Redaction

It is a truism that it is always opposition parties in Parliament that favour freedom of information. It is only in government that politicians realise just how undesirable freedom of information really is. The present Minister of Justice, Jack Straw, was a persuasive advocate of the case for freedom of information, until, after the Labour victory in 1997, he became Home Secretary. He was committed to bringing in a Freedom of Information Act but he wrestled with the details for some years before introducing legislation with many a loop-hole and limitation. In spite of the restrictions the act has forced government - both national and local - to reveal much about their deliberations, the waste and the cock-ups. Since the act came into force in 2000, the government has, with the connivance of parliament, sought repeatedly to restrict still further the availability of information - on the basis of various spurious arguments. But most depressing has been the Speaker and MPs themselves seeking to make the act completely inapplicable to them. This has been a cross-party conspiracy to suppress all details of their expenses, their movements and their extra-curricular activities.

Having lost that battle, MPs have this week allowed officers of parliament to published on-line the "full" details of MPs expenses. This extra-ordinary collection of documents has been subjected to a process of "redaction". Until yesterday, I had never even heard of this word. What is redaction? An Internet search tells me that it is a process that involves blacking out potentially sensitive information so that documents can be made available to a wider audience [the public]. Alternative words with the same meaning are sanitisation and censorship. It is the default condition for politicians. Do not reveal anything if it can be kept secret. The absurdity of this week's publication of redacted documents is that publication seeks to conceal that which is already known. However, if these documents had been published without the information made available to us by the Daily Telegraph over the last 3 weeks, MPs would have succeeded in hiding vital facts about second homes, avoided taxes and miscellaneous expenditure on the home terraced house or the stately pile, etc. It would have concealed. Publication would have hidden also many a fact of no significance whatsoever and in so doing made the public convinced that all MPs were crooks. They are not.

There is nothing more revealing of the policies of dictators than national newspapers that appear with huge areas left blank - removed by censors. Is it now to become a feature of life in Britain? It is symptomatic of the breakdown in the relationship between the UK parliament and the people that MPs have allowed £1.2 m of our money to be spent on censoring documents in order to achieve nothing other than a lowering even further of the public's opinion of the morals and competence of our MPs.

And now I need to remember the meaning of redaction

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