Government needs secrecy but the public needs whistleblowers

This has been the week of the whistleblowers. Nevres Kemal is the social worker in the north London borough of Haringey who raised the alarm about failings in the council's child protection system in early 2007, several months before the death of Baby P. For her bravery and compassion she was dismissed from her job and served with an injunction preventing her from speaking publicly of her concerns.

Christopher Galley is the Home Office civil servant who leaked details of mismanagement within the department to the Conservative immigration spokesman and MP for Ashford, Damian Green. The information he passed on was of the lowest level of classification but included details of the employment of illegal immigrants, including 7,000 in sensitive security posts. Mr Galley was arrested in a dawn raid on 19 November and held for 17 hours. Mr Green was arrested eight days later.

Events tragically vindicated Ms Kemal. Individuals who failed to act on her concerns in 2007 are themselves disgraced, while the then health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, and her ministers, who were warned in writing about Ms Kemal's worries in February 2007, have questions to ask themselves.

Mr Galley is a partisan Tory: he has stood as a Conservative councillor and applied to work in Mr Green's office. He was arrested on suspicion of "misconduct in public office". There has so far been no mention of charges under the Official Secrets Act, suggesting that the police recognise the leaks were not especially serious.

What the cases of Ms Kemal and Mr Galley have in common is the disproportionate scale of the authorities' reaction to concerns raised by staff about their policies. All governments, local and central, need to be able to trust their employees to treat sensitive material with discretion. That may sometimes require enforcing. Without secrecy the government cannot function properly, as demonstrated by the hysterical reaction to the news that it had considered raising VAT to 18.5 per cent in 2011.

However, the manner of Mr Green's arrest and his extended detention (surely intended to intimidate), the search of his home and the raid on his parliamentary office are all, in different ways, shocking. No member of parliament is above the law. But there are sound reasons for the privileges of parliament, not least that they allow MPs to hold a government to account on behalf of constituents. MPs must be able to do this without fear of the arbitrary exercise of power of the executive.

We welcome, therefore, the appointment of Ian Johnston, the head of British Transport Police, to lead an inquiry into the police investigation of the leaks. We welcome, too, the warning from the Leader of the House, Harriet Harman, a former civil liberties lawyer, that the arrest of Green raises serious issues for parliament to consider. An explicit code defining the protection that MPs should enjoy is urgently needed.

Both may bring calm to the overblown statements of distress and foreboding of an imminent British police state expressed in sections of the press and allow us to focus on an urgent issue.

A culture of secrecy remains obstinately central to British politics. This culture assumes that it is dangerous to give the public official information. The Freedom of Information Act was a major step forward and has yielded good results. But it was designed to tip the balance in favour of disclosure and this it has signally failed to do. Outdated civil service attitudes persist. Officials complain they are overwhelmed by FoI requests. A sensible approach would be for government agencies to accede to requests as a matter of course. Objecting to disclosure should be the exception.

The New Statesman has supported whistleblowers and their right to disclose information they believe to be in the public interest. That is why we supported Derek Pasquill, who leaked information from the Foreign Office about the government's relationship with radical Islamists and ministers' knowledge of CIA "rendition flights". Charges against Mr Pasquill were dropped when it was revealed that senior FO officials shared his concerns.

His disclosures had been embarrassing to ministers but not damaging to national security. The same may prove true of the leaks to Mr Green. Or they may not. But the first question should have been asked long before the arrests: why are these documents secret?

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