Secrecy office

Linking the cabinet minutes and the Damian Green case is the involvement of the Cabinet Office, who obviously see it as their main job to stop information that will damage the government getting into the public domain.

Meanwhile, Douglas Carswell MP blames Commons speaker Michael Martin for allowing Green's office to be searched and says he will call for him to go.

More on the minutes

I've got a piece on Comment is Free suggesting that the minutes of the cabinet meeting held as Lord Goldsmith was making up his mind might be just as interesting. Did Blair string the cabinet along?

Daft and stupid

I'm pretty gobsmacked by the arrest of Damian Green for using leaked information. On Comment is Free, David Hencke says that "whistleblowing happens every week and any government that thinks it can stop it is daft and stupid".

What he was actually doing, as any good investigative journalist would know, is obtaining information that the government had suppressed of an extremely embarrassing nature that ministers would rather not see published.

And indeed, journalists are also at risk under the same law.

Astonishing arrogance

Yesterday I read headlines like "BAA to accept air quality watchdog at Heathrow" and wondered if anyone had proposed such a thing. Apparently not. Monopoly airport owner BAA used to be the British Airports Authority and some people think it still is. It seems to think it is still part of government, as do the Department for Transport officials who let it fix their modelling on noise and pollution at Heathrow.

What an astonishing piece of spin, to propose a dodge that it thinks will get Heathrow expansion through in spite of the environmental issues. If the government did choose to take this route, whether BAA accepted it or not would be irrelevant.

Greenpeace says that "BAA's arrogance knows no bounds" and I tend to agree.

Along the way

I've been out and about for most of the week and haven't kept up with this blog.

I was at the Environment Agency piece on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, I did this piece for newstatesman.com, pointing out that ministers are still not quite singing from the same hymn sheet on Heathrow and air quality. The most interesting thing was that when Hilary Benn apparently went off-message, the potentially offending words were struck from the record.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I was at the information tribunal to hear the government's appeal against the information commissioner's order to release cabinet minutes around the attorney general's Iraq war advice. It emerged that the minutes may "prove the absence of sufficient discussion".

Oh no he didn't

According to yesterday's Sunday Times,

In a speech tomorrow the government’s own green watchdog will increase pressure on ministers not to approve the expansion [of Heathrow].

[Chris] Smith will tell his agency’s annual conference: “The government has committed itself to rigorous targets to emissions 80% by 2050, which now include reduce CO2 aviation and shipping. It is impossible to see how they would be achieved if the current plans for a third runway go ahead.

I'm at the conference today and Smith said no such thing. He didn't mention Heathrow. Maybe he'll say it tomorrow...

Getting ahead of ourselves

The Guardian says "10,000 jobs to be created by insulating homes" but what is this based on, apart from government spin? The paper clearly has a tip-off of what Alistair Darling will announce in this afternoon;s pre-budget report but who knows how many jobs will be created?

It was always clear that the government would seek to claim that jobs are being protected or created and that they would like to get credit for it. So how naive is this?

Ministers believes the report will be a defining moment for Labour, and that the government will receive credit from voters for acting to stem a looming recession, rather than be blamed for taking state borrowing to record levels.