The launch party for the second edition of Your Right to Know was a glamorous affair at the Art Workers’ Guild in Holborn Monday night. It was fabulous to see so many people supporting freedom of information and the new book. We even had a surprise guest who ventured over from the bowels of the Cabinet Office for a night of champagne and wine.

I made a speech at the launch and have posted the full version below:

Thank you all for coming out on this dreary January evening to support ‘Your Right to Know.’ First I’d like to thank my publisher and all those who helped bring about this second edition of YRTK. It was a big risk taking on the first book as we had no way of knowing how a book about freedom of information and citizens’ rights would sell. Few had heard of FOI back in 2003/4 and certainly fewer thought it would catch on or flourish. But it has and the existence of this second edition hopefully proves that the public are interested in politics when it is on their own terms.

When I wrote the first edition of Your Right to Know, I hoped it would inspire a culture change from obsessive secrecy to openness. The concept of ‘information sharing’ in the minds of politicians seemed to me at the time to exist entirely of a one-way process where we tell those in power everything about us, but they tell us nothing about themselves. I was surprised by how little respect the general British public received from those calling themselves public servants. Everywhere I saw signs saying ‘We will prosecute those who abuse our staff’ but nowhere did I find any awareness among this staff that the public being abused in numerous ways. Firstly, they were being forced to fork out a load of their own money for services that often didn’t work and when they tried to fix them they were told to go away. I wrote: “Novel Concept: the public pay for and elect the government. Public servants’ primary responsibility is to serve the public.” Our role should not just be to put up (the cash) and shut up. We are ‘the boss’ of government. We put up the money for public services and they are run for our benefit. We have a right to ensure they are working for our benefit.

Fortunately, I didn’t realise the immensity of the task when I first began. But here we are now at the launch of the second edition of Your Right to Know – fully updated and expanded for the year 2007. I didn’t expect politicians to embrace the book, but I did hope the public would. It’s been an interesting couple of years. When people complain that the FOI law is useless then the question must be asked ‘then why did politicians spend so much time and energy blocking it? And why are they now attempting just two years in, to kill off the law?’

The fact is that although the law is weak and enforcement weaker still – freedom of information is revolutionising the way we are governed. It reminds me of the little dog Toto in the Wizard of Oz. The law, like Toto, is not a big muscled beast designed to protect us, nevertheless, it is successfully pulling back the curtain to reveal the inner workings behind the great and powerful. And the great and powerful certainly do not like their lever-pulling exposed.

(more…)

Pluto Press invites you to the launch of

Your Right to Know

A Citizen’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act

by Heather Brooke

Monday 22nd January at 7pm

The Art Workers Guild, 6 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR

RSVP

Helen Griffiths at heleng@plutobooks.com or 020 8374 6424

Greg Dyke was on BBC Radio 4 yesterday discussing the publication of the BBC minutes. This prompted an unusual call-in from Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. Greg made a good point that it isn’t the job of the BBC Director General to be loved by the Culture Secretary. And I agree – can one imagine the Washington Post getting rid of Editor Bill Bradley during the Watergate scandal because of his undoubted unpopularity with President Nixon? Greg’s comments obviously struck a nerve, prompting in impromptu phone-in from the Culture Secretary herself, Tessa Jowell.

You can listen again to the BBC Today programme or hear the highlights of the row on the Guardian’s Media Podcast (where I was a guest). I was also discussing the use of FOIA and the Tribunal case on yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 ‘The Message’ show. You can listen again until next Friday.

The BBC sent me the full minutes to the BBC Governors’ meeting in which Greg Dyke resigned. They have also voluntarily published the minutes from a subsequent meeting in February 2004 related to the fallout from the Hutton report.

You can now read the minutes for yourself and judge whether the BBC Governors were justified in spending license-fee money to fight public disclosure for three years:

Minutes from January 2004 Meeting.

Minutes from February 2004 Meeting.

My own opinion is that the Governors fought so hard against disclosure purely out of self interest. The minutes show them in a poor light: coming across as panic-driven, cowardly, and shallowly self interested, thinking more about their personal careers than the survival of the BBC. Throughout, they express worry that they might have to resign. God forbid some faceless bureaucrats whom nobody knows should get the chop. Gavyn Davies is not enough. Rather than resign themselves, they toss Greg Dyke to the wolves of Whitehall.

The meeting seemed to go downhill once Richard Ryder took the chair after Mr Davies’ resignation. Greg Dyke was asked to leave and the Board discussed how it ‘was in the interests of the organisation that the Board stay in place.’ Of course it was! Richard Ryder then presented the Governors with the pros and cons of keeping Mr Dyke.

For:

• Gavyn Davies’ resignation had lanced the boil.
• The organisation would need leadership continuity.
• Greg has leadership skills in abundance, and he would be needed now more than ever to inspire the organisation.
• The new chairman should have a say in whether Greg continues as DG.

Against:

• The BBC would face calls that the wrong man had resigned, which would leave the DG a lame duck.
• Greg’s stock in Whitehall was very low, and his relationship with the Secretary of State is very poor.
• Greg’s internal authority would be compromised by recent events.
• Mark Byford was unaffected by Hutton.

The Board made a number of incorrect assumptions about the effects of Greg Dyke staying in place as Director General. They believed the press would hound the Corporation if Greg stayed on (instead the Press and the public saw Hutton as a whitewash). The Board heard from several members of the BBC who believed it would be a mistake to lose both the Director General and the Chairman in one go. Nevertheless the board decided that the external pressures outweighed internal considerations and demanded that Dyke leave.

The minutes show that Dyke withdrew his offer to resign, and that Mr Ryder and Dame Pauline Neville-Jones took several hours to persuade him to go. His requests to speak to the Board were refused.

The February minutes are interesting for the revelation that Mr Dyke contacted the BBC governors the following week to ask for his job back. They also reveal that Richard Ryder held a meeting with the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, on the day he issued the abject apology on behalf of the BBC. An apology now considered a humiliating capitulation to the Government but one supported, we now know, by the entire Board of Governors. With friends like these, the BBC needs no enemies.

The Guardian has published its own report on the publication of the minutes as has the BBC Press Office and BBC News.

I won my first appeal to the Information Tribunal this week for the case heard 20th December 2006. The decision orders the BBC to publish secret documents that should reveal the reasons (if any) behind the Governors’ decisions to sack former director general Greg Dyke and issue an abject apology to the government for its coverage in light of the Hutton report.

The case was brought by myself and The Guardian newspaper after the BBC refused for two years to disclose the minutes from a meeting of the Governors held on 28th January 2004. Another meeting was held on 29th January but minutes were not kept. The BBC is now considering its options. It has 28 days to comply or seek a judicial review from the high court.

The decision itself is rather bizarre and not as forthright as I would like. There remains an overriding attitude of deference to those in authority. To be fair, this could simply be a reflection of the Freedom of Information Act, which is written to favour those in power. For example, the Tribunal interprets the law as stating that a qualified person can come to a reasonable opinion without using any reason whatsoever! No facts, evaluation or analysis need be taken into account, simply the opinion of the public body involved in the case is deemed conclusive evidence that the decision is reasonable. This is a standard of reasonableness that has more in common with the religious fundamentalist than a post-Enlightenment rationalist.

Nevertheless, the decision is important for many reasons. Firstly, it provides some limitation to the wanton use of the section 36 exemption: information prejudicial to the effective conduct of public affairs. This particular case hinged on the BBC’s claim that to publish the reasoning behind its decisions ‘would, or would be likely to, inhibit the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation.’ This exemption has become popular among secrecy-loving officials precisely because the test for whether the exemption applies is completely subjective. The ‘qualified person’ is the public body itself, in this particular case the BBC Board of Governors. Fortunately, a public interest test is attached to this exemption (though not, I might add, when it concerns Parliament as I have discovered to my cost).

The Guardian’s article outlines the general facts of the decision or you can download a copy of the 32-page Tribunal Decision.

(more…)