The British government has an unusually strong penchant for secrecy, part of a culture of superiority among those born to rule. It becomes especially clear in the release of government papers via the ‘thirty-year rule’, so often countered by the needs of national security. This week we see another example: the Daily Maverick reports that British dealings with Saudi Arabia back in the 1990s have been withheld from public scrutiny. The strong suspicion is that this links to more recent and controversial arms sales relating to the war in Yemen.
Even stronger state control may well follow the recent general election, making it much more important that high-quality investigative journalism survives and thrives. openDemocracy is already a major player in this regard, perhaps one of the reasons that The Sun included it in its short-lived pre-election ‘revelation’ of “an extraordinary network of hard-left extremists pieced together by former British intelligence officers” that had Jeremy Corbyn at its centre.
More seriously, the election result has given us a Conservative Party in Westminster with two distinctive features: it has moved decidedly to the right, even further than it did in the Thatcher era; and it has an eighty-seat overall majority, enabling further moves in a neoliberal direction once the annoyances of Brexit are out of the way.
