Let a hundred whistles blow

Civil Servants should have a safe way to make public any evidence of Government wrong-doing.

That's the main conclusion of  the Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) 's report on Leaks and Whistle Blowers.  Our report started with the arrest of Damien Green MP. The allegation was that a former Tory election candidate was leaking politically damaging information from Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's private office. 

This is not on. But we do not recommend that people with strong political beliefs be barred from Civil Service jobs. That is not possible. However they should not be employed in sensitive areas such as the private offices of ministers.

It is fundamental to good government that civil servants keep the confidences with which they are entrusted.  The conflict is between that  basic duty and the public’s legitimate interest in having access to information about how government works.

Far more important than malicious leaking for money or for party political purposes is  ethical whistle blowing.  This is not reprehensible, it is almost a duty of civil servants to expose situations when Governments deceive parliament and the nation.

We heard from witnesses who had sacrificed their careers to get the truth into the public domain. Katherine Gun thought the Iraq War was a mistake and she had information to prove it from her work at GCHQ. She leaked it a newspapers and she was arrested.

Carne Ross was a troubled senior diplomat in the Foreign Office. Talented and idealistic, his job was to know the secrets about our relations with Iraq. He was contemptuous of claims that there were WMD or any  threat from Saddam Hussein. He knew that Saddam could be controlled by cutting the illegal sales of of oil through our allies in Jordan and Sudan. This was an easy bloodless alternative to war. It was not considered because Bush was determined to go to war. We meekly followed behind. The price was that 179 British lives were lost.

Carne Ross did not speak out at the time. He might have stopped the war if he had. He gave evidence anonymously to the Butler Inquiry then resigned from his high flying post. There was no ready alternative. Although he and the other whistle blowers could have leaked productively to MPs. None of them considered that.

What PASC recommends is   that civil servants should know what channels are available to them. If they believe there is wrongdoing or information is being suppressed, they must be able to report to Civil Service Commissioners  without he risk of damaging their careers.  A culture that encourages proper whistle-blowing procedures is the best safeguard against leaking.,

We called today for a route to be established whereby evidence that a minister had misled Parliament or the public could be reported to Parliament following a complaint by a civil servant.

All other PASC members appear to be on holiday. It was my pleasure today to do the interviews on BBC TV news and on the radio. Our proposal would be a worthwhile reform.

Plain English

Another PASC task tomorrow is to discuss on Radio Four Word of Mouth programme,  our probe into the  problems of official language and jargon.

I have to pre-plan my forward planning to morph into challenges going forward to seize the low hanging fruit and get all my ducks in a row and push my fingers down the throat of the organisation of that nodule to escape the cascading paradigm granular shift.

Any ideas how to do 'backward planning'? How about 110%? That is not enough because now it's 200% or even 500%. Gordon Brown said he was 101% behind Tony Blair. People gasped, "Only 101%/'

Hope that's clear.

Comments

[HuwOS]

As they went against evidence and rationality anyway I think you are placing more weight on the effect of what Carne Ross might have said than is reasonable.

Also by implication it places part of the blame on him, which is grossly unfair.

The blame lies squarely with those who lied to bring the situation about and those who sheeplike followed them despite all that was obvious beforehand.

[Paul Flynn]

I agree with that huwOS. That was my opinion at the time. 139 Labour and 6 Tory MPs defied their parties' three line whip. It was 80 waverers among the Labour MP who made the difference. A leak from Carne Ross to an Mp or paper could have made the difference between Britain going in or staying out.

[HuwOS]

To be fair Paul, while some civil servants may have known some specific details that the issues we went to war with Iraq on were false, on the generalities most people in or out of government were aware that there was no justifiable reason for it.

Even those who didn't feel they knew with certainty that they were false, at least knew that no credible evidence was being put forward to make the case for war and what checkable "evidence" was presented was invariably proven to be false within a very short period of time.

We did not need civil servants to blow the whistle, people who went along with the call for war did so against all rationality.