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I came accross this in a recent addition of Private Eye:
What was it that Gordon Brown said about restoring trust and exposing the government to the full glare of the freedom of information laws, which ''is the right course because government belongs to the people?''.
His first step when nationalising Northern Wreck ( or using the ''temporary public ownership solution''as he called it) was to excude the bank from freedom of information laws, making it the only taxpayer-owned company to operate behind an official veil of secrecy. This was essential, insisted Gordon, because ''it is surely a matter of commercial confidentiality that Northern Rock should be able to plan it's business future'', ignoring existing let-outs from FoI rules for commercial information which are good enough for bodies like the Post Office and certainly cover business plans.
To keep any of the Rock's grubby little secrets out of the public eye an alternative truth has been fashioned. Under emergency legislation the bank ''shall be deemed not to be a publicly-owned company '' and so fall outside of freedom of information laws. Perhaps later legislation will deem the whole horrible episode never to have happened so there'll be nothing to find out about it anyway...
What was it that Gordon Brown said about restoring trust and exposing the government to the full glare of the freedom of information laws, which ''is the right course because government belongs to the people?''.
His first step when nationalising Northern Wreck ( or using the ''temporary public ownership solution''as he called it) was to excude the bank from freedom of information laws, making it the only taxpayer-owned company to operate behind an official veil of secrecy. This was essential, insisted Gordon, because ''it is surely a matter of commercial confidentiality that Northern Rock should be able to plan it's business future'', ignoring existing let-outs from FoI rules for commercial information which are good enough for bodies like the Post Office and certainly cover business plans.
To keep any of the Rock's grubby little secrets out of the public eye an alternative truth has been fashioned. Under emergency legislation the bank ''shall be deemed not to be a publicly-owned company '' and so fall outside of freedom of information laws. Perhaps later legislation will deem the whole horrible episode never to have happened so there'll be nothing to find out about it anyway...
