http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19775763

Bloody right, Jeremy Hunt anyone? Posh and Becks (Cameron and Brooks)?

I do think that if they use a private lines for sending government messages then that should mean that their private personal accounts become public property. If you want to keep your private life private do not blur the boundaries. Keep them separate.

How do you prove they've stuck to that rule without examining their private correspondence? And if you don't make it public, who do you trust to examine it on our behalf?

Civil servants can check that there are no texts to other ministers. If there are no communications that need further reading then why do they need to be read? It does not have to be examined by the press or anyone else. Personally I do not trust the police or press so it has to be the civil service.

The bare fact is the majority of the population do not trust civil servants either. The only way for such a scheme to work is for it to be seen to be working. It requires transparency and the only way to get that is by putting it on the public record.

Now, I'm not actually endorsing the idea that all of a minister's correspondence being examinable but if it's going to be, it needs to be, not some half way house where someone the public has no faith in does it for them. That's going to please next to nobody.

IMO, the solution I'd propose is that all a minister's correspondence is archived and, upon his/her leaving the front bench, the archive is 'unlocked'. That allows for ministers to operate properly but provides a fair disincentive to doing something untoward.

If we do not trust civil servants either then we are in a pickle. Who can we trust to actually do this and who the politicians will allow access to their communications? You cannot have the police do it because there will be a legal problem with convicts or suspected criminals having their communications read by the police. While it might not be a problem for 99% of us, it will be once you find yourself on the wrong side of the law for whatever reason. Civil servants are the only ones who have access and are semi independent.

Yeah.. well there is that..
It's simple - large chunks of the population do not actually trust people in authority. We may not all agree on which ones are untrustworthy but it would be next to impossible for everyone to agree on someone we all trust. You trust the civil service. That's fair enough. But there are numbers of people who don't. Who can site... for example, it was civil servants who went to nice lunches with Vodafone executives then decided six billion pounds worth of taxes weren't actually worth collecting after all.
You can find similar examples of apparently untrustworthy behaviour in pretty much every branch of the state - police, judiciary, civil service, politics... as soon as you invest authority in someone you leave them open to at least accusations of abuse of that authority. The only way to ensure that isn't the case is to give the authority to everyone. If you do that, the authority itself has no value and therefore isn't worth compromising.


That's the point of publication. If everyone has access to the information, nothing can be hidden and you don't need to trust anyone else to decide what you can or cannot see and what is or is not relevant. I think retrospective publication is enough in this regard to act as a deterrent to misdeeds, at least in terms of casual wrongdoing. No overwatch scheme is infallible, so lets have the one that does most good for least effort.