Politics
They may listen, but they won't tell
Published 04 December 2000
Freedom of information? Ministers will go to any lengths even to avoid answering MPs' questions, reports Nick Cohen
The "thank you for voting Labour" posters currently smiling down on bleak high streets are poll numbers solidified into propaganda. The government is still anxious about its haughty image; it wants the governed to know that it and they are enjoying a conversation of equals. As Tony Blair put it to this year's party conference: "I am listening! I hear! And I will act!"
It is generally assumed that if dialogue is to be anything more than the beseeching of insecure lovers (Are you listening? I swear to God I am, baby. No, tell me you are really listening), it must involve equality of access to information and, thus, equality of arms in the discourse. Yet in the House of Commons, where constitutional myth decrees that the representatives of the governed hold ministers to account, MPs' requests for enlightenment, which should be answered as a matter of course, are dismissed with contempt and impunity.
A study of how ministers escape responsibility has been completed by the Liberal Democrats. The party's researchers found that the government did not answer fully, openly or at all 2,855 written parliamentary questions between 19 October 1999 and 20 April 2000 - one in eight of those tabled. This total is a certain underestimate. In Kafkaesque fashion, the Treasury, Ministry of Defence and Home Office refused to answer questions on how many questions they refused to answer. Dear Mo Mowlam, who as well as being a national treasure is the Cabinet Office minister responsible for open government, failed to answer openly 32 per cent of questions put to her.
Meanwhile, a satirically titled Freedom of Information Act, drafted to restrict information, is slouching through parliament. Margaret Beckett has prevented MPs from voting on proposals to allow select committees to scrutinise departments more effectively. Secrecy is so commonplace that even Tories can lug themselves on to the high ground and accuse new Labour of treating the legislature with the disdain of the Stuarts.
This is the proud record of an administration whose leader said before the 1997 election - the last occasion on which he was obliged to enter into dialogue with the people in a deep and truly listening manner - that: "The real problem with the situation at present . . . [is] the government grants information when it wants to. What is needed is a change in culture and a statutory obligation on government to make it a duty to release information to the people who elect the government . . . We want to end the obsessive and unnecessary secrecy which surrounds government activity and make government information available to the public unless there are good reasons not to do so."
Later in that speech, which was delivered to the Campaign for Freedom of Information on 25 March 1996, Blair despaired of those who doubted his commitment to reform. "People often say to me today: everyone says this before they get into power." He was different. He was true. He would deliver "a sea change . . . in attitudes towards the release of information".
Written questions are one of the few excuses left for our dying parliament. MPs never vote on the merits of the debate; their interventions in the chamber are crafted either to show bovine devotion to power, if they are government supporters, or to produce the sweet soundbite that will win 15 seconds of broadcast fame, if they are members of the opposition. The written question, by contrast, is designed to prise out pure information. Guidance to civil servants states that ministers must be as open as possible with parliament and the public, and the code of practice says that officials must "not omit information sought merely because disclosure could lead to political embarrassment".
You may never read Hansard or know anyone who does, but when you hear pressure groups, charities, unions, businesses, the falsely convicted and the roughly treated protesting about this or that, there is a fair chance that they are in a position to be eloquent because of evidence found by written questions. Jack Straw, indeed, used them as an excuse for his risible and repressive Freedom of Information Act. There was no need for Britain to imitate modern democracies and legislate for glasnost, he told the Select Committee on Public Administration, when "a huge amount of public information is made available in parliamentary questions . . . There is a mine of information in the back of Hansard every day which gives a lie to the fact that we are an anally retentive government."
Straw had it right for once: the government is not so much anally retentive as chronically constipated. Every possible trick has been pulled to avoid an honest account to the legislature. A short list would include evasion, mendacity and obstruction. I'll take them in order.
One ever-popular evasive tactic is that finding the answer to a question would incur a "disproportionate cost". An MP has no way of proving the assertion is true, but the experience of Norman Baker, the Lib Dem MP for Lewes, suggests that the costs of secrecy are the hardest to carry. In the early days of the Dome, he bombarded Peter Mandelson with questions about its price and contractual liabilities. Mandelson never bothered to answer promptly. He refused for nine months to discuss whether his fun palace would be quite as groovy as he, Michael Heseltine and Simon Jenkins had proclaimed. Characteristically, he did not have the grace to leave it at that. He briefed tame journalists who duly denounced Baker for wasting public money on impertinent inquiries about a folly that has wasted £650m of public money to date.
It is not considered good taste to throw about claims of mendacity in polite society, but the evidence is there for those prepared to look. Last year, a parliamentary researcher discovered a briefing from Conor Ryan, David Blunkett's enforcer at the education department, lying on a Westminster photocopier. It told Labour MPs what they must say if they were asked about the government's failure to recruit teachers. They were ordered to repeat that Blunkett's consultation with teachers was proof, yet again, that "the government was listening", Ryan wrote. The paper was numbered "Brief No 84", and Blairites wanting more information were told to phone Ryan and ask for back copies of Briefs No 60, No 69 and No 72.
Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, asked how many times Blunkett and Ryan had given Labour MPs hymn sheets to sing from, and was told that "records are not held of such briefings". When Foster protested to the Speaker that parliament was being blatantly misled so new Labour MPs could be spared exposure as doltish courtiers, his complaint was ignored.
Similarly, when the Lib Dems asked about the propriety of allowing firms that seek public money to sponsor government websites, it was told that the advertisers did not exist - an assertion that could be contradicted by anyone with access to the internet. In neither instance were civil servants and ministers disciplined. In a country without a written constitution, the rules need never hold because the rule book can always be rewritten.
Obstruction comes in a parade of disguises. On some occasions, answers are delayed for so long - seven months, in the case of one to the Department of Health - that the concern which provoked the question has long gone by the time a reply is received. On others, answers are deposited in the Commons library where journalists and the public cannot read them. The shabbiest tactic is to group dozens of questions together and answer them with a bland smirk. John Redwood asked 45 questions on the position the government will adopt on qualified majority voting in the European Union on tax, immigration, social security, financial regulations and 41 other policies. Whatever your views on Europe, I hope and believe that you recognise it as the most important issue of the day. Keith Vaz, the minister for Europe, replied to all 45 questions with: "We have made it clear that where the extension of qualified majority is in the United Kingdom's national interest, we will support it strongly, and where it is not, we will oppose it firmly." Well, that's a relief.
The replacement of the era of big government by the era of big business has supplied novel grounds for obstruction. In the cold war, ministers would plead "national security" as a catch-anything reason for secrecy: today, they prefer to chant that "commercial confidentiality" prevents them from levelling with the electorate.
Liberal Democrat attempts to find out who from lobbying and management consultancy firms were being seconded to Whitehall - and gaining useful inside knowledge for the time when public assets would be flogged off - got nowhere. The Labour backbencher Ann Clwyd asked Barbara Roche, then a junior minister for industry, which arms companies had breached government guidelines on trading with dictatorships, and found that commercialism overrode her party's toughness on crime, promises of openness and commitment to an ethical foreign policy. Two British firms had been caught flogging electro-shock batons to Saudi Arabian torturers, and Clwyd suspected they were the tip of a large iceberg. Roche replied that, if the government named names, "it would harm the competitive position of the companies concerned".
Blair, Straw and Alastair Campbell have a familiar answer to critics of their manipulations, which they make no attempt to conceal. Only middle-class pointyheads care about the betrayal of open government and freedom of information, they snap; the decent little people in the world beyond Hampstead don't give a damn.
Yet the reason why Blair is having to cock his ear and engage in the postures of dialogue is that the great unwashed are growing weary of being patronised. Control freakery is the accusation against this government that has stuck - and for good reason. One day, perhaps not at this election but the next, the many who are not taken into account will settle their accounts with the unaccountable few. I, for one, can't wait.
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