Open government? Don't make me laugh

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/29/open-government-not-in-the-uk

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On 30 October, Britain will welcome delegates from 60 countries for the summit meeting of the Open Government Partnership. David Cameron said when he came to power that he wanted to lead "the most open and transparent government in the world". One can imagine how pleased and puffed up he will be when the world comes to his capital and applauds his achievements.

At a preparatory gathering, Cameron's Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, recruited that great enabler of the free flow of knowledge Sir Tim Berners-Lee to stand alongside him and endorse the coalition. "Once people see the advantages of transparency," Maude boomed, "the democratic impetus for open government will be irresistible and there will be no turning back."

I doubt British ministers will tell wide-eyed visitors from foreign shores that they are driving open government out of Britain. They will not admit that the coalition, with the collusion of illiberal judges, is shutting the British public up and closing it down: nowhere more conclusively than when the public seeks to discover how corporations spend and misspend its money.

Public services have always moved from daylight into darkness when private managers take them over. Ever since Labour passed the Freedom of Information Act in 2000, MPs, journalists, bloggers, academics, campaign groups and concerned citizens have been able to examine a prison, say, or medical service up to the moment of privatisation when the possibility of scrutiny vanished.

In one sense, nothing new is happening. But quantitative change can become qualitative if it grows for too long. The scale of the privatisation the coalition is authorising is taking us into a new and more secretive country. If you think that only policy wonks are bothered by these concerns, you should know that freedom of information requests have exposed the police concocting evidence against demonstrators, the strip-searching of children, state nursing homes that were also fire traps and unsafe practices at the Sellafield nuclear power station.

Sadiq Khan, Labour's justice spokesman, grasped the need to extend freedom of information to cover the private recipients of public money when he tried to investigate a case of equal importance: the death of Jimmy Mubenga. The Angolan died on board a plane at Heathrow as three private security guards from G4S hustled him out of the country. One witness told the inquest that security men were "standing over him and trying to push him down or keep him down". Mubenga shouted: "Help, help, I can't breathe. You are killing me." He was dead within minutes. The jury found that he had been unlawfully killed. The coroner worried that G4S gave cash payments to guards who succeeded in keeping a detainee quiet. She noted "pervasive racism and loutish, laddish behaviour" among G4S officers. Most grotesquely, she found evidence of a dangerous restraint technique the boys called "carpet karaoke", where they held detainees' down to prevent them provoking the captain into ordering the posse and its captive off the plane.

As it is the job of parliament to hold the executive to account, Khan set a test for G4S. He asked for details of its restraint techniques. The company replied that it could not respond to freedom of information requests. The Ministry of Justice would, even though G4S trained the guards and knew what they did while the ministry did not,

The cloak of secrecy may soon be draped over the public sector as well. The Campaign for Freedom of Information is alarmed – to put it mildly – that ministers are talking about making it all too easy for civil servants to refuse to disclose information that the public needs to know – and once had a right to know.

The keenness with which the coalition is protecting commercial interests explains a ministerial manoeuvre that baffled me at the time. When libel reform came before parliament, I, along with everyone else, assumed that the private contractors moving into the NHS, prison service and just about every other service would not be allowed to sue their critics for libel. Under the far-from-liberal existing law, public authorities could not sue because in a democracy voters were free to speak their minds about the providers of public services even if what they said was not in the best possible taste. Indeed, as taxpayers and as the recipients of services, we had a dual justification for saying what we wanted without the threat that crushing financial penalties would bully us into silence

In the new market-orientated order the coalition was so keen to embrace, any restriction on robust debate would be unfair as well as undemocratic. A failure to allow free speech would mean that businesses and charities could say what they liked about a local authority bidding for a service, but the local authority could not respond in kind for fear of a writ. The Conservatives would not give an inch. In the name of libel reform, they insisted that the freedom to argue in the public square must be restricted and gave private interests an exemption from criticism they denied to public services.

As privatisation gathers in pace, such restrictions will only bite deeper. I don't want to go over the Leveson debacle again, but I should warn you that his desire to pile costs on newspapers will kill investigative journalism. Already media organisations, whose business models are collapsing, back away from the very corporations and oligarchs we ought to be writing about. If you could sit in a newspaper office, you would see lawyers and editors muttering nervously whenever the name of a litigious plutocrat or commercial outfit is mentioned. If the price of taking them on goes up, and if Leveson's plan to make newspapers pay costs even if we win a case is accepted, the future is plain to see: we won't touch them.

In a doomed but magnificent attempt in 2010 to stop rightwing judges on the US Supreme Court allowing corporations to pour resources into political propaganda during American election campaigns, Justice Stevens dryly noted: "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

British democracy has its imperfections too. Yet few would have thought that corporations acting in the public's name and using the public's money needed less rather than more scrutiny. Unfortunately for us, those few are our masters.

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