If you were to draw up a tag-cloud of common phrases that dominated the political blogs in 2009, as the year wore on, you would have seen the dominance of the word “liberty” giving way to an increasing concern with “transparency.” But the left should not allow this concept to be dominated by the right.
Between Heather Brooke and the Telegraph, we’ve also seen MPs being the butt of the demands for disclosure – often in excruciating detail. In both cases, the left have found themselves on the back foot in these discussions, allowing our perceived shortcomings to reflect badly on the Labour government that introduced the Freedom of Information Act in the first place.
Now, it seems that – as the election draws nearer – we’re allowing David Cameron to use a half-formed notion of “transparency” as the foundations for his “Post-Bureaucratic Age”. This concept (or #PBAge as it has inevitably been tagged) borrows the fluffy clothing of behavioural economics and webby goodness. But it’s an aggressively Thatcherite programme in drag. Demands for more “transparency” are at its heart. In yesterday’s speech, Cameron makes a range of laudable proposals about increasing the capacity of well-heeled and resourced pressure groups ordinary people to participate in the legislative process. He also refers to the Tory’s plan to make the tendering of public services more transparent.
The left should be looking to take this one step further:
• What about opening up the delivery of those contracts? Let’s see the private contractors exposed to every bit as much scrutiny as the public sector are, and then we can make a call on the question of whether private provision is actually more efficient or effective.
• Let’s see people who are suspected of tax-dodging being subjected to the same level of scrutiny as the considerably-cheaper-on-the-public-purse benefit cheats.
• And what about more transparency in the way that the more socially useless parts of the finance sector increase short-termism by the way that they speculate? What about more transparency for fund-managers? In this post by Tom Powdrill about the Kraft/Cadbury takeover, we see opaque fund-managers speculating against jobs to create a less valuable company. And what about exposing the estimated $390 million in fees on that bad Cadbury deal?
• When do politicians meet commercial pressure groups, and where do they get the research that they introduce into debates? Surely shareholders should know every penny that is spent on lobbying – what is being advocated and who is doing the advocacy? When do wealthy organisations provide cheap interns and secretarial services for MPs and public committees and what do they get back?
• When do newspapers carry stories that are favourable to their proprietors commercial interests? Surely journalists should source assertions that they make so we can see who is influencing public debate? Good journalism should be subject to a great deal more fact-checking than it is currently, and Left Foot Forward’s very own Andrew Regan has a good tool that could be adapted to this purpose.
So far, all of the demands for transparency have been placed upon either democratic institutions or public service broadcasters. That tells you everything you need to know about who is making the running in this debate so far.
Now, maybe it’s time they had a taste of their own dogfood?
8 Responses to “Time for the left to reclaim the “transparency” debate”
Rory
Why should the debate ‘belong’ to the left or the right?
It is people who operate in non-partisan way, such as Andrew Rawnsley, who in my view do the most to foster transparency, while partisan types such as Alistair Campbell seek to obscure the facts
Paul Evans
I've just posted something about the left and the transparency debate over at Left Foot Forward – here: http://tinyurl.com/yk5zap6
Clifford Singer
RT @leftfootfwd Left should reclaim "transparency" debate (bankers, tax dodgers, lobbyists beware) http://bit.ly/d4Yd7N < @Paul0Evans1 v gd!
Clifford Singer
Paul Evans makes some excellent points here. We called for a similar measure in our Other TaxPayers’ Alliance submission to Power2010 http://taxpayersalliance.org/news/two-submissions-to-power2010
Rory, I don’t think it’s a question of any side ‘owning’ the debate. But that as Paul says it is currently being skewed in one direction – focusing on the public sector while letting others escape scrutiny.
To some extent this mirrors the way in which the debate over the economic crisis has shifted from focusing on capital to focusing on the public sector. As William Davies puts it in a good piece on the limits of the debate on mutuals: “Unless one believes David Cameron’s peculiar 2009 conference speech, the crisis was more a consequence of capital behaving badly than of the state doing so. It seems perverse, therefore, that we should seize the subsequent opportunity to reinvent the state, as necessary as that may be, while leaving capitalism roughly as it was.” http://www.demos.co.uk/blog/john-lewis-vs-easycouncil
MyDavidCameron
RT @OtherTPA RT @leftfootfwd Left should reclaim "transparency" debate (bankers, tax dodgers, lobbyists beware) http://bit.ly/d4Yd7N