William flew past British govt

Records concerning the end of the British Empire were meticulously selected, archived, hidden and then made unavailable. The truth is long overdue

Even given the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s apparent skill in such matters, it is quite a feat to ignore hundreds of boxes of documents filling 110ft of shelving for almost half a century. Now that the FCO has dusted them off, prompted by a case that opens at the High Court today, in which four elderly Kenyans allege that they were brutally tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule, it seems prudent to wonder exactly where, all this time, they might have been.

This is not idle pondering. It is a fashionable and mendacious fallacy to consider British colonial rule to have been dominated by atrocity, but any honest examination suggests that it was certainly studded with it. Lord Howell of Guildford, Minister of State at the FCO, told the House of Lords this week that his department has “decided to regularise the position of some 2,000 boxes of files it currently holds, mainly from the 1950s and 1960s”. Within that bland word “regularise” sits the philosophy of the paternalistic Establishment of yesteryear. Why were these documents ever “irregular”? What was surpressed, by whom?

Allegations concerning the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion, disgusting and bloody as that uprising was, are disturbing enough. But this is about more than Kenya. Lord Howell has confirmed that the Foreign Office holds files from 37 former British administrations, also including Palestine, Cyprus, Northern Rhodesia, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Ceylon, Malaya, Nigeria, Jamaica, the Gold Coast and the Bahamas. These must be released, in full.

Lord Howell has also confirmed that, throughout the period of British colonial disengagement, it was standard practice for colonial administration to remove “selected documents held by the governor, which were not appropriate to hand on to the successor government”. By what law was this done? Who did the selecting? Indeed, when did this practice cease? Was it still in effect in 1997, when Britain surrendered sovereignty for Hong Kong? Much like “regularise”, moreover, “not appropriate” conceals a cover-up behind the mask of prudence. Release of these files, suggest historians, could lead to lawsuits from almost any corner of the globe once coloured pink. Be that as it may, any redaction would make modern Britain complicit in the sins of the past.

The legal status of these documents, similarly, is no minor issue. Although apparently classed as public records under the Public Records Act 1958, their existence has never been publicly acknowledged. Should they have been available under the Freedom of Information Act, which came into force in 2000? Have any such requests been made, fruitlessly? Lawyers note that FOI requests come with a £600 ceiling for retrieval costs. By the chaotic nature of these documents’ storage, have they been considered beyond FOI? Do government departments still dump documents in this fashion?

The position of government lawyers, in the case of the four Kenyan claimants, is that responsibility for British activities during colonial rule passed to newly independent governments at the time of British withdrawal. If so, should not ownership of documents relating to them have done so, too? Is there a chance that Britain did not merely suppress its own evidence of wrongs, but stole and suppressed that which belonged to other nations?

This hitherto unsuspected trove of documents raises all these questions and more. They must be answered. Such a cache is not merely of immeasurable value to historians. It is also, potentially, the cue for a fundamental national reimagining of the last days of the British Empire. This country has long prided itself on a cleaner past than many other former colonial powers. If this is to remain the case, the truth, no matter how many yards of chaotic shelving it occupies, must emerge.