Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Holding power to account has played a big role in your career as a journalist.
Most people have a sense of justice. They don’t like to see people with power abusing that power. It happens to be the focus of my career, but that is largely because I’m a journalist and holding power to account is what journalists are meant to do.
Your book Your Right to Know is about the Freedom of Information Act that came into force in the UK in 2005. How did the act change your career?
It started with some civic activism I was doing in my neighbourhood in east London. I wanted to know fairly basic things about where I lived – how many policemen were on duty at any one time, for example, because there were some incidents when I phoned the police and they never showed up. There were other mundane things, like why litter wasn’t picked up. Even there I couldn’t get answers. I kept coming across an awful attitude of obstruction whereby the council didn’t want to give the public any information. I’d been a journalist in America and I was used to getting quite a lot of information from local government. The more I looked into Britain, the more I discovered a culture where the public didn’t have any rights to official information.
Then I found out that the Freedom of Information Act was coming into force in 2005. I had an idea of writing a book that would serve as a guide for citizens in Britain on how to use this new law and start asking challenging questions of public bodies.
You were born in the States and lived there for quite some time – do you think that public bodies in the US act in a similar way to the UK?
It is very different, particularly in local government which is how most of us experience government. When I lived and worked in America, most public officials understood they were working for the public and that their livelihood depended on the citizens. When I was a crime reporter in South Carolina, the amount of information I was able to access – in a supposedly backwater state – was leagues ahead of what the public can access today even in a major British city like London.
Why do you think there is such a difference in attitude?
In Britain there is still an attitude almost of feudalism – that the common person can’t be trusted with information. Maybe it’s a holdover from the class system, but there is a sense that the people at the top know what is best for the rest. We’re also dealing with an ancient bureaucracy. The civil service has been in existence for many hundreds of years, so the people working there see it less as public service and more as their own fiefdom. They don’t want to share information with the public. Information is power and many people see the sharing of information as the diminishment of their power, so they refuse to disclose.
Let’s move onto your books. Your first choice is George Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm.
It was a toss-up between Animal Farm and 1984. I picked Animal Farm because it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. As one moves up the ladder and accrues power, the tendency is to forget principles – instead the ends come to justify the means. Once principles are cast aside, however, it is a short way towards becoming exactly the thing one fought against. What you see in Animal Farm is an imaginative depiction of exactly how this happens.
There are two main characters – the pigs Napoleon and Snowball – and they lead an animal-liberation revolution on the farm: “Two legs bad, four legs good”. They write a declaration of rights on a wall and the main tenet is equality, but soon a power struggle develops and Napoleon ditches these principles to focus on concentrating power in himself. He does so primarily through the manipulation and control of information. By the end of the story, the pigs are no better than the humans they deposed.
I have seen this in politics quite often. In my latest book I looked at Wikileaks, and the dynamics of that organisation offered a living example of this book. It was bizarre to see how Julian Assange, a supposed campaigner for truth, manipulated information to build up a cult of personality around himself – and also to see how many people fell for it. It seems a lot of us are looking for a saviour, someone who will do the hard work of making society just. We want to outsource the hard graft of democracy and then we wonder why that person fails to live up to our expectations. It’s because they are fallible human beings, as everyone is.
The main problem is they start to believe their own hype. If you look at any dictator, most started out from a position of powerlessness. They desperately crave power, but even when they have it they can’t shake that internal feeling of powerlessness, which is why they covet more power and will do whatever it takes to keep it. It is that kind of dynamic which makes power so seductive and dangerous.
How can we hold people like that to account?
The main point is that power – when concentrated – is dangerous, and the only way to counter that danger is to build into a political system a series of checks and balances that are constantly monitored. For that monitoring to be effective, there need to be robust laws on freedom of speech and of information.
Heather Brooke is a journalist and freedom of information campaigner. Born in America, she has lived in the UK since the late 1990s and is best known for helping to expose the 2009 UK parliamentary expenses scandal. Brooke is a visiting professor at City University’s Department of Journalism in London. She is the author of three books, most recently The Revolution Will Be Digitalised
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