Why are our governments so allergic to scrutiny?

Was Tony Blair an “idiot” for introducing the Freedom of Information Act? He certainly thought so, writing in his memoir that “there is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate” to describe the policy. Recent governments, it seems, would tend to agree.

It is hard, if not downright impossible, to imagine any government from the last decade passing similarly radical legislation. If anything, successive administrations have strived even harder to make up for this moment of “stupidity” by fervently drawing the curtains on transparency and accountability. As a result, public protest and independent journalism are firmly in the crosshairs.

The recent Afghan data breach is a case in point. In response to a leak exposing the identities of 19,000 people seeking refuge from the Taliban, the Sunak government took the unprecedented step of issuing a super-injunction to keep the scandal from hitting the headlines. By invoking increasingly dubious national security concerns, the Conservatives maintained the injunction until the election, after which it was continued by Labour for almost a year. Journalists were not only forbidden from reporting on the leak but from even discussing it with friends, family, and colleagues, allowing the government to act with complete impunity.

The super-injunction points to a broader culture within government – a culture which seeks to avoid scrutiny at all costs, from both the public and the press

Slammed as “disgraceful” by The Times and “corrosive of democracy” by The Guardian, the super-injunction has managed to unite the left- and right-wing press in their opprobrium of the measure. One of the first journalists to be silenced, Lewis Goodall, concluded: “If this becomes part of the furniture of the British state, we will have become less of a democracy than we were two years ago.”

A lack of transparency in politics is nothing new, of course, but the super-injunction points to a broader culture within government – a culture which seeks to avoid scrutiny at all costs, from both the public and the press. You could be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu. Many of Labour’s worst instincts are hangovers from past Conservative administrations, with their consistent disregard for the rule of law and their undermining of checks and balances.

The signs were arguably there from the start, with David Lammy saying in 2023 that Labour would not repeal Tory anti-protest laws. A reluctance to commit to repealing past legislation was to some extent understandable – scrapping their predecessors’ reams of undemocratic laws would be a time-consuming and electorally unrewarding undertaking for the party’s first government since 2010. Now, however, it is hard not to see this reluctance as an implicit endorsement of the substance of these laws and a willingness to exploit them.

Take what is arguably the most egregious attempt by the government to stifle public criticism: the proscription of Palestine Action. Since then, a 67-year-old man has been arrested for holding up a Private Eye cartoon at a protest, while over 500 arrests followed suit at a march supporting the group. No wonder, then, that the proscription has been slated by UN experts as having a “chilling effect on protest” and labelled “a serious attack on freedom of expression” by human rights organisations. Meanwhile, the exact reasoning for the proscription remains conveniently vague.

The Starmer administration has decided to gag civil servants, preventing senior officials from speaking at events without their comments being vetted in advance

The proscription – and the obfuscation surrounding it – has not taken place in a vacuum, but builds upon anti-protest legislation, including the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act and the Public Order Act. These acts criminalised ‘disruptive’ protests, leaving demonstrators facing up to six months in prison for ‘locking on’ or defying court-imposed conditions (or even carrying zip-ties). Following in the Conservatives’ footsteps, Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill will reintroduce a measure to ban face coverings at protests.

When it comes to media coverage, governments have been no less repressive; a fear of bad press has resulted in worrying overreach. Beyond maintaining the super-injunction, the Starmer administration has decided to gag civil servants, preventing senior officials from speaking at events without their comments being vetted in advance. This follows a pattern of discouraging criticism instituted by the Conservatives, including the blacklisting of a chemical weapons expert and academic for criticising the government.

There is evidently no shortage of time or money for suppressing information. Boris Johnson’s government spent half a million pounds resisting FOI requests; one reporter, who left the profession after a prolonged legal case, reckoned that “spending £20,000 to make an investigative journalist give up is very good value for money”. Earlier this month, it emerged that the Cabinet Office spent £30k of taxpayers’ money attempting to block the publication of a financial interests form for ministers. Naturally, for an apparently highly sensitive document whose release was prohibited for close to two years, the form was entirely blank.

You might say that reporting on the handing over of citizens’ private information to a far-right billionaire is in the public interest, too. Not in the eyes of Labour, which is also resisting efforts to scrutinise Palantir and OpenAI’s lucrative contracts with institutions such as the military, the NHS, and the police. The details of money being spent and public data being harvested remain murky, with the public and press left similarly in the dark. In the meantime, the lines between big tech and government continue to blur.

Much like the open corruption and lawlessness which defined the last few years of Tory rule, Labour’s lapse into unaccountability and evasion is, ironically, rather transparent

All of this, inevitably, comes back to 2016 and the political sea change which followed, propelling manifestly unfit individuals like Johnson into office. While the spectre of Brexit looms over ministers’ shoulders as a reminder of referendums past, the prospect of putting decisions – or even offering any kind of accountability – to the people is plainly undesirable. At the same time, we have seen a degradation of political discourse and the concomitant curtailing of transparency within government, carried out with a brazen confidence in the continued apathy of the electorate.

And so, much like the open corruption and lawlessness which defined the last few years of Tory rule, Labour’s lapse into unaccountability and evasion is, ironically, rather transparent.

Hoping to restore his plummeting support, Starmer has openly expressed his desire to court ‘authoritarian-leaning’ voters, a style of governance which ostensibly focuses on hot-button issues like crime and migration but which necessarily relies on a more intolerant, repressive state. (Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy was, for example, followed by a £30k attempt to hide the Windrush Report.) For governments eager to buy into the hard right’s fixation on crime and immigration, perhaps by echoing the rhetoric of Enoch Powell, basic scrutiny is hardly convenient.

Starmer’s hardline approach has unfortunate echoes of Boris Johnson, who expelled 21 of his colleagues for opposing a no-deal Brexit

Parallels can also be drawn with the Prime Minister’s intolerance of dissent within his own party, most recently involving the suspension of four rebels. In contrast, Tony Blair did not strip a single MP of the whip despite significant rebellions against cuts to single mother’ benefits and the Iraq war. Starmer’s hardline approach has unfortunate echoes, instead, of Boris Johnson, who expelled 21 of his colleagues for opposing a no-deal Brexit.

Starmer’s aversion to scrutiny is not an outlier, but instead fits into a new model of leadership, one which is dominated by a need to show strength in a fragmented political landscape – the cost of which is often a loss of transparency and accountability. Johnson and Sunak were merely symptoms of a broader cultural change. Likewise, on the world stage, unassertive leadership is punished by tariffs and a cold shoulder from the US. Mark Rutte’s fawning over Trump failed to sway the President’s undimmed admiration for Putin, while the EU conceded a lopsided trade deal.

When the independence of the Electoral Commission was curbed in 2022, with the organisation placed under the direct supervision of a secretary of state, concerns were raised about the possibility of future governments being handed the tools to undermine democracy. To date, this decision has not been reversed. If a Labour government has shown itself all too willing to impede journalism and crack down on public protest, you’re left to wonder whether the next administration will be worse still.