28 Jan 09 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Chris Ames
Yesterday’s ruling that pre-Iraq war cabinet minutes must be released is a vindication for Labour’s Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, although whether the government will see it that way is another matter. It shows that the most sensitive and controversial discussions at the heart of government are potentially open to public scrutiny – a lot earlier than many ministers may find comfortable.
It’s a momentous decision from the Information Tribunal that reflects the even more momentous decision — cabinet approval for the war — that lies at its heart. In this case we can celebrate an advance for transparency without worrying that anything too catastrophic will result.
The ruling makes clear that the FOI Act has fundamentally shifted the balance between government secrecy and transparency. Sitting through most of the tribunal’s hearing of the case in November, it struck me how much the Cabinet Office had failed to grasp this. Their counsel, Jonathan Swift QC, repeatedly argued as if cabinet confidentiality and collective cabinet responsibility were so fundamental to the workings of government that they could never be challenged by FOI.
Essentially, the information commissioner, whose decision was being challenged at the tribunal, won the case by pointing out that the exemptions under the Act relied on by the government were not absolute, but ‘qualified’, that the public interest in disclosure could triumph.
So any comfort zone that politicians thought they had no longer exists, and ministers will probably change the way they talk behind the scenes. The possibility of disclosure in the not too distant future, which already existed, is now crystal clear.
But a decision that is justified as ‘exceptional’ clearly doesn’t mean that absolutely everything politicians say will now be disclosed.
Ministers will be relieved that it leaves them free to mislead the public about what they really think, as the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility requires. As the commissioner put it, disclosure of these minutes will cause little damage because ‘no member of the Cabinet will be placed in the embarrassing position of being seen to have opposed in private a decision that he or she subsequently supported in public’.
The tribunal has again shown that it is swayed by claims, citing Section 27 of the Act, that some things should be concealed for fear of damaging international relations. It has allowed redactions to be made from the minutes on these grounds. So if, as has been alleged, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw were rude about alleged French intransigence over attempts to get a new UN resolution, their blushes will be spared.
The decision is also a triumph for the man who requested the minutes, who, I understand, is an ordinary citizen rather than a journalist. He has shown that FOI opens up possibilities that the rest of us never imagined.
So it goes down as an away win, albeit a close run thing. Perhaps, reflecting the split in the panel that made the decision, I would score it two to one. But it’s a significant advance for the cause of transparency all the same.
20 Jan 09 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Chris Ames
So it turns out that another of the government’s claims about Iraq was baseless. As I revealed last week, it cannot prove a claim that former attorney general Lord Goldsmith decided that the war would be legal before meeting two of Tony Blair’s closest allies. The revelation also raises questions about the commitment to transparency of the information commissioner, of all people. Why did he allow the government to make an unsubstantiated assertion in a formal ‘disclosure statement’ under the Freedom of Information Act?
With hindsight, even Richard Thomas must realise now that it was a bad idea to let the Blair government to mix spin with fact, without even asking them to distinguish between the two. The subject of the disclosure that he ordered in 2006 was hugely contentious –– the process by which Goldsmith came to drop his concerns that the Iraq war might be illegal.
The meeting between Goldsmith and two members of Tony Blair’s inner circle, Sally Morgan and Lord Falconer, is probably the most contentious part of that process. It took place on 13 March 2003, a week before the invasion and just as Goldsmith was coming round to agreeing that the war would be legal after all. It’s not entirely clear what the purpose of the meeting was at such a sensitive time but the suggestion that Goldsmith was leaned on is unavoidable.
It appears that a record exists of a conversation that same day between Goldsmith and his legal secretary in which the attorney general stated that he had come around to Blair’s way of thinking. For the government to have simply revealed that this happened on the day he met Morgan and Falconer would have aroused huge suspicions that the change of heart followed the meeting.
But Thomas had made it easy for the government to assert that it happened the other way around. He did not require it to publish actual documents but to produce a narrative of events, and allowed it to include ‘information’ that was not backed by documentary evidence.
The suspicion that ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ would have been clearer at the time had Thomas required the government’s narrative to distinguish between those ‘events’ that were real and those that were embellishment. But Thomas didn’t see the need for this and now has egg on his face.
You could say the information commissioner is entitled to expect that the government will tell the truth when asked. But in the context — that the government had already mixed spin with fact in a dossier about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to include unsubstantiated assertions — Thomas should have been less naïve.
Surely the whole point of the freedom of information act is that the public gets to see the behind-the-scenes evidence — or lack of it — rather than having to accept the government’s account.
But of more concern is Thomas’ subsequent lack of transparency about his own involvement. When I asked him to confirm that the disclosure statement’s version of events was based on documentary evidence rather than spin, he was unwilling to do so. I had to make a new freedom of information request.
Three years down the line, the facts are a bit clearer. The attorney general met two of the prime minister’s closest allies on the day he changed his mind about the legality of the war. The government has admitted — or perhaps claimed — that it has ‘no information’ about which happened first.
We also know that the cabinet met on that very same day but not what it was told about Goldsmith’s view, whatever that was. Former minister Clare Short has suggested that the cabinet had no opportunity to question Goldsmith four days later, after he had given it a single page ‘opinion’ that the war would be legal.
I’m told that the information tribunal’s decision over the release of minutes from these two cabinet meetings is due towards the end of the month. If we could just have the unvarnished facts, that would be very helpful.
05 Nov 08 | Comment, News and features
Chris Ames identifies a worrying trend in the government’s latest refusal to release documents under the Freedom of Information Act
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20 Feb 08 | Comment, Middle East and North Africa
The release of a draft of the British government’s dossier on Iraqi weapons confirms suspicions but also raises more questions, writes Chris Ames
Monday’s release of the John Williams draft of the Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” dossier shows why the government fought for so long to suppress it. It proves what I have always suspected: that a spin doctor was in the thick of sexing up the document that took Britain to war. At the same time, Williams himself has shattered the Foreign Office case for not releasing the draft under the Freedom of Information Act.
We learn two things from the document. Firstly, Williams produced what became the dossier’s executive summary, which purported to set out the Joint Intelligence Committee’s (JIC) “judgments”. Secondly, and consequently, the draft is proved to have led to JIC chairman John Scarlett’s “first draft” the next day and therefore to the published dossier. The first shows that the government misled parliament in making the case for war. The second shows that the government misled the Hutton and Butler inquiries, and parliament again, to cover this up.
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