Freemasons at Scotland Yard are afraid

Representatives of the main umbrella organization of British Freemasons – the United Grand Lodge of England – reject this regulation as religious discrimination. The reasons for their concern are obvious: transparent Freemasonry is a contradiction in terms, but their defense is weak.

On the contrary, the reasons for greater transparency, and not only in the Metropolitan Police, are strong. This is despite the fact that Freemasons are now far past their zenith.

This is not really a case of religious discrimination. Freemasons have never registered as a church anywhere, even though they have always had some ecclesiastical elements. Lodges profess a certain "humanistic" worldview, have rituals and a hierarchical structure.

Especially in Catholic countries, they often defined themselves as so anti-clerical that they created a kind of liberal anti-church, which in terms of power resembled the hated Roman enemy in every way. However, unlike Christian churches, they have always been exclusively influential communities that were closed and remain semi-secret to this day.

The question of reporting

This special character is precisely what the aforementioned London police regulation refers to: its officers are required to report current or past membership in "hierarchical organizations that require their members to protect and support each other." The police leadership is not concerned with questions of worldview, but with influence.

If there is a structure within any institution whose members support each other at the expense of others, this represents at least a managerial problem, because particular interests that do not correspond to the official purpose of the institution enter into its operation. Nevertheless, such structures occur relatively often in institutions. Traditionally, these are informal groups referred to as "old boys networks," defined either by graduation from an elite school or by a certain professional experience.

If such a group is hierarchically managed, there is a risk of the institution being hijacked: instead of the official leadership, a hidden leadership takes control. For example, at the Free University of Brussels and other liberal-oriented universities, membership of the lodge was said to be a prerequisite for a successful academic career.

The question of loyalty

In the police and the judiciary, the activities of hidden structures such as Freemasons are extremely dangerous. Firstly, as elsewhere, people can get into influential positions not because of their professional abilities or loyalty to the institution, but because of their service to the lodge and loyalty to their brothers. Secondly, Freemasons in uniforms or robes can find themselves in a serious conflict of interest when, in the fight against crime, they encounter one of their brothers on the other side of the law. In France and Italy, where lodges have traditionally been an influential social force, similar suspicions arise regularly, usually based on real grounds.

This is nothing new in Britain either. In the late 1990s, a special parliamentary committee even addressed this issue. On its recommendation, the Blair government began requiring incoming police officers, judges, prosecutors, and prison service workers to disclose whether they were members of lodges or other secret societies.

After several years of not very strict enforcement, the Labour Party itself eventually abandoned this policy. The final nail in the coffin of efforts to achieve greater transparency was hammered in by the judiciary. Amidst legal battles, the government was ultimately deterred by a 2007 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which prohibited Italy from requiring the disclosure of Freemason lodge members. No one knows how many of the judges and legal experts who ended the transparency policy were Freemasons.

The December attempt to clarify who in the London police force is and is not a Freemason is also based on suspicions of wrongdoing. It responds to the unsolved murder of a private detective in the late 1980s. A subsequent investigation more than 30 years later revealed that the main suspect was a Freemason and, by some coincidence, the case was also investigated by Freemasons, one of whom later joined the former suspect.

The question of trust

Although the investigation did not prove corruption or manipulation, which is perhaps not surprising thirty years after the event, it did shake confidence in the police. Scotland Yard's leadership justifies its move by saying that it will strengthen confidence in the police.

The Freemason organization is trying to downplay the issue by referring to numbers: it claims to have only 440 members among the 32,000 London police officers. But the argument that Freemasons make up just over one percent of the police force does not dispel mistrust. These 440 police officers are likely to be in senior positions, and their share in the police leadership could easily jump from one percent to tens of percent, which, on the contrary, would indicate significant influence.

We will see whether the current attempt to identify Freemasons in uniform will be more successful than it was twenty years ago. Given the declining influence of these once powerful organizations, it has a chance. On the one hand, influential people still meet in lodges. The Grand Master of British Freemasons is still a member of the royal family. On the other hand, the situation is also reflected in the fact that for the last sixty years they have been led by the now 90-year-old Duke of Kent.

While we can legitimately look for Masonic influences behind major historical events from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century, this is no longer the case with the end of the European empires and the decline of the Catholic enemy.

This is despite the fact that they can exert influence in certain professions anywhere in Western Europe. If they were once a significant political force, today they are more likely to be counted among many other lobbies, among which they do not necessarily occupy a prominent place. Their mystique can be more of a burden. The current Western oligarchy is based on other mechanisms of hidden power.