The Brown Envelope v Freedom of Information

In the on - going debate over the implications of the exposure of the deep seated corruption at News International a number of commentators from odious dirt-diggers used to paying to get their prurient and irrelevant stories for the tabloids to the noted journalist Andrew Gilligan who investigated the death of David Kelly over the Iraq dossier affair are piping up in defence of the practice of paying sources of information.

Its the brown envelope full of cash, no questions asked, out of sight, off the record way of doing things that clearly exists within parts of the journalist and police professions. This is yet a further example of how ingrained in this culture a corrupt, secret and essentially obscure way of operating has become. The issue of MP’s expenses was sighted in Gilligan’s blog of 8 July 20011 published in the Daily Telegraph, although curiously I cannot find it today. Even in this very rare instance where it could be said to be in the public good that the information was released it was still gained by a corrupt and probably illegal method as in the widely vilified phone hacking routinely used by News International.

He stated that in order to get the information about the expenses details it was necessary for the Daily Telegraph to pay an undisclosed sum to an individual, unnamed, and that this was justifiable because the expenses were proven to be being claimed illegally in some MP’s cases. What this completely fails to acknowledge is that there is now a Freedom of Information Act and it was using this that one Heather Brooke, with the support of The Guardian, had spent five years attempting to get this information and effectively made it an issue : why was it not released ? Paying someone a large wedge of cash should not be a ' necessary evil ' to get to the facts about how our elected representatives are operating.

Surely the fact that it was necessary for a newspaper with access to large sums of cash to gift someone a brown envelope full of same rather than this information being supplied to an inquiring party under the Freedom of Information Act is another strong reason to put an absolute stop to this culture of secrecy and subterfuge not a reason to maintain the status quo ?

It is surely now necessary to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act to make it unnecessary for the buying of information not use the fact that in this shameful case of the illegal MP’s expenses claims not being disclosed until a brown envelope had changed hands to justify this practice ? Its an old cliché but two wrongs do not make a right and corruption is corruption whether in politics or in journalism.