When I was a civil servant I was lucky enough to have an Assistant Secretary who would regularly challenge the over-classification of really quite mundane documents as confidential (or worse). At one point, I sat down with a marker pen, now presumably owned by the redactor-in-chief in Parliament, blacking out large amounts of perfectly unassuming data from a report that was to be made publicly available. It occurs to me that one very useful policy that could be put in place on Day One of a new government would be instructions that made much less internal communication classified.
Here's a good candidate, unearthed by the estimable Christopher Booker:
In recent months, in fact, a curious little drama has been unfolding over attempts by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian statistical expert, to get the Met Office and the CRU to divulge the computer data on which they base their temperature record. ...
When Mr McIntyre made Freedom of Information requests to see the data used to construct the HadCrut record (as he has chronicled on his ClimateAudit blog) he was given an almighty brush-off, the Met Office saying that this information was strictly confidential and that to release it would damage Britain's "international relations" with all the countries that supplied it.
The idea that temperature records might be a state secret seems strange enough, but when the policies of governments across the world are based on that data it becomes odder still that no outsider should be allowed to see it. Weirdest of all, however, is the Met Office's claim that to release the data would "damage the trust that scientists have in those scientists who happen to be employed in the public sector".
This classification is, to put it bluntly, contemptuous of the British people. Go on, Mr. Cameron, pledge to declassify this and a thousand other state "secrets" that have no business being so.
