A long queue for the Studio Theatre at the Edinburgh International Book Festival attested to the interest Ian Cobain’s investigative writings produce.
A journalist with The Guardian newspaper, Cobain specialises in uncovering material Her Majesty’s Government and its servants would prefer to keep under wraps.
In his latest book ‘The History Thieves; Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation’, Cobain looks at the impact of Official Secrets Acts (there have been five since the initial legislation of 1889).
Although the first Act was aimed at the increasingly large class of clerical workers Government employed to deal with the largely mundane but necessary tasks generated by modernising bureaucracy, as with other types of legal constraint, subsequent Acts covered increasingly wider areas of activity.
Cobain’s net is cast wider, however, than simply the state servant mind-set that declares that the contents of any official document are in essence officially secret. The implication in the title of his latest work is that, however necessary the maintenance of secrecy may be – and Cobain does not deny that secrecy is at times necessary – the lack of record allows Government to deny past actions and thereby distort our understanding of the past. In this sense, what takes place is indeed the theft of history.
The implications were made clear when Cobain enumerated the numbers of documents involved. A Freedom of Information request revealed some one and a half million documents, in potential at least, lying beyond the immediate terms of the request itself.
Cobain noted that the release of large numbers of documents, as in the case of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, is unlikely to be repeated, as governments will strive to prevent the circumvention of their security, making legitimate investigations more difficult to conduct.
Tension between the need and desire to retain control of information on the part of governments and the desirability of transparency and maintenance of accessible records will continue. Cobain’s book is a timely reminder of the observation that the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance, not only by those in power, but also on the part of those speaking truth to those in power.
Ian Cobain's The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation