THE low return to the police questionnaire by freemasons (LET, October 27) reflects the Police Federation vote in the mid-1990s, when a motion put forward at their AGM that masons should reveal their membership, was voted against by a proportion of 40 per cent to 60 per cent.

The figure of 60 per cent is a measure of the number of freemasons active inside the police.

This figure also explains why the Association of Chief Police Officers are against a mandatory declaration. It is easy to see that the power of secrecy will not easily be given up.

Focus on the police only is too narrow. The magistracy can be regarded as nothing less than sinister on the assumption that their membership of freemasonry is also 60 per cent.

The reason for the focus on the police is that they are a professional body and it is entirely inappropriate for any of them to hold masonic membership.

If the magistracy are able to keep their membership secret while the police are forced to give up their own secrecy, the police will be in an invidious position. That these arguments embrace two thirds of the criminal justice system turns attention to the third part, the judiciary. If they were the only part to hold this informal power because the other two had given up secret membership, the judiciary would have their power increased at the expense of the other two.

It is unfair that the Chief Constable of Lancashire should have to bring about change on behalf of the public when the methodology imposed by the Government is flawed in the extreme.

The public have spoken -- in the minutes of evidence taken at the time of the Home Affairs Committee on Freemasonry in the Police and Judiciary in 1997. In evidence, the Law Society, the Association of Women Barristers, a former chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police and a firm of solicitors used the words prohibited, resign, whitewash, disgraceful, damage and skulduggery to describe their feelings about free masonry.

As long as freemasonry is active in the justice system, anyone coming before a magistrate may not find his legal representation adequate and may eventually find his judge hostile.

There is no alternative to police, magistracy and judiciary giving up their membership in the public interest.

The half-baked decision by Home Secretary Jack Straw to limit the revelation of membership to the police and to ask them, instead of instructing them, calls into question whether he is a fit person to be administering public justice.

FRANK GLYNN, Old Bank Lane, Blackburn.