Fire and flood

See, I always thought that if you lost documents courts were supposed to presume that they were… unhelpful… to your case, and for example do things like strike out any defences you advance that rely on matters that would be clarified by documents you lost.

But it turns out that these are actually discretionary powers, probably for precisely this reason, and british courts are notoriously supine on national security matters.

But really you have to ask youself: why are british bureaucrats so fucking fragile and insecure that they need to hide documents rather than accept that they fucked up? What other effects does this insecurity have on policy outcomes, what shitty policies are pressed on with because the bureaucrats too embarrassed to admit mistake?

The British govt definitely has a habit of keeping embarrassing secrets centuries past everyone involved being quite dead and buried. What are they worried about?

I ran into an example researching the Battle of New Orleans and the end of the War of 1812. As of the 1990s, the last time I looked at the question, Her Majesty’s Govt was still keeping secret the instructions its predecessor in 1815 had given the plenipotentiary sent to the US that year to sign the treaty ending the war, depending on whether or not the Senate ratified the document, and with whatever changes or provisos the US might make before signing. It is suspected that his instructions included the insistence that the treaty would not require GB to hand back New Orleans, had General Packenham managed to capture the city before the date of ratification. But almost two centuries later, this was still thought too shockingly sensitive a matter for public revelation. None of this came to pass, however, because Packenham was killed and his army repulsed, so NO was never lost.

They slipped up though. In issuing the official refusal to disclose the instructions given to Lord Sherborne, the British govt did reveal that he was actually given two sets of instructions, one to the govt of the US, and a second to the Hartford Convention. That body was a meeting of delegates from the New England states, which had long opposed the war, and were considering secession if it were not ended. The idea seems to have been that Packenham would capture NO, and Sherborne would announce in Washington that His Majesty’s Govt would not have to give it back under terms of the treaty. The US govt would then either ratify the treat as is and accept the loss of NO, and the effective loss of the whole Louisiana Purchase, or it would reject the treaty and try to continue the war. If the latter, Lord Sherborne would make his way to Hartford and negotiate a peace with a seceded New England, as well as support for that fledgling republic.

This, in 1990, was thought still too hot to handle. Maybe in 2090 it will be sufficiently distant. Or maybe Trump will so torpedo our relationship with GB as to make a little thing like planning the dismemberment of the US a truly trivial matter.

Very interesting, and somewhat depressing.

@ 4. Thank you for this. I’d rather hoped that the acts of more than a century ago could be regarded as the ‘historical record,’ rather than national secrets.

More understandable, from Henry’s linked Guardian piece:

In 2012 the Guardian disclosed that 1.2m documents were being unlawfully kept at a high-security compound in Buckinghamshire. The cache of files came to public attention when the FCO was forced to admit it had withheld thousands of colonial-era papers after elderly Kenyans took a case to the high court, following their detention and torture in the 1950s during the Mau Mau rebellion.

Britain in Kenya, and we can forget about the more recent American fixations on that nation’s history, has been struggling to deal with post-colonialism and the real and purported crimes of the British colonial government there. That something bad happened in Kenya, and how bad, depends very much on who is speaking. Which leads to another Guardian piece by Thomas Frank.

The invested demand a particular version of a truth – usually one that absolves us of any criminal and financial liability, that allows us maximum free future action, and that allows us to pursue present and future goals, almost always at the expense of accuracy.

Thinking about why GB might still want to keep official secrets concerning the War of 1812, it occurs to me that maybe the answer is the stereotype of “perfidious Albion”. It’s not that the events of 1815 embarrass anyone still living, or a party still in office, but that if GB was conniving in the dismemberment of the US in 1815, well, that fits in with the idea that GB is perfidious Albion, the great power that sits back in splendid isolation, plotting the destruction of even its closest friends of last year, if that is thought to be in the national interest of keeping every other power on the planet weak and divided against its neighbors.

Concern about such a stereotype of the nation’s diplomatic strategy might not motivate ordinary people, but perhaps to a certain sort of civil service, technocratic, deep state, permanent govt (pick your stereotype) player in govt, it might loom large enough to make them want to conceal evidence of His Majesty’s Govt of 1815 conniving against the national existence of a power that is now a close ally. If we’re talking about WWII, or even WWI, maybe there are still persons or parties to be protected, but perhaps at least part of the motivation for covering up even these more recent activities is the preservation of the national reputation. Albion is still perfidious, of course. Been like that, as we say in New Orleans.

The US is sort of the opposit in that regard, isnt it? Things, no matter how embarassing tend to get public in an official non denial manner pretty fast. Which as a start would be great. Expect that it doesnt seem to change anything either.