Opinion: The Phoenix cover-up

The government’s failed attempt to stifle public access to vital information was a near-miss notes u/SoSaturnistic.

IT is a scene that those who watch Westminster have become all too familiar with in the last few months: the government votes one way on a bill and the opposition defeats it by a substantial margin. Bumbling from one failed legislative position to the next, the current coalition between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats has made this stream of events become the norm within the Commons. With this pattern becoming so embedded in our politics, and the public at large becoming entirely numb to it, it is perhaps unsurprising the the government’s recent defeat on a bill to restore the so-called ‘ministerial veto’ on the release of information has passed more or less without comment despite this bill’s substantial potential impact on democracy and the civic sphere.

The Ministerial Veto Cabinet Collective Responsibility (Freedom of information) Bill was not initially introduced by the government, instead being a proposal submitted by the crossbench peer u/LeChevalierMal-Fait, a figure with deep roots on Britain’s political right. In spite of its lengthy “short title”, the bill had a single substantive provision which would have restored the power of ministers to block the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act. While used rarely, this power, known as the ‘ministerial veto’, was stripped away by the u/can_triforce “traffic light coalition” government in an attempt to limit the ability of ministers to block the release of potentially embarrassing information within their own portfolios. At the time, many civil libertarians were distressed about instances where the power was abused by both the New Labour and Coalition governments in recent memory; in the latter case a prominent example was legal advice on the Iraq war being suppressed, and in the former a prominent example was the suppression of impact analysis on reforms to the NHS in England. It is important to note that ministers used the ministerial veto outside of other mechanisms which blocked the release of information on clearer grounds such as national security, so it was always used on the basis of political discretion when it did exist.

The way parties have shifted on the ministerial veto issue is remarkable. At the time, the removal of the ministerial veto mostly came under attack from those on the political right, especially the Tories. UKIP was more split on the matter, but again lay mostly against. The parties of the coalition of time, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens, were all in favour of the abolition but were able to pass the bill substantially due to support from forces to their left. Since that time, there were two more attempts to either introduce or revoke the ministerial veto, and in both those two times it was the Tories who most uniformly opposed it (it appears that the LPUK supported a bill to abolish the ministerial veto even though it had already been abolished at some point). On other matters of openness and transparency, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have usually leaned towards greater state accountability as well, with whistleblower protections being one more relevant case. So see this sudden swerve in favour of unaccountability from the current Labour-Liberal Democrat government has been baffling—I have only been more surprised by witnessing the mass opposition from Tories to restoring the device.

There has been little in the way of a rationale provided to justify this new position on the part of the incumbent government. The only indication of any position was a vague reference to a purported need to suppress information by the Defence Secretary, who seemed to imply that the government would have been able to suppress the ROK transcript leaks. The Coalition! peer u/TomBarnaby rightly pointed out that leaks would not have been impacted by the bill anyway. Leaks do not fall within the purview of the ministerial veto as the veto only covers information that a public authority grants under the Freedom of Information Act. In other words, not only did a government minister seemingly try to facilitate the cover-up of their government’s embarrassing mistakes, but this minister tried to do so in an incompetent and incoherent way. While there might have been other, legitimate motivations behind the decision to swap sides on the ministerial veto issue, none are to be found. We are left only with the distasteful impression that the government wished to insulate itself from public scrutiny for the sake of securing their own power.

The restoration of the ministerial veto would have been a profound mistake. Though it has been used rarely, the instances where it was used have been questionable at best and authoritarian at worst. Other states which lack such a device, such as Australia and New Zealand, largely operate fine. The public broadly benefits from realising the full potential of the Freedom of Information Act as it was initially conceived—the ministerial veto was a late addition. We are lucky that, as with so many pieces of legislation, the government was simply unable to find a majority on this proposal.

u/SoSaturnistic is a contributor at the Morning Star and sits with Solidarity at Westminster.