Privacy

There has been much coverage of the seemingly slobby and sloppy behaviour of some of our leaders during the COVID years, this coming to light in the course of the monster inquiry into same. And while it all looks a bit bad, I did have some other thoughts.

I might start by saying that in my days as a middling sort of civil servant, I never encountered the expletive laden shouting which has turned up here, although I do remember a salesman once explaining that he liked selling to the civil service because civil servants were courteous and polite and did not resort to either shouting or expletives - which would be reasonably common out in the private sector.

I dare say it does go on, but whether or not, my point today is rather different. When I was young, one had meetings and if it was a sufficiently important meeting, the chairman and the secretary cooked up a minute of the meeting for the record. A minute which set down what had been said and what had been decided, with the chairman exercising some discretion about both - taking care that he did go so far astray as to run into trouble at the next meeting, when people would be invited to agree to his minute. A minute which would then be carefully filed and which would be the record should anyone want to know what happened at some point in the future. A manilla file containing papers, somewhere down in the basement. Not some bits and bytes floating about in Amazon Cloud Services, possibly in Minnesota. 

And in so far as they mattered, conversations in the margins, telephone calls and other stuff of that sort would all have been blandly, smoothly and probably anonymously rolled into that minute. Any bad temper, bad manners or anything else which reflected badly on the process would have vanished from sight.

All of which I believe to be true in spades when it comes to delicate negotiations, perhaps between parties who disagree about a great deal. For example, the sort of negotiations that diplomats or Treasury officials might get involved in. Deciding exactly how much money the Department of Sealing Wax should be allocated for developing a new eco-friendly brand of sealing wax can generate much sound and fury, sound and fury which is best brushed under the carpet once agreement has been reached. 'There were full and frank discussions' covers quite enough ground.

Whereas now, with the profusion of various forms of electronic media, all busily recording everything that goes on in copious and tedious detail, the record has expanded correspondingly. Looking at the record after the event has expanded enormously, for the greater good of the lawyers who are often hired to do such work, if not for the greater good of the rest of us.

With the bigger down side being that it is going to get very hard to do business if every last cough and scrape of a chair is going to be recorded for posterity. One needs a bit of privacy to get business done. A principle that, as I recall, is firmly built into the Freedom of Information Act, with discussions of policy being exempt.

Perhaps the Tories should hire one of their expensive friends from PWC to write a report about how better order might be brought into the public record. About how conducting business, even public business, potentially if not essentially, in public, is not really a runner.

PS 1: the salesman mentioned above did not go on to explain that the civil service was a soft sell. Which, even if there were truth in that, was countered by the notoriously high costs of sale to the civil service, with their fondness for elaborate procedures, designed, in part, to extract value for money without recourse to shouting or expletives. And in another part, to protect the public purse from abuse, backhanders and worse.

PS 2: one might reflect that while we (in the West anyway) are all for drilling deep into the doings of governments, drilling deep into the doings of people is regarded as very wrong - although most of us tend to turn a blind eye to the amount of information about us held by the likes of Google and Meta. On which I read only yesterday that some psychologists think that my electronic record with people like them, Google and Meta that is, might be a jolly good place to look for early signs of mental disorder. And that without looking at the content, just the logs.

References

Reference 1: https://sluggerotoole.com/. The (Northern Irish) source of the snap above. While a lot of the snaps turned up by Google were from India.