All good British Conservatives know of Conservative Home, even if they do not look in on the site
regularly. They also know to expect a suitably rigorous diet of right-leaning
content, generally with a high ideological purity content, especially as the
Executive Editor (that means he effectively runs it) is one Mark Wallace,
formerly a stalwart of the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA).
This means arguing for less Government, less tax, less
benefits system, as little NHS as they can get away with, but all the while
with total transparency. Or rather that was the case until one contributor
found that transparency was not to his liking: step forward Tory MP Richard
Benyon, who, not to put too fine a point on it, is minted beyond the dreams of
avarice.
Benyon is
clearly aghast at the existence of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, and
the uses to which they may be put: “I was
given a two page going-over by the Daily Mirror – which claimed that I was ‘raking in £625,000 a year from his hard-up
tenants’ housing benefit’. In other words, it produced some half-fictions
wrapped up in a load of 1970s class warfare”. Poor dear.
And, worse for Squire Richard, the
lower orders were lurking in the shadows: “Behind this attack was the GMB Union, acting as a fig leaf for the
Labour Party. It has gone on a fishing trip around local authorities, using the
Freedom of Information Act to harvest data with which to knock the Government
in general and Conservatives in particular”. They just don’t know their
place nowadays.
Benyon senses malpractice: “This prompted me to ask how many FOI requests my local authority is
getting and what the burden this activity is on council resources. The
staggering answer is that a small unitary authority like West Berkshire Council
receives around four or five FOI requests a day ... [in] the long run, we need to make sure that the
Act is there for what it is designed to
do”.
So submitting significant numbers of FOI requests is A Very
Bad Thing. One has to wonder how Mark Wallace squares this point of view with
his time at the TPA – with whose philosophy he still sympathises – when submitting
unfeasibly large numbers of FOI requests was de rigueur. Benyon thinks millions are being consumed by servicing
these requests. He is right. But this cuts both ways.
Just because some rotten lefties have discovered the art of
extracting information through FOI is no excuse to deny them the same
transparency that the TPA uses to its advantage so often – and at such cost to
the same taxpayers it pretends to champion. One wonders what Wallace’s excuse
will be for Benyon’s petulant outburst, other than that he is also a champion
of free speech.
So free, in fact, that it allows ConHome to face both ways
at once. No change there.
1 comment:
And at least the Mirror's use of FOI here sounds justified, in uncovering information of interest and relevance, whereas every FOI-related TPA 'story' I've seen seems to involve them submitting a FOI, sucking their teeth and grumbling "Ooh, looks like a big number, that can't be good". I saw a local story a few months ago, in which the council planned to provide some workers with mobile phones (note the word 'some'). Up popped the TPA, whining that 'the taxpayer shouldn't be paying for all council workers to have free mobiles'. Which they clearly weren't. Still, anything to keep the TPA busy. It must get dull playing Minesweeper all day.
It reminds me of the way the anti-BBC mob take one look at the number of people sent to cover Glastonbury/the Olympics/insert-event-here and then whinge that it's far too many, and it must just be a 'jolly' (because of course they know exactly how many people it takes to cover a festival or sporting event, including TV, radio, red button and website coverage, plus transport, wires, satellite links, catering, legal etc).
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