The Spectator’s Notes

7 April 2007

Another change since the Falklands is the growth of the idea that the British media are being unprofessional if we display any preference for our own country’s cause over that of its enemies. Except in the BBC, media attitudes at the time of the Falklands were different. A friend who fought on Mount Tumbledown remembers what happened when shooting started and some British soldiers were hit. The late A.J. McElroy of the Daily Telegraph and Tony Snow of the Sun laid down the manual typewriters with which they had yomped to the battlefield, and picked up a stretcher. I can’t help thinking that this was the right thing to do.

It was Labour’s own Freedom of Information Act which was used to smoke out some of the documents about Gordon Brown’s disastrous decision in 1997 to abolish the tax relief for pension funds. But what tends to be overlooked is that New Labour’s entire method of government is designed to get round the openness which it extols (just as its fundraising methods circumvent its attacks on ‘sleaze’). Part of the reason for this is the ‘Project’s’ distrust of civil servants; part is the fear of leaks, and part is the fear of Freedom of Information. FOI makes it more important than in the past not to record your real debates. So if you have FOI, you also, inevitably, get ‘sofa government’. I pity any future historian trying to find accurate and full documentation of the last ten years of British government. For the first time for more than a century, it does not exist.