'There is among the many departments of our well-ordered state a department which would be known if we were Chinese as "The Board of Things to be Known and Not to be Known".' Hilaire Belloc, writing in 1925 a satire on England as he imagined it would be in 1953, accurately linked the mandarin élitism of the Civil Service with its determination to control the supply of public information. What is new in the present decade is the assumption of power by a government which shares this determination but which also has definite and disturbing ends in view. Nevertheless the formal processes of public dialogue are still in place, and White Papers and published Bills form a traditional part of them.

LRB 2 March 1989 | PDF Download