of army intelligence officers that handled republican and loyalist informers. "Ingrams" is accused of passing information to the Sunday Times journalist Liam Clarke - including details of alleged police and security force involvement in loyalist murders.

It is said that ministers are not prepared to reform the Official Secrets Act because the British electorate is traditionally unconcerned about matters of freedom of expression. What is certain is that no other country in the western world has such draconian secrecy laws. New freedom of information legislation drafted by the Home Office has so many exemptions that it is less progressive than similar documents being prepared for Bulgaria and Moldova. In February this year, the UN rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression slammed the government for failing to stop the stream of cases involving journalists and their sources that were coming before the courts.

In case after case, the intelligence service, the police or civil servants need only assert that a particular disclosure harms national security for the courts to take them at their word. This is particularly troubling when "national security" is such a notoriously difficult concept to define.

The nearest we have come to a definition in this country was in the obscure asylum appeal in May this year of a Pakistani cleric accused of fundamentalist activity. In this case, it was decided that a danger to national security exists where there is "at least a real possibility of direct or indirect repercussions on the security of the UK". In other words: a danger to national security exists where there is a danger to national security.

The real concern among human rights activists is that the government and the security services are more concerned with the chilling deterrent effect of court cases on potential whistle-blowers than with the defence of the realm. Perhaps it is far-fetched to imagine that the state would push cases such as Nigel Wylde's to the brink just to scare others, while knowing that it would never gain a conviction; a more straightforward explanation is that the principle of secrecy at all costs is simpler to act upon than the more slippery concept of freedom of expression.

The Blair government has been responsible for an unprecedented series of attacks on the press and the freedom of the whistle-blower. The suspicion remains that a civil service that cannot understand why it should release figures on free school meals is unlikely to understand its duty to give up its hold on more sensitive material that is potentially far more embarrassing.

The author is home affairs correspondent for the Observer

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