Flickr/Jonas Schleske. Creative commons.The Freedom of Information Act (FoI) has been in the news recently with the Government complaining that the act is costly to administer and limits the work of government. Plans are afoot to charge for and restrict requests with a new panel due to report later this year.
It is not only contemporary documents, however, which are being suppressed but also historical ones and this - quite independently of our position as responsible citizens - should be of concern to writers. There was an outcry, for example, at New Year when only 58 documents, none of them controversial, were released under the Twenty Year Rule compared to over 500 last year.
Documents are the lifeblood of historians — they provide the bricks to build our picture of the past — and making government records publicly available is an essential part of any democracy. As both citizens and writers, we should be very concerned about this suppression of our past. How can history be written accurately without access to all the documents?
