Those of you following me on Twitter (@newsbrooke) will know that I’ve been negotiating a new book. I can now announce that the deal is done and my next book is tentatively titled: The Silent State: How Secrecy and Misinformation are Destroying Democracy. It will be published by Heinemann, a division of Random House in Spring 2010.

More details to come but in brief this book will be a treatise on the way information collected in the public’s name at public expense is not available to the public and the consequences this has for society. It will be told through a series of stories – including my own case to get MPs’ expenses released -but there will be many more examples from a variety of people. If you have an interesting example of your battle for officials information please do contact me.

Clarification: I’ll be taking part in Open Tech at ULU (University of London Union), on Malet Street near Russell Square on Saturday July 4th. Seriously hard-core geek action.

I’ll be taking part in the Freedom of Information workshop which will offer advice on how best to prise out official data from the cold, dead hand of government. Also giving a talk about my own little FOI battle with the House of Commons. Tickets are just £5. I’ll be selling a few copies of my old book – now a collector’s edition!

Here is the statement I submitted in evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life on 30th June 2009. Tom Steinberg of My Society was also questioned with me. A transcript of our discussion with the committee members should be published shortly.

What keeps people out of power and out of politics is the lack of access to meaningful and useful information. My experience since 2004 has been that Parliament greedily hoards information as a miser does gold. And just as a miser’s hoarding means his gold does not benefit the wider economy so parliament’s insistence on hoarding information does not benefit civic society. Instead citizens remain ignorant about the very institution that is meant to epitomise democracy in this country. If this is happening in Parliament then how much worse is it lower down the scale?

Parliament sets an example to public servants and public bodies throughout the nation, which is why it is so appalling to see the way MPs and officials in parliament behaved when faced with a robust freedom of information challenge. They did not rise to the challenge but actively fought to obstruct it and to suppress information clearly in the public interest. They fought for four years and at great public expense. In the process they demeaned terms such as national security and privacy. Parliament is not, in my view, a system open to full participatory democracy. At least officials are now adopting the right rhetoric about democracy and transparency – which is a victory in itself – but the real victory comes when the practice changes. And that has not happened yet. I hope this committee’s recommendations will go so some way to ensuring that real, tangible change takes place so that we have a parliament suited to 21st century democracy.

I would like to talk specifically about my experience trying to access information from Parliament, in particular trying to get details of MPs’ expense claims. You may have read about my story in the Guardian which I’ve included with this statement, so I’ll be brief.

My battle began in 2004. I was working on a book called ‘Your Right to Know’, a guide for citizens on how to use the new Freedom of Information Act. It might be worth giving a bit of background on why I decided to write such a book.

I’d trained and worked as a journalist in America. First as a political reporter and then covering crime. The American style of journalism relies heavily on official public records. It may be why some British journalists describe US papers as boring and academic. In the US all states have laws on public records, open meetings and freedom of information. The default position is generally that any organisation receiving the bulk of its funding from the taxpayer must be directly accountable to the public. Of course there are instances where this ideal is not adhered to but for the most part I found that locally, information was widely and easily available. For example, doing the crime beat consisted not just of talking to various police officers but also looking through all the criminal incident reports, going to the jail to look through the booking sheets, scouring court documents, looking at fire inspection reports, etc.

These records are not available in the UK. In fact until October 2007 it was actually illegal for a fireman to let the public see the results of a fire safety inspection: done at public cost and in the public’s name. This is one of the 300+ prohibitions on disclosure that exist in the UK. The type of reporting I am used to doing is just not possible in Britain. Here a reporter has to rely almost entirely on people. Information is not available to all, no strings attached as a statutory right, but comes at the discretion of an individual. There is a kind of quid pro quo to accessing information in the UK that I find uncomfortable and I don’t believe it benefits society. I always find it odd how so many British politicians complain about the sensationalist British press and then refuse to provide any of the official data needed for a more serious, academic journalistic inquiry.
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