What lies within?

Ok my political anorak chums, here's a question to get the synapses charged on a driech monday morning. 

Name the Castle Douglas born politician who produced the White Paper on Freedom of Information, which led to the Freedom of Information Act 2000?

The very same Act which Dominic Grieve the Attorney General, has thwarted by vetoing a request for the disclosure of minutes from the Cabinet Committee on Devolution to Scotland, Wales and the English Region.

It's a tricky one isn't it? To be honest I'd never heard of this chap, despite the fact that he was a regular front bench spokesperson for Labour during the 18 years of Tory government. At various times he held portfolios in Agriculture Food & Fisheries, Defence, Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs and was even Shadow defence Secretary 1992-97, a period which included wars in Rwanda, Croatia, Slovenia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Georgia et al.

Now I'm normally a clued up chap on these sort of global manifestations of unpleasantness, but I racked my brains and I have absolutely no recollection of Labour's then shadow defence secretary pouring forth with an opinion during this period. His name is David Clark, and since 2001 he's been known as Baron Clark of Windermere. Ring any bells? Nope me neither.

His wiki page is a fascinating insight into a life in Labour. I don't know who wrote it, but I suspect old scores are being settled in a quiet little corner of the internet. I was unaware, for example, that David Clark MP was forced to apologise to the commons after meeting with Bosnian war criminal Radovan Karadžić in 1993 and not declaring it in the Register of Members Interests.

I was also unaware that when Labour were returned to power, Blair felt obliged, due to his long but mostly anonymous service, to give him a ministerial prize as a sort of New Labour gold watch, he was given the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This is at best a one day a week job, where the bulk of the work is done by an actual deputy, thus freeing up the MP to loaf around pretending to be a politician. The incumbent Chancellor is one Nick Clegg MP.

I did not know that David Clark, also stood for election to Speaker of the House of Commons and was defeated by the only Speaker ever to resign his post in an expenses ridden scandal, one Michael Martin, now Baron Martin of salubrious Springburn.

By far the most interesting thing I did not know about David Clark, is that his South Shields seat was one of the safest Labour seats in the UK. It was much coveted by those bright young things in the New Labour Party, particularly the then head of the Number 10 Policy Unit, one David Miliband, who had absolutely no connection to the constituency, other than the attraction that they weigh the Labour vote there rather than count it. Clark's constituency branch caught wind of this and fought his reselection in 2001, for fear of Clark rolling over on his belly for a seat in the House of Lords, thus allowing the National Executive Committee to parachute in their own candidate, who would have little interest in the actual constituency.

Clark, fought these unsubstantiated claims, declared his willingness to fight for his constituents for a full term, garnered the support from local trade union barons, won the day and immediately rolled over to allow the NEC to err parachute in David Miliband and for himself to undergo that transformational role and ascend from trade unionist to a comfy green seat in the House of Lords.

What a fascinating life and great insight to the merits of public life. Keep your head down, don't rock the boat and one day you'll be clad in ermine. Obviously to claim a bit of gravitas for posterity, Clark claimed he was shunted from his role writing the White Paper on Freedom of Information, because he shunned the London cocktail circuit for the heady delights of South Shields.

His legacy, however, remains what eventually became the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

From this Act we now know some of these salacious details that were never intended for public consumption:

» The Thatcher Government concocted a plan to search for the Loch Ness monster using a team of dolphins

» Foreign diplomats – who have diplomatic immunity – were accused of rapes, sexual assaults, child abuse and murders while working in Britain

» Ted Heath was once offered concert work by Idi Amin of Uganda. The eccentric dictator made his offer in a 1977 telegram

» Weapons used by paratroopers on Bloody Sunday have ended up in the hands of the army in Sierra Leone, paramilitary police in Beirut and even in an Arkansas gun shop

» A clandestine British torture programme existed in postwar Germany, “reminiscent of the concentration camps”

» Britain helped Israel to obtain its nuclear bomb 40 years ago, by selling it 20 tonnes of heavy water

» Then Prime Minister Blair took trips costing more than £1.2m over four years from 2002 on RAF jets allocated to the Royal Family and government VIPs, including those for holidays abroad

» Britain has extradited four times as many people to the US as have been sent in return since the introduction of fast-track extradition

» More than 1,000 girls aged 14 and under had abortions in a single year

» 1980s school dinners could be the cause of three young Welsh people’s deaths from the human form of mad cow disease

» The Elgin Marbles were damaged by two schoolboys fighting in the British Museum in 1961. One of the boys fell and knocked off part of a centaur's leg

All items at once variously surreal; amusing, terrifying, to be expected and quite concerning. Yet, Dominic Grieve has decided that the contents of the cabinet meeting on devolution are so serious that they are not to be open to the public.

What outrageous slurs about Scotland, Scottish politicians and Scotland’s destiny could these minutes contain? 

The odd thing in this whole mess, other than the fact that it's been little reported in the Scottish media, apart from of all people, the Hootsman, is that the original FOI was done by one of those UKIP chappies. Here's his correspondence and rather unique response to the refusal to release the minutes.

Where are the pro-Independence thinkers and doers who have the legal ability and tenacity to set about FOI cases with the same relish that the ignoble Baron Foulkes used to when he was being subsidised by the Scottish Parliament? Is there not one SNP intern, staffer or assistant willing to roll their sleeves up and get stuck into this veil of secrecy? 

This veto has only been used twice in the past, once on questions regarding the Iraq War, the other on questions of Devolution. Iraq, you can understand from the perspective of 'national security', but to refuse publication on matters pertaining to Devolution, not once, but twice...that's something worth prising open.