It seems the government and the prime minister to be, have not listened to the public or their concerns despite Gordon Brown and some of his career hopefuls telling us all that their will be more listening, more consultation and more accountable, in fact he said "One of my first acts as prime minister would be to restore power to Parliament in order to build the trust of the British people in our democracy.

Less than forty eight hours later, we witnessed just how much he supports this “new” building of trust by refusing to condemn the career sleazers who voted to a controversial move by MPs to get out of freedom of information laws.

We also noticed how the government “listened” to a two million signature petition on road pricing and completely ignored public concerns on this new stealth tax

But that aside, we then see an opportunist front bench and completely useless sleazer going by the name of Alistair Darling saying he wants even more of the Freedom of information act to be taken away from public view by coming up with a weak and feeble argument that he is concerned that it does not sufficiently protect advice from officials to ministers.

In a letter to the Lord Chancellor he argues that "incremental harm" could be done to policy development.

The Popular Alliance are pleased to reproduce the letter in full.

Dear Charlie,  

As you know we are increasingly concerned that in a number of respects the demands of the Freedom of Information Act are placing good government at risk.

First there is the position of MPs' correspondence under the Act. Disclosure of letters between MPs and Ministers, even if ostensibly innocuous, will inhibit the dialogue between MPs and their constituents and MPs and Ministers. It can't be right that a constituent's affairs could be made public because he asked his MP to write to a Minister. And if we are to live under the constant threat of publication, this will prevent MPs from expressing their views frankly when writing to a Minister. We need urgent advice on what the position is.

Second, I am concerned that the FOI Act, as it appears, prevents us from protecting robustly and across the board advice from officials to Ministers. Here again we should be able to guard more effectively against the incremental harm to the policy development process that must inevitably arise from the disclosure of individually innocuous submissions.

This is the type of information that, I believe, it was never the intention should be made public under an FOI Act. The problems seem to stem from the case by case approach that the Act requires us to take to FOI requests and a discernible trend within the Information Tribunal that decisions on the public interest test have not been falling in the government's favour in key cases. It is open to the government to appeal a decision to the High Court, but this must be on a point of law and is inevitably a costly and time consuming process. There have not yet been any circumstances where departments have felt able to take this approach and we appear to be faced for the future with either conceding to adverse decisions or exercising the Cabinet Minister veto to annul them.

Third, on a point of process, where an FOI applicant sends multiple requests to various Departments on the same subject we need to be confident that there is effective co-ordination between Departments' responses. This is particularly so in cases where the request does not meet a Clearing House trigger and where it is left to Departments to liaise on their own initiative.

For immediate purposes, I would ask that officials, led by yours, conduct a speedy review of these aspects of the FOI.

On MPs' correspondence and advice to Ministers, we need to examine whether a more robust approach is possible to applying FOI exemptions and the scope for a more generic approach to guard against incremental harm from individual disclosures.

On coordination between Departments, it would be helpful if officials could examine interdepartmental arrangements for handling FOI requests, taking in the role of the Clearing House, to ensure a consistent and rigorous approach to cross cutting requests. I expect this would entail clear instructions across Whitehall from your Department.

Beyond that, we will need to watch Information Tribunal case law carefully and in due course consider whether change to the legislation is needed to redress an apparent imbalance between the "right to know" and the protection of private space where necessary for good governance.

I am copying this letter to Cabinet Ministers and to Sir Gus O'Donnell.

Alistair Darling.

Now from this letter we can actually see what is going on, the first paragraph says:

As you know we are increasingly concerned that in a number of respects the demands of the Freedom of Information Act are placing good government at risk.

The popular Alliance would like to know who are the “we”, could it be the whole cabinet, Blair perhaps, almost certainly Brown will be involved, we also question his interpretation of “good government”, if it is that good, surely they have nothing to fear, and like all career politicians such “good government” would be allowed to find its way to the media and press to maximise publicity of such a "wonderful" government.

So the only conclusion we can draw from this very important opening paragraph is:..... “They” don’t want “bad government” being given to anyone at all, especially not the public or the press, plus, it would appear there is more bad government than good government when you read the rest of the letter.

We will allow the reader of this blog to determine their own conclusions from this “good government” letter, and all we will say is, “its more of the same” more new labour, and more “good government”.