Government 0 Internet 1

http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/21/blimey-it-looks-like-the-internets-won/

mysociety are a great group of people, they're behind such websites as theyworkforyou, the site that from a simple postcode will tell you the names and official contact details and voting records of all your elected representatives. In fact I'd go further by saying they're the vanguard in an effort to stop the government taking advantage of the general apathy of the public to sneak through legislation.

Recently, Ministers were trying to put through an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act which would take ministers expenses out of the FoI remit. In short, they were going to put through a paper that would mean we, the elected public couldn't request to see exactly what they're doing with out money.

This isn't petty snooping, the ministers have to reveal exactly the same expenses as any self employed person has to in order to avoid being over taxed, so if its a standard they're holding others to it is not unfair that they be held publicly accountable by the same standard. It also prevents abuses of ministerial expenses.

The announcement of this bill was released at the same time as the controversial decision to go ahead with the 3rd runway at Heathrow, in short a blatant attempt to bury the bill and hopefully sneak it through without the public noticing. In fact what is worse is that, not only did Labour try to sneak it through, but none of the opposition made any move to inform the press or public about this. Basically all the ministers were keeping quiet in the hope of being able to keep their expenses out of the public eye.

Fortunately Mysociety organised a major Internet campaign, with a facebook group and everything, to get people to write to their MPs and ask them to vote against the bill. There was a small amount of media coverage and the majority of MPs said "Caught" (OK, they didn't say "Yes you got us, we were trying to hide this from you but you got us good you rascals") and voted against it. Now its very hard to see any sitting MP in a good light, they all let this through, kept it quiet and hoped it would stay buried. Its very hard to see them as greedy self interested spongers who don't want us to know exactly how their abusing our tax pounds.

Thankfully MySociety are doing good work in keeping all workings of parliament public, and in a more easily digestible way than the online Hansard. Its sad that we need a group like them, but with the current Governments habit of trying to hide controversial legislation and the press' seeming inability to catch them at it (I could go on about journalists being lazy and only re-hashing press releases as opposed to doing all that difficult research but that's for another post) it is important that a group like this keeps them on their toes.