June on openDemocracy was packed with exposés of dodgy practice by Boris Johnson ‘s government, many circling around the ‘Orwellian’ FOI unit our journalists have been investigating for some years. There have also been successful probes into the misuse of non-executive director appointments who are meant to deploy their expertise to scrutinise what the government does; the unusual secrecy surrounding the setting up of a new defence research agency (ARIA); the weakening of an election fraud watchdog; and ministerial preferences for using private email over departmental emails let alone official routes of communication.
Much of the attention has gone quite understandably to the croneyism enabled by this undermining of laws from within. But there is something else that all of these malpractices, large and small, have in common. That is the sheer unwillingness of this government to subject its dominant narrative to any kind of questioning, let alone dissent. The excuse is that democracy, as David Cameron described FOI requests, “furs up the arteries of government”.
Johnson’s Government has previous form on this. We should not forget that ‘Getting Brexit done’ was the winning formula for the 2019 elections, abjuring scrutiny and parliamentary debate and leaving all the difficult decisions to be worked out and fought over afterwards. Before that, there was the fracas in which Johnson tried to prorogue Parliament rather than have an open parliamentary Brexit exchange, and his subsequent declaration of war on the Supreme Court for having the powers to prevent this.
