Heather Brooke: "campaigner of the year 2009"
Today, over at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, Prospect is co-sponsoring Future Democracy 2009, an annual conference bringing together enthusiasts for internet politics, government folks and NGO campaigners. They still have a few tickets, so if you fancy popping by, you should.
I’ll be speaking on a panel about the impact of transparency on government and parliament, in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses backlash. Intimidatingly, I’ll be alongside FOI campaigner Heather Brooke, fresh from her being honoured at yesterday’s Political Studies Association lunch as “campaigner of the year” — a richly deserved award given her three year battle to unveil the largely soft, but sometimes hard, corruption in the system of Mps’ payments. But I’m not entirely sure what to say.
For some years I’ve been involved in MySociety.org, and more transparency is the thread which links everything we do. There is now a soft consensus about expenses, namely that the transparency it brought was a good thing, and that the Telegraph is to be broadly commended for its work. It remains unclear, however, exactly how far that model of exposure can take us. Not every example of Telegraph-like pushing will reveal expenses-like corruption. In some situations transparency of data alone won’t be enough to achieve a change in the way institutions operate. In others, simply trying to bounce an establish bureaucracy into action (often by leaking against it) may be counterproductive: witness the long, seemingly now victorious battle to get the Ordnance to open up its mapping data.
Some of this was well summed up by Larry Lessig (normally a hero figure for the pro-transparency internet crowd), who published a much discussed essay in the New Republic last month—one of those pieces I’d have dearly loved to have in Prospect. In it he argued convincingly that radical transparency could be both harmful to institutions and counterproductive to good government. So how much transparency is too much? If I find an interesting answer between now and 2pm, I’ll post it up here later …
Share
Comments
Print
Add Comment
Transparency in Democracy.
First, it is often a given in debates like this that Democracy is a ‘good thing’ full stop.
Whereas in fact it’s actually Freedom that is a ‘good thing’ full stop – by Freedom I mean in the old fashioned/traditional sense of the word as in freedom of the individual from oppressions of various kinds by other individuals and organisations including, and frequently especially, the state. Think of being stuck in a lift. If the other occupants in the lift declare a ‘Lift Democracy’ then you could be pretty naked and pretty poor quite quickly if you are on the wrong end of a ‘Democratic vote’ – ‘All those in favour of all the girls in this lift having to … say Aye”. Whereas if un-democratic, un-elected traditional common law was upheld in the lift they you’d be fine. Having a larger caucus doesn’t negate the Democracy’s essential shortfalls – unborn children don’t vote and 600 are killed in Abortion chambers in the UK each day. Iraqis don’t vote in our elections and…”.
That said we have ‘democracy’ which in practical terms means a 5 year rolling semi-dictatorship of fairly vain, frequently intellectually and morally inadequate frequenters of the subsidised bar at Westminster. It can only work (be of benefit to all of us) if we accept that they are a bunch of naves and limit their knavery. Limiting their knavery means we need to be able to get rid of them – and 5 years is far too long to wait and we need to know what they are up to so we need better transparency – which does not necessarily mean more – And this is the rub – A surfeit of information is no information at all. We have a surfeit of democracy – we can vote celebs off TV shows all day for 50p per text – this is chaff – and so is the MP’s expenses story. The whole traditional point of parliament was for people to send ‘one of theirs’ to Westminster to decide laws and stuff after a big open, written-down (Hansard) public debate. Now-a-days all these laws are now decided in secret cabinet meetings – following instructions from outside sources – Party funders, Bilderberg… MP’s are then whipped from the bar to the voting chambers and told to vote this secret decision into law – This is the transparency we need, not websites full of receipts for toilet rolls – we need the real debates to be taken from the secret cabinet meetings back into the main chamber.
A better way to think about transparency could be to use the idea of network tracing, as explained in a recent article : “Knowledge and praxis of networks as a political project”, published in: Twenty-First Century Society, Volume 4, Issue 3, November 2009 (abstract available at : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a916116619 ).