THERE is no doubt that in recent years Freemasons have made determined efforts at greater openness and that the public has become much more aware of the considerable charitable work they do. And evidently much of this endeavour stems from the Brotherhood's perceived need to mend the considerable harm done to its image by the now-notorious Blackburn Moat House affair of 11 years ago when two men were wrongly accused of assault after intruding on a Masonic function attended by Masons from Lancashire Police.

But if these endeavours to show Freemasonry's benign and benefactory face are designed to convince people that its members belong not to a secret society, but only one with secrets, we are afraid the distinction will be lost on most people - when its resistance to real and necessary openness is displayed in the way it is today.

For we find the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee regretting the slow and manifestly reluctant response of police and the Crown Prosecution Service to Home Secretary Jack Straw's call 15 months ago for Masons working in the criminal justice system to declare their membership. In contrast, judges and JPs have, albeit with some five per cent of them declining, been more co-operative, so that we know that as many as one in five lay magistrates could be Masons, together with ten per cent of judges and professional magistrates.

But only half of those in the CPS who were asked replied and two years after the Commons committee recommended voluntary registers of Masonic membership among police forces, only a handful have been set up.

Significantly, Lancashire Police - a force whose reputation was tainted by the Moat House incident to the extent that it made a £100,000 out-of-court settlement to its victims - is not among them when, arguably, it has the greatest need to prove its integrity in this respect.

And do not people working in any area of the criminal justice system have a need to do the same - to dispel the suspicion that British justice cannot be corrupted by Masonic influence?

Yet, though they may prefer to call it a desire for privacy, the Masons' obsession with secrecy - demonstrated by this misguided response - does the very opposite.

Indeed, as a result, we find the select committee concluding that Freemasonry could have played a part in miscarriages of justice.

This is the Masons' own fault.

The yardstick ordinary people judge them by is that, if you have nothing to hide, why hide. But still they do. Why, Brothers?

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