Abstract
Historians tracking down Britain’s historical documents are encountering a crisis, says
The introduction of a 20-year-rule making formerly secret documents public, and revelations of massive holdings of documents held by departments in infringement of the UK’s Public Records Act, have created a crisis of formidable proportions. The system is struggling to cope, and government departments can’t deal with the backlog. This is made worse by limited resources for record management, especially in the last five years, due to budget cuts. Austerity means that even those who would like to pass records on to archives don’t have the capacity.
In May 2013, the first legal case bringing to light the scale of government secrecy took place. The British government made an out-of-court settlement with 5,228 Kenyans who had been tortured whilst in British detention during the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s.
This was an armed rebellion among the Kikuyu in central Kenya, aimed at bringing colonial white rule to an end. The rebels killed 32 white settlers, and murdered over 3,000 Africans accused of collaboration. The British counter-insurgency crushed the uprising, resulting in an estimated 25,000 deaths and the detention of 80,000 Kikuyu suspected of rebel sympathies.
The payments in 2013 marked the culmination of a legal campaign that had spanned more than a decade. Access to crucial documentary evidence was a bone of contention throughout this protracted case, with London lawyers Leigh Day making repeated requests for the government to release records.
Historians, too, had endeavoured to track down these documents. These requests met with deflection, denial and, ultimately, deceit, as the British government sought to keep critical evidence out of the hands of those who might use it for legal redress.
The breakthrough in the Mau Mau case came in December 2010, when the High Court ordered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to locate and release the documents described in a witness statement I had submitted through Leigh Day. The FCO now miraculously “found” the documents which they denied had existed and late in January 2011, Leigh Day’s legal team received the first of a huge tranche of historical papers. It was admitted that these 1,500 files had been illegally and secretly removed from Kenya before the country’s independence in 1963. The documents provided critical evidence supporting claims of torture and abuse.
A policeman guards Mau Mau tribesmen, Nairobi, Kenya, 1954
CREDIT: Popperfoto/Getty
And there were more revelations to come. In April 2011, a statement announced that a further cache of documents relating to 36 former British colonies and dependencies would be released – more than 24,000 files.
Then, in 2013, a further 1.2 million “retained materials” emerged. These included papers dealing with Nazis at the end of World War II, as well as Cold War spying.
There is a further sinister aspect: the FCO did not consider these materials “searchable” under the Freedom of Information Act. If a document is not listed, it cannot be found. In effect, the documents did not officially exist. This raises the question of whether other government departments may also hold collections of documents that are not listed.
The preservation of Britain’s historical records is primarily protected through an act of parliament passed 60 years ago. The Public Records Act (1958) sets down the legal procedures that government departments must follow in retaining, destroying or releasing documents in the public domain. Written long before digitisation, and decades before anyone thought of freedom of information as a right, the 1958 act is archaic. Despite this, government departments are required to work with The National Archives, at Kew, within the terms of the act.
This creaking act has been augmented in important ways by two more recent pieces of legislation. The first, dating from 2000, is the Freedom of Information Act, which allows individuals to request the release of any government document. The second is the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act of 2010. This reduced the long-standing 30-year-rule on document release to 20 years, massively increasing the workload of those who make documents public.
A stream of press stories from 2014 suggesting there might be other hidden document caches were summed up in the publication of Ian Cobain’s book The History Thieves (2016). Cobain saw secrecy as a “fiercely protected norm” of British government. This view was evident in the reaction of the Cameron government to the accidental release, in January 2014, of documents relating to British assistance for an operation by the Indian army at the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984. These showed that the Thatcher government had been complicit in a military action that resulted in a massacre in which hundreds died. Cameron’s reaction to the leak was to ask why the management of British documents had been so careless as to release this information.
The Golden Temple scandal led directly to the setting up of a far-reaching Cabinet Office enquiry, which makes for alarming reading. It identified at least six other departments as holding large “legacy collections”. The Ministry of Defence had the most significant backlog. In all these cases, the departments lacked lists of the files concerned.
The inability, or unwillingness, of departments to comply with their legal requirements under the Public Records Act gives a hollow ring to British claims of “open government”. Historians are right to be suspicious that the past is liable to censorship by the actions, or inactions, of government.