Archive for January, 2010

Book edits DONE

Friday, January 29th, 2010

You wait months for a new blog post and then three come along at once!

I’ve been neglecting the dear old YRTK blog while I thundered through all the research and writing necessary to complete the manuscript of The Silent State. It was stressful but intensely exciting and I turned in the book on deadline. It’s since been to the lawyers, the editor and the copy editor. On Wednesday I met my wonderful editor Drummond Moir at Heinemann to go through the final corrections in an all-day editing session. Now the manuscript is being set and then it’s one more read-through before it heads to the printers. I can’t wait!

Publication is now set for the first week in April. You can pre-order a copy on Amazon for a special 30 percent discount price. I hope some of you will get your orders in early and often!

Posted in Freedom of Information | 2 Comments »

When Brooke met Brooker

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I’m on the most recent episode of Charlie Brooker’s wonderfully acerbic Newswipe. Readers of my twitterfeed (@newsbrooke) may know that I’m a big fan of Brooker’s style of caustic and insightful humour so it was a real pleasure to be interviewed for the second series of his show about the news.

You can watch the entire episode on the BBC’s rubbishy iplayer for a limited time (I appear 15 minutes in) or in perpetuity on YouTube (minute 5). I’m talking here about the way journalists grant public officials anonymity for no good reason. By the very definition of their role, official spokespeople have absolutely no reason to be anonymous yet one of the more dubious practices of the British press is the way reporters collude with officials by granting anonymity.

Sources should be granted anonymity only in very limited circumstances where naming may cause specific harm (such as a whistleblower who could lose his job). There is no reason a Home Office or police force spokesman, for example, should be granted anonymity, yet I’ve had many arguments with these people who insist on it as their ‘right’.

The reason these people insist on anonymity is simply to exercise power without accountability. Anonymity = deniability.

I believe it is a fundamental role of the journalist to push officials to stand behind what they say. If these officials don’t agree, then don’t print their statements or give them air time. It really is that simple. If journalists stuck together on just this one point they could overnight force a change in the culture of parliament, the civil service and many public services.

Posted in Freedom of Information | 6 Comments »

Bad-mouthing FOI

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I notice the naysayers are peeping their heads over the parapet again. I’m serving notice that any public servants moaning about having to account to the public under the Freedom of Information had better be prepared to undergo some intense investigation on their spending. I’ll be keeping my eye out for any FOI bad-mouthers in the future and if you know of any please do let me know.

Perhaps these public servants hope that enough dust has settled from the MPs’ expenses scandal. Let’s remember that it was in secrecy that this massive abuse of public funds was allowed to operate. Transparency was finally acknowledged as the single best cure for preventing corruption. But now some officials are trying to bad-mouth FOI and go back to the old ways. I’ve seen claims that FOI is a waste of public money, that it diverts from the serious business of bureaucracy, that it might even be jeopardizing police investigations. All this is nonsense. FOI is the single best regulator of efficiency and probity. It’s certainly cheaper and more effective than the hundreds of regulators currently in operation.

Yet here’s the latest FOI gripe from Chief Constable Ian Latimer of Northern Constabulary in Scotland: He claims that the number of people making FOI requests is going up.

“There is concern that additional funding will be required to support this business area in 2009-10, diverting resources away from operational policing.”

Firstly, isn’t citizen involvement precisely what our leaders claim to want? Now they have it – and they’re moaning. Turns out they don’t actually want the public asking challenging questions about who does what, whay, and for how much.

On the matter of funding – let me remind readers of the vast amounts of cash police forces are spending on Public Relations (i.e. propaganda) departments. Re-read the investigation I did for the Times on police PR spending. We found that police forces across the UK were spending £39m each year on press and PR – enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers and more than enough to cover the annual police pay rise withheld by the Government. The ratio of PR to FOI officers was also striking; many forces having 12 PR people for every one FOI person (that’s them telling us what they want us to know as opposed to actually answering our questions).

Posted in Freedom of Information, YRTK | No Comments »

Newswipe: Official sources

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

A segment on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe show in which I discuss the naming of official spokespeople.


Posted in Video | No Comments »

Bureaucrats and Blackmailers

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Over Christmas I happened to catch the Orson Welles Sketchbook broadcast December 26th on BBC4. Welles may have been speaking decades ago, but his message couldn’t be more pertitent to today. He disccuses state surveillance, police powers and blackmailing bureaucrats.

You can watch it here: http://bbc.co.uk/i/plbtd/

Welles relates stories from his travels around the globe dealing with border police and bureaucracy in general. He longs for his father’s day when people had free movement as opposed to, “nowdays [when] we’re treated like demented or delinquent children.” What on earth would he make of modern-day Britain, the most watched place on the planet?

He tells of being stopped at the border of a nameless European country by typically officious and bullying policemen. He’s at pains to tell us he is by no means an anarchist or against the police. He may play a practical joke on the police but he does not advocate breaking the law. Rather he wants to bring the policeman to law.

The best bits begin 9 minutes in where he explores the insidious dangers of ‘red tapism’.
“Think of all those forms we have to fill out. Why should I have to confide my religion to the police? No one’s race is anybody’s business.”

Yes the policeman has a difficult job a very hard job, he says, but, “it’s the essence of our society that the policemans’ job should be hard. He’s their to protect the free citzien. Chasing criminals is an incidental part of his job. The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman than the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal.”

“We should be grateful for the policeman. But we should be grateful, too, for the laws that protect us against the policeman. There are those laws and they’re quite different from police regulations. And those regulations do pile up. The forms keep coming in.”

“The bureaucrat, and I’m including the policeman here, is part of one great big monstrous thing – really like a blackmailer. You can never pay him off. The more you give him the more he’ll demand.”

We accept each new demand because we don’t want to get into trouble with the police. It’s easier just to hand over whatever new piece of our personal lives the authorities require, to agree to yet more surveillance, more forms, more databases; to grant the police more powers of arrest.

Why should we make trouble? A better question in a democracy would be, as Welles says, “Why should the policeman make trouble for us?”

Posted in Crime & Justice | 3 Comments »