I’m looking to radically re-design this site and would love to hear from any interested web designers.
In brief, I plan to keep the blog on wordpress but want to re-brand the site as heatherbrooke.org (I have purchased this domain name). I’d like to see more graphics and better navigation and more streamlined hierarchies. I’m looking at something along the lines of this site by the author Raj Patel: http://rajpatel.org/
If interested please let me know your daily rate and how many days’ work you think this rebranding would entail. Please also send me some of your previous work.
The final caveat is that this needs to be done quickly – before March 23rd.
Questions or offers gladly received at heather (at) yrtk.org.
Hope you’ll all tune in tonight to watch On Expenses at 9pm on BBC4.
Great to see it’s made pick of the day in most of the newspapers (even if my character was described by the Times’ parliamentary sketch writer Ann Treneman as ‘this side of loony on the bus’).
The dramatisation of my campaign to open up Parliament now has a date.
On Expenses (formerly Bringing Down the House) will have its first broadcast on BBC4 at 9pm on Tuesday February 23rd. Don’t miss it!! I’ve done an interview with Martin Bell for the Radio Times and will be in tomorrow’s (Feb 16th) Woman’s Own magazine for those who want a taste of what’s to come.
I’ve just returned from a week’s holiday in Cornwall. It was my first time along the Atlantic Cornish coast and I absolutely loved it. I did some epic walks along the cliffs of Crackington Haven then headed down past Tintagel, Rock, Padstow and on to St Ives with a few trips out to Penzance and the wonderful Minack Theatre in Porthcurno.
Cornwall is a truly magical place but it got me thinking about who owns this lovely landscape so favoured by artists. Land ownership is the primary means by which scarce resources are divided in society and as such in a democracy it is imperative that the people know who owns land. In the UK we don’t have a clear idea of who owns the land which is why I am keen to liberate the entire data set of the Land Registry. At the moment you can look up an address and find the owner for the cost of £4 per search but it is not possible to search by land owner.
We do know, however, who is the biggest land owner in Cornwall: the Duchy of Cornwall. But what do we know about this estate and the tax relief or benefits Prince Charles receives as a result of inheriting this vast land holding?
I asked one of my avid correspondents Philip Hosking who is a specialist in all matters Cornish. He’d been in touch several months ago seeking advice about using the Freedom of Information Act to get answers to questions about any public subsidies or benefits received by the Duchy.
He has found the Duchy to be less than transparent. Instead this feudal constitutional body of governance claims that it is nothing more than a private landed estate and therefore exempt from the FOI act. He did point me to John Cross who is using the FOI act to obtain as much info as possible on the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. You can find out about his work by visiting his blog Confirm or Deny.
For those interested in this subject, John Kirkhope, a Notary Public and Solicitor, has extensively researched the Duchy of Cornwall and is organising a series of public talks on the Laws of Cornwall.
I have one word of advice to all those seeking info on land ownership. Instead of using the Freedom of Information Act you might also try citing the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. This law is based on an EU directive and covers a wide range of information about the environment including land use and pollution. It also applies to any organisation conducting activities affecting the environment, not just public bodies (thus the Duchy of Cornwall IS covered under the EIR). For more info about using the EIR see the websites for the Information Commissioner, or the Scottish Information Commissioner. You should also look at the site of Rob Edwards who is an excellent journalist covering the environment and using both FOI and the EIR laws.
You wait months for a new blog post and then three come along at once!
I’ve been neglecting the dear old YRTK blog while I thundered through all the research and writing necessary to complete the manuscript of The Silent State. It was stressful but intensely exciting and I turned in the book on deadline. It’s since been to the lawyers, the editor and the copy editor. On Wednesday I met my wonderful editor Drummond Moir at Heinemann to go through the final corrections in an all-day editing session. Now the manuscript is being set and then it’s one more read-through before it heads to the printers. I can’t wait!
Publication is now set for the first week in April. You can pre-order a copy on Amazon for a special 30 percent discount price. I hope some of you will get your orders in early and often!
I notice the naysayers are peeping their heads over the parapet again. I’m serving notice that any public servants moaning about having to account to the public under the Freedom of Information had better be prepared to undergo some intense investigation on their spending. I’ll be keeping my eye out for any FOI bad-mouthers in the future and if you know of any please do let me know.
Perhaps these public servants hope that enough dust has settled from the MPs’ expenses scandal. Let’s remember that it was in secrecy that this massive abuse of public funds was allowed to operate. Transparency was finally acknowledged as the single best cure for preventing corruption. But now some officials are trying to bad-mouth FOI and go back to the old ways. I’ve seen claims that FOI is a waste of public money, that it diverts from the serious business of bureaucracy, that it might even be jeopardizing police investigations. All this is nonsense. FOI is the single best regulator of efficiency and probity. It’s certainly cheaper and more effective than the hundreds of regulators currently in operation.
Yet here’s the latest FOI gripe from Chief Constable Ian Latimer of Northern Constabulary in Scotland: He claims that the number of people making FOI requests is going up.
“There is concern that additional funding will be required to support this business area in 2009-10, diverting resources away from operational policing.”
Firstly, isn’t citizen involvement precisely what our leaders claim to want? Now they have it – and they’re moaning. Turns out they don’t actually want the public asking challenging questions about who does what, whay, and for how much.
On the matter of funding – let me remind readers of the vast amounts of cash police forces are spending on Public Relations (i.e. propaganda) departments. Re-read the investigation I did for the Times on police PR spending. We found that police forces across the UK were spending £39m each year on press and PR – enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers and more than enough to cover the annual police pay rise withheld by the Government. The ratio of PR to FOI officers was also striking; many forces having 12 PR people for every one FOI person (that’s them telling us what they want us to know as opposed to actually answering our questions).
I’m on the most recent episode of Charlie Brooker’s wonderfully acerbic Newswipe. Readers of my twitterfeed (@newsbrooke) may know that I’m a big fan of Brooker’s style of caustic and insightful humour so it was a real pleasure to be interviewed for the second series of his show about the news.
You can watch the entire episode on the BBC’s rubbishy iplayer for a limited time (I appear 15 minutes in) or in perpetuity on YouTube (minute 5). I’m talking here about the way journalists grant public officials anonymity for no good reason. By the very definition of their role, official spokespeople have absolutely no reason to be anonymous yet one of the more dubious practices of the British press is the way reporters collude with officials by granting anonymity.
Sources should be granted anonymity only in very limited circumstances where naming may cause specific harm (such as a whistleblower who could lose his job). There is no reason a Home Office or police force spokesman, for example, should be granted anonymity, yet I’ve had many arguments with these people who insist on it as their ‘right’.
The reason these people insist on anonymity is simply to exercise power without accountability. Anonymity = deniability.
I believe it is a fundamental role of the journalist to push officials to stand behind what they say. If these officials don’t agree, then don’t print their statements or give them air time. It really is that simple. If journalists stuck together on just this one point they could overnight force a change in the culture of parliament, the civil service and many public services.
Over Christmas I happened to catch the Orson Welles Sketchbook broadcast December 26th on BBC4. Welles may have been speaking decades ago, but his message couldn’t be more pertitent to today. He disccuses state surveillance, police powers and blackmailing bureaucrats.
Welles relates stories from his travels around the globe dealing with border police and bureaucracy in general. He longs for his father’s day when people had free movement as opposed to, “nowdays [when] we’re treated like demented or delinquent children.” What on earth would he make of modern-day Britain, the most watched place on the planet?
He tells of being stopped at the border of a nameless European country by typically officious and bullying policemen. He’s at pains to tell us he is by no means an anarchist or against the police. He may play a practical joke on the police but he does not advocate breaking the law. Rather he wants to bring the policeman to law.
The best bits begin 9 minutes in where he explores the insidious dangers of ‘red tapism’.
“Think of all those forms we have to fill out. Why should I have to confide my religion to the police? No one’s race is anybody’s business.”
Yes the policeman has a difficult job a very hard job, he says, but, “it’s the essence of our society that the policemans’ job should be hard. He’s their to protect the free citzien. Chasing criminals is an incidental part of his job. The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman than the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal.”
“We should be grateful for the policeman. But we should be grateful, too, for the laws that protect us against the policeman. There are those laws and they’re quite different from police regulations. And those regulations do pile up. The forms keep coming in.”
“The bureaucrat, and I’m including the policeman here, is part of one great big monstrous thing – really like a blackmailer. You can never pay him off. The more you give him the more he’ll demand.”
We accept each new demand because we don’t want to get into trouble with the police. It’s easier just to hand over whatever new piece of our personal lives the authorities require, to agree to yet more surveillance, more forms, more databases; to grant the police more powers of arrest.
Why should we make trouble? A better question in a democracy would be, as Welles says, “Why should the policeman make trouble for us?”
Under Sections 40-44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 , the police can stop and search you without a warrant, or any grounds for suspicion, and can arrest you and hold you for up to 48 hours without any charge being brought. Any items in your possession can be taken in evidence.
Of course, these draconian powers haven’t caught many terrorists. But they have been used over and over again to harass photographers:
Two-time BAFTA winner Anna Maxwell Martin is holding her own against a slew of older men playing the parts of the old boys network in Parliament. I’m sure she’ll give ‘em hell.
There’s a rumour that I might be an extra in the film. We’ll have to just wait and see on that.
Have you ever: ◦Wanted to get information from a public authority? ◦Thought they weren't telling the whole truth? ◦Had problems getting the information you wanted? […]
A website with resources on a variety of issues that confront reporters, writers and journalists. For example, when a writer is on public school grounds covering a protest, can they be charged with tresspass? […]
The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama's administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by th […]
Heather Brooke is an award-winning writer, journalist and activist. Her unprecedented five-year campaign for the full disclosure of MPs’ expenses led to a full-scale reform of the Parliamentary expense system. Heather is the author of The Silent State (Heinemann) and Your Right to Know (Pluto Press). She is is an honorary professor at at City University’s De […]
You choose the public authority that you would like information from, then write a brief note describing what you want to know. We then send your request to the public authority. Any response they make is automatically published on the website for you and anyone else to find and read. You pay taxes, and then government does things with the money. All sorts o […]
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