Opinion
A webcast full of black holes
'Man is God's secret, Power is man's secret, Sex is woman's secret' or so held the Grey Woman of Dun Gortin and the Thin Woman of Inis Magrath; at least according to the Irish writer, James Stephens, who fashioned these timeless characters for his fairy tale 'The Crock of Gold.'
They had, apparently, a love of secrets, believing that 'a secret is a weapon and a friend.' Though there isn't much remarkable in that; most people, men and women, seem to delight in secrets which they retail as fast as possible, presumably on the principle that, unless shared, knowledge becomes lumber in a week.
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Government in particular is addicted to secrecy. This is not perhaps surprising. Since political government is ultimately about power and since political government tends to be a masculine affair, both literally and metaphorically, it is not difficult to find evidence for the truth of the assertion that James Stephens puts into the mouths of the Grey Woman and the Thin Woman. He wrote a century or so ago, though his maxims are as eternal as his writing.
Indeed it is questionable whether you can have government without secrecy. When pressed by his Minister to introduce a policy of 'Open Government' the fictional British civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby almost succumbs to a fit of apoplexy.
"Open Government," he exclaims with ever reddening face, "is a contradiction in terms: either you can be 'open' or you can have 'government,' but not the two at the same time."
Such thinking lay behind the early British objections to opening the proceedings of the Council of Ministers to the press and television cameras. Power would continue to be dispensed secretly, they argued. If the covering stone were lifted from the dark recesses of the Council then the real debate would occur elsewhere, in the corridors perhaps or even in the cloakrooms.
Much the same resistance has been encountered whenever the spotlight has threatened to pierce the dim religious gloom of debating chambers. Many in Britain argued that to let the television cameras into the 'Mother' of Parliaments would bring a swift end to democracy.
If the people were actually to see that far from their representatives packing the Chamber, day after day, night after night, eagerly debating amendments to some obscure statutory instrument on agricultural subsidies, the House was largely empty, why would they continue to vote in elections?
Of course, they were right - though it is not politically correct to say so. Parliament is not held in the same awe and respect as it once was, and nor is government generally; though whether this can entirely be laid at the door of greater openness is moot.
What has not been examined - because it is held to be an axiom that transparency is automatically good - is the cost of general openness; the elaborate public consultations and tendering procedures, the delays and inquiries, the need to document everything, the need to provide a reasoned decision for every action, the desperate need to avoid risk (and therefore blame) and, if possible, to avoid any action at all. The steep rise in public sector consultancy revenues in recent years is a direct consequence.
This downside of openness is rarely explored. But we should keep it in mind. We think that openness will stop corruption, make for better decision-making. In practice corruption and bad governance, continues to be widespread, though there is no evidence that corruption at the EU level is worse than at any other.
Still, we feel that people have a right to know how they are governed and to see how they are being governed. But seeing how they are governed can lead to dissatisfaction; the public's expectations being always greater than can be reasonably fulfilled.
It was against this background that I watched last Tuesday part of the first (web) televised proceedings of the Council of Ministers, the ECOFIN Council to be precise. The Austrians, at last month's European summit, had pressed their colleagues for an agreement and now the Finnish presidency was showing that it intended to ensure that the decision degenerated rapidly into action.
I had expected the broadcast to be routine and dull and it fulfilled my expectations admirably. Indeed how could it be other for much of the process of government, at whatever level, is arcane, it demands a high degree of foreknowledge, is riddled with jargon and is simply uninteresting - even for the participants, yet alone the observers. That is why Ministers hold press conferences, after all.
Writing about a Council of Ministers meeting on 5 October 1987, the diarist Alan Clark, then the British Minister for Trade, wrote: "A totally wasted day at the Council of Ministers. No conclusions, no nothing. I can't remember what we were discussing although the meeting broke up only an hour ago and the Line to Take from the Foreign Office was 'prepared for any eventuality' and some six pages long. The background brief weighed about four kilos.
"Sorghum, I should think. It's always sorghum, sometimes sorghum and maize."
Had he been writing about Tuesday's meeting I strongly suspect he would probably not have changed the flavour of the entry much.
If this had not been the first such televised meeting of the Council there is little reason to suppose that anyone other than a few officials would have therefore paid it much attention. Except, that is, for the bizarre decision - an illustration of an unworkable compromise if ever there was one - to blank out certain parts of the meeting deemed to be private and too controversial for the sensitive ears of press and public.
What no-one seems entirely to have twigged is that immediately you black out a screen, ordinary viewers will be immediately convinced that all manner of corrupt, heathen and morally reprehensible practices are taking place behind it.
That the boring discussions about the lending mandate of the European Investment Bank were only the prelude to secret decisions about a new pan-European income tax and the reintroduction of penal fines for eurocriticism.
People will accept that sensitive security - or even personal - information should be withheld, but otherwise if you are going to open up a meeting, you need to open it up in its entirety.
Otherwise the exercise in transparency will be seen quite literally to be full of black holes. One thing or another, but please, let's not try to be secret and transparent at the same time. Goodness!
The author is editor of EuropaWorld
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author's, not those of EUobserver.