I had given up. I'd been trying to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from meetings between UK officials and foreign governments who were negotiating post-Brexit trade deals, as part of my work with Global Justice Now.
The Department of International Trade had released a wedge of papers after years of wrangling. But each document had been redacted to within an inch of its life. The department claimed any transparency would kill the talks dead. The Information Commissioner, hiring the country's best Freedom of Information lawyers, said she knew almost nothing about trade talks, nor Freedom of Information regimes overseas, so could not rule whether release of the documents was in the public interest.
It seemed hopeless. It had been two years and all I had was documents so redacted they might have been shredded. This was not exceptional. The Tory government is so contemptuous of Freedom of Information that it has been rendered all but obsolete. I could no longer, in good conscience, advise charities to spend time and money filing requests. So I shut down my company - the Request Initiative - and moved on.
