Whistelblowers. Saints or Demons?

Yes, they can be mavericks, but we need whistleblowers like Edward Snowden

Call them weird, snitches, or friends of any enemy. Yet without these saints the world would be a worse place

Simon Jenkins

'I realise why any organisation spits whistleblowers out like poison. They break the glue of discipline.' Illustration by Joe Magee

A lawyer working for HMRC found that his boss, David Hartnett, was having "sweetheart" sessions with Goldman Sachs allowing the bank to avoid £10m in interest on tax. He thought this out of order and did what the rulebook said. Under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (Pida) he wrote privately to the national audit office and to a committee of parliament. When HMRC found out, it went berserk. Using the anti-terrorist Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), it had his belongings, emails and phone calls searched. He was suspended and left "a broken man". He lost his job.

On Monday the public accounts committee chairman, Margaret Hodge, asked HMRC's boss, Lin Homer, to promise to never again use anti-terror laws against whistleblowers. Homer refused. She will have known she had ministers on her side. Jack Straw's Ripa has been an all-purpose state cosh against dissent ever since Tony Blair capitulated to the securocrats in 2000.

HMRC is not alone. Last week the policeman who blew the whistle on the Metropolitan police's massaging of crime figures was driven to resign, citing his "treatment as a result of making disclosures in good faith and in the public interest". He had been placed under police investigation for "misconduct". Round at the benighted NHS, the Mid-Staffs hospital whistleblower, Julie Bailey, has had to move home after being insulted, threatened and attacked by local Labour activists as a liar. Her dead mother's grave was desecrated. She had "brought shame on the town".

The Pida supposedly lays down a procedure for reporting illegality or misconduct to accountable authority. It supposedly protects whistleblowers from victimisation or blacklisting. It has led to a rise in reported cases – almost 8,000 in the NHS alone – though it is hard to tell its resulting effectiveness. What remains clear is that anyone who blows the whistle on Britain's public sector will get little sympathy from authority and can look forward to a bleak future.

The default setting of British democracy, as de Tocqueville suggested, is the club. The club hates those who step out of line, who are disloyal to the group. Whistleblowing is classic disloyalty. Talk to members of Britain's security establishment about Edward Snowden, king of whistleblowers, and the reaction is universal bafflement. If Snowden was so concerned about the NSA and GCHQ, why did he not go to his superiors? Why not convey his concerns privately? Why not come and have lunch at the club?

One answer is to look at what happens to people who do just that. HMRC treats its whistleblowers as terrorists. The police hound anyone who reveals their multifarious antics from their jobs. The NHS and its union henchmen run its victims out of town. Whatever public interest may lie in revealing wrongdoing in government, it will be outgunned by accusations of misconduct, breach of contract and threats to national security. The HMRC official concerned, David Hartnett, went off to work for Deloittes, citadel of tax avoidance.

The reality is that all organisations hate having their inner workings exposed, the more so if it incurs collective odium and risks jobs. The wagons gather into a circle to defend a wounded superior. The gossip-mongers get to work on the whistleblower's reputation. Why could he not just live and let live? What is the harm in a bit of misconduct?

More to the point, whistleblowers are rarely club players. They are usually driven to break ranks through a sense of moral outrage that eludes their colleagues, despite knowing that it will probably bring pain and ostracism. It is thus easy for the organisation to dismiss them as weird, as grasses, snitches, friends of any enemy, even if the enemy is the public interest.

Snowden, a Republican libertarian and staunch opponent of gun control, was no leftwinger. He was a nerd appalled to find that the internet, which he saw as liberator of mankind, had been seized by the federal government, "hijacked and turned into a machine for spying on whole populations". He was shocked to find the superiors at the NSA breaking the law and lying to Congress (with support from their British sub-contractors at GCHQ).

Snowden had no doubt what would happen to him. The WikiLeaks whistleblower, Bradley Manning, was serving 35 years in jail. As Luke Harding shows in The Snowden Files, that was why Snowden fled to Hong Kong. Yet he was obsessed that his chosen intermediaries "filter out" anything that might endanger western security. It is hard to imagine a less traitorous motive for whistleblowing, or a more powerful public interest in what was revealed. Snowden changed the debate on internet security everywhere except in Britain, where such dissenters are regarded as cads and weirdos.

I see whistleblowers as strange, brave and necessary mavericks. I realise why any organisation spits them out like poison. They break the glue of discipline, the bond of faith between individuals that is required for any joint enterprise. They threaten the institution in claiming to decide for themselves what should be the boundary between confidence and disclosure.

Yet as organisations and, above all, government get ever more powerful, making them account for their activities becomes ever harder. All dealings between individuals require a degree of confidentiality, but, especially in public bodies, the line between secrecy and transparency must be patrolled. If it cannot be patrolled from outside – if misconduct is rife – the last resort is from within. That requires exceptional protection which few at present seem to get.

Whistleblowers are not always right, let alone easy companions, but then nor were saints. Few can be saved from a degree of martyrdom. But we can at least canonise them as saints rather than persecute them as devils.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/27/mavericks-whistleblowers-edward-snowden