Book Reviews 1 12 1

NOTES 1. W. Kip Viscusi, “The Impact of Occupational Safety and Health Regulation,” BeZZ Journal of

Economics, (10)1(1979): 117-140.

INFORWTION

Walter Williams

The Press and the Decline of Democracy: The Democratic Socialist Response in Public Policy, by Robert G . Picard. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1985, 173pp. Price: $27.95 cloth.

Sources Close to the Prime Minister: Inside the Hidden World of the News Manipulators, by Michael Cockerell, Peter Hennessy, and David Walker. London: Macmillan Papermac, 1 9 8 5 , 2 6 1 ~ ~ .

The Right to Know: The Inside Story of the Belgrano Affair, by Clive Ponting. London: Sphere Books, 1985, 214pp.

These three volumes concern, broadly speaking, the flow of information and democracy, using flow to connote movement in multiple directions. Do citizens and their representa- tives receive timely information and are there channels to send their ideas to policymakers before decisions affecting them are made? Are the information and analyses of policy- makers and their staffs subjected to hard scrutiny and challenge by political and policy people?

The Picard book is by far the broadest of the three books-a democratic socialist’s critique of press freedom that, in the author’s words, is “utopian.” The author decries the decline of newspapers in America and claims that the freedom of ideas is stifled because capitalist enterprises have cornered the market. Picard supports a strong government role including subsidies, arguing that the Scandinavian experience belies the claim that such subsidies restrict press freedom (a questionable comparison for the U .S .). Picard’s main concern is not the top of the central government (as is the case with the other two books), but how to encourage a wide diversity of ideas in the press and to increase citizen access to the press. “The struggle to democratize the press is a microcosm of the struggle to democratize society” (Picard, p. 150). The book is long on normative statements at a high level of generality and short on implementation ideas.

Sources Close to the Prime Minister and the Ponting book complement each other nicely in treating secrecy in Britain. Sources, by three media people, centers on the “Lobby” correspondents who are physically based in the Palace of Westminster and who write about the prime minister, the House of Commons, and more generally, British politics. They charge that the Lobby accepts spoon feedings quite willingly through mass, non- attributable briefings by “sources close to the prime minister” rather than engaging in sound investigative reporting. The Lobby is part of the secrecy syndrome that reigns at the center of British central government. The Ponting book is an almost too perfect case example of this secrecy problem. A t question is the Thatcher government effort to cover up the May 1982 sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano. In this affair Pont- ing, a career civil servant in the Ministry of Defense (MOD), ends up being charged under the highly restrictive Official Secrets Act of 191 1 with a criminal leaking of information.

A strength of Sources is that it is so readable and quotable. Cockerell, Hennessy, and Walker, like Picard, are concerned fundamentally with democracy. “Facts are the raw material of democracy. . . . [British democracy] is a sham because the British people are

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governed by a system which does all it can to deny them the facts.” (Sources, p. 8). Here is my favorite: “Secrecy is built into the calcium of every policymaker’s bones. It is the very essence of his-or her-concept of good governance” (ibid, p. 15).

Blend together the 191 1 act, the Lobby, and Mrs. Thatcher’s skillful news management and the result is the most consistent, most effective government information manipula- tion in memory, likely ever in Britain. In the face of this onslaught the authors claim journalists’ responsibility to get the facts should increase: “Yet we find in the Lobby a system of information-gathering which actually makes journalists a party to government news management. . . . [The Lobby] inevitably promotes political news management and reinforces the monolithic edifice of secrecy. The consequence is private government” (ibid, p. 233). The book’s penultimate paragraph offers a remarkable 1984 quote from the Conservative Mail on Sunday: “Britain is the most backward county in the whole of the Western world both in the ability of the press properly to investigate the ‘great and the good’ and in the refusal of all governments actually to trust the people with the informa- tion to which they are fully entitled” (ibid, p. 248). Sources’ main recommendation is to do away with the Lobby and have all mass non-attributable briefings replaced by a system- atic and sustained investigation of the civil service. Alas, the three authors may in this recommendation be almost as utopian as Picard.

The Right to Know underscores Sources’ secrecy theme. It reads like a spy thriller, a corking good tale with the twists and turns of that genre. Put quite simply, The Right to Know is the story of a career civil servant on his way up (division head at MOD headquar- ters at age 35) who finally “leaks” papers to a Labour MP, not the press. These papers documenting that the Thatcher government was misleading a House of Commons com- mittee on the sinking of the General Belgrano. In this Watergate-like affair, it is Ponting, not the cover up perpetrators, who ends up before a judge and jury in the Old Bailey accused of disclosing official information without authorization under Section 2 of the 191 1 act. Reading the book may give you far more information on official secrets than you probably will want (although it is concentrated in one place), and you may be bothered by the author’s self-righteousness and tendency to dwell on poor persecuted me. But these are small quibbles, so read and enjoy the book on a rainy England-like day.

Two further aspects of the Ponting book need highlighting. First, it is true both that few civil servants ever run afoul of the Official Secrets Act and that the act is Kafka-like in its restrictiveness. The key provision, Section 2, applies to all information, not just classified or secret information. I recall interviewing a British civil servant who during the discus- sion handed me a paper he was to deliver the next day at a conference and said he was in violation of the Official Secrets Act. I found nothing that had not been published before. Still, I had been party to a violation of the 191 1 act. Secrecy does permeate British central government. Neither Ponting nor Cockrell, Hennessy, and Walker exaggerate.

Second, Ponting puts his finger on what may be the most insidious aspect of the interac- tion of the civil servant and secrecy: “[Tlop civil servants tend naturally to subscribe to the view that closed government is rational government. . . . Closed government ensures that ‘official information’ is overvalued compared to information generally available” (ibid, p. 207). Ponting notes that the published studies of outside institutes on strategic and defense issues “were usually greeted with amused contempt within MOD” (ibid, p. 208). Ponting may be suspect, a disgruntled victim, but his case is substantiated from the top of the Ministry of Defense in this statement by Sir Frank Cooper, the senior civil servant at MOD 1976-1982: “In defense . . . there are very few other experts and [the Ministry of] Defense has a near monopoly. In terms of foreign affairs? Well, people cer- tainly write history and write pieces about foreign affairs. But again there is a limited knowledge of the real relations that one country has with another.”’ How revealing a

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statement. Those poor, uninformed folks on the outside may write in their amateurish way but the best and brightest (civil servants) have an information monopoly and no doubt superior intelligence. The insiders do not need outside help.

The great cost of secrecy is that it reduces or eliminates the kind of competition that improves information, analysis, and ideas. Both Ponting and Cockerel1 and his colleagues stress that secrecy is the enemy of democracy in barring people from the decision process. But democracy is a separate issue. Independent of that vital issue, secrecy should be rejected on more pragmatic grounds-it hampers effective governance. Britain is a classic case in point.

WALTER WILLIAMS is Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Peter Hennessy, Susan Morrison, and Richard Townsend, Routine Punctuated by Or-

gies, University of Strathclyde, 1985, p. 27. The quote is from an interview with Cooper on October 31, 1983.

WELFARE

Michael Wiseman

In Defense o f Welfare, Philip Bean, John Ferris and David Whynes, Editors. London: Travistock, 1985, 282pp. Price: $17.95 paper.

The Future of Welfare, Rudolf Klein and Michael O’Higgins, Editors. Oxford: Basil Black- well Ltd., 1985, 253pp. Price: $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Like the Reagan administration in the United States, the Conservative Party government in the United Kingdom has pursued major changes in social welfare policies. In both countries these initiatives have generated public debate over the specifics of the proposals and the evolving role of government in providing social services. These two essay collec- tions (here labeled Defence and Future) consider the state of and alternatives for welfare policy in the U.K.

Welfare is broadly defined to include all social service and income support commit- ments taken on by the British government since World War 11. Both books attempt to clarify the nature of Britain’s welfare “crisis” and to explore possibilities for reform in the social welfare system. While diversity of opinion is evident within each collection, the twelve essays in Defence reflect a generally Labour-socialist perspective, and the thirteen papers published in Future have a more centrist tone. The books touch on many issues, but the significant contributions concern (1) the nature of Britain’s welfare “crisis”, (2) the philosophical basis of the welfare state, (3) the relation between the social services system and the distribution of income, (4) the consequences of the social welfare system for national output, and (5) problems of social service operation.

The crisis has both economic and political dimensions. Essays in Future by Colin Gillion and Richard Hemming and by Gavyn Davies and David Piachaud indicate that while the level of social welfare expenditure in Britain is not exceptionally high by European stan- dards, the rate of growth has been great. Between 1960 and 1975 public expenditure on social programs other than housing in Britain grew at over twice the rate of increase in gross domestic product; the rate of change continued to be substantially greater than GDP