By vetoing release of Iraq war cabinet minutes, Jack Straw has flouted freedom of information – and ruined his own credibility How apt that Gordon Brown should ask Jack Straw to strangle the life out of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. In a previous life, Straw helped water down the act that he now finds so threatening to his traditional way of governing. As the foreign secretary that took Britain to war, he may also have most to lose if we find out how it happened. However much Straw tries to spin as exceptional his decision to veto release of the minutes of two pre-Iraq war cabinet meetings, he has sent a signal that wherever an application for disclosure under FOI risks embarrassing ministers, it will ultimately be rejected. Someone has got the Freedom of Information Act badly wrong. Jack Straw thinks it's the information commissioner and the information tribunal, both of whom ordered the government to release the papers. Straw clearly has no confidence that the courts will back him up. With a cry of "it's my act and I'll wreck it if I want to", he has made clear that he will be the ultimate arbiter of what the public can be told. The justice minister has already proved the perfect man to implement Brown's limited constitutional reforms, which promise a lot but mean doing very little. It is no surprise that he has again trotted out the notion that letting the public in on what happens in cabinet meetings will seriously damage the conventions – collective cabinet responsibility and cabinet confidentiality – on which "good government" depends. Can he not see that both are already holed below the waterline? This case truly goes to the heart of the FOI Act. If you believe that cabinet government works very well and should be left alone, you probably agree that its secrecy should be preserved. If you take the contrary view, that things went very badly wrong over Iraq, far from wanting to preserve business as usual, you will feel that a little transparency might actually help. Straw is obviously in the former camp. But here, more than anyone else in the cabinet, he is vulnerable to the charge of "he would say that, wouldn't he?" To recap briefly: what the minutes are thought to show is that ministers were not only happy to accept the attorney general's single-page advice that the war would be legal, but were also reluctant to allow Clare Short to ask Lord Goldsmith why it had taken him so long to make up his mind and whether he had any doubts. They may also show that those, like Straw and Geoff Hoon, who saw Goldsmith's earlier, longer and more equivocal advice, misled those who had not. But the thing that Straw really doesn't get, as the government's failed case to the information tribunal showed, is that the possibility that cabinet minutes will be released already exists and existed from the moment he introduced the FOI Act. Because there is no absolute rule against disclosure, there was always the chance that minutes would be disclosed, where the public interest requires it. If ministers thought cabinet meetings were exempt, that was surely their problem. So much for collective responsibility, what about cabinet confidentiality? It was amazing that Straw kept a straight face this afternoon as he pretended that such a thing still exists. As Sam Coates of the Times brilliantly pointed out last week, ministers' "fetish" for giving the press one-sided briefings about what they said in cabinet makes a mockery of their attempts to prevent the formal record ever coming out. In fact, the prime minister's spokesman routinely briefs the press on the same day with an official version of what was discussed at cabinet. As usual with the FOI Act, what is at stake is the public's right to look behind the official version. Straw will no doubt enjoy the company of the Tories, whose Dominic Grieve threw a few "I told you so" barbs at him before revealing that he actually backed the use of the veto. The Tories have for some time developed the line that while a full Iraq inquiry is necessary, it should take place in secret where necessary. No doubt, they are positioning themselves for the day when they will be in government. How noble of Straw to lay his credibility down in defence of principles from which others will soon benefit.The Act that Jack wrecked
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
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