Today we put politicians, spinners and PR sharks on notice: The public who pay your wages have an inalienable right to know

DEMOCRACY has been hard-won and needs constant vigilance to safeguard it against dangers both great and small.

Today the Mail is declaring war on one of the most invidious threats our precious freedoms have faced in the modern era: Secrecy.

We report on the incredible reality that politicians and civil servants are abusing their positions to keep from the public – the very people who bankroll their activities – vast amounts of information.

From shadowy political advisers censoring and vetting answers to Freedom of Information requests to jobsworth apparatchiks citing data protection laws as a catch-all reason for keeping secrets, the body politic and wider society face a corrosive threat.

While a handful of issues are so sensitive that a degree of confidentiality will always be required, we are heading for a situation where officials first seek to find out how little they can reveal.

The default ought to be the polar opposite – the public have an inalienable right to know as much as possible and officials should be trying to facilitate, not frustrate, that. But the lead has come from the top when it comes to underhand tactics and the stonewalling or derailing of legitimate requests for information.

When former Prime Minister Tony Blair complained FoI was ‘a dangerous mistake’ that he regretted making while at Downing Street, it sent a signal to government – local and national – that telling people what was going on was wrong and could be avoided. Quite the opposite is true. It is in the cleansing sunlight of open government that democracy flourishes.

Decisions taken in dark, fetid rooms cloistered from scrutiny are the stuff of oppressive and totalitarian regimes.

Here in Scotland, political interference in FoI by so-called special advisers strikes at the heart of our entire democracy.

This is utterly wrongheaded but we can trace a line from this high-handed attitude to sharks in communications offices refusing to confirm the obvious; to senior Government figures using unminuted meetings to short-circuit the proper checks and balances of government.

Baron Wallace of Tankerness was, as Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Jim Wallace, the architect of Scotland’s FoI legislation.

Writing elsewhere on this page, he calls for nothing less than a shift of culture away from secrecy towards the openness that FoI was designed to engender.

The Scottish Daily Mail stands four-square behind him.

Those squirreling away secrets, be it politicians who fear being damaged by the truth, low-grade officials denying public access, or spinners obscuring the truth – all are now on notice.

A bright light is being shone into some very dark corners where secrets are being salted away for no good reason. We will have no compunction about naming and shaming those taking public money while complicit in Scotland’s shameful culture of secrecy.

Ours is an apolitical campaign, one which we look forward to right-thinking politicians of every stripe backing to the hilt.

Scots will no longer tolerate the very people charged with informing the public instead dissembling and indulging in a masquerade.

This needless secrecy ends now.