Government Information

Part of Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 4:06 pm on 13 January 1999.

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Photo of Dr Jack Cunningham Dr Jack Cunningham Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Cabinet Office, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister (Cabinet Office) 4:06, 13 January 1999

I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof: welcomes the Government's commitment to modernising Government; commends the professionalism of the Government Information and Communications Service (GICS) in carrying out the important task of effectively communicating and explaining policies, decisions and actions of the Government of the day; recognises that the Mountfield Report set out the future direction of the GICS and confirmed the long accepted conventions of impartiality and propriety; believes that the model contract for special advisers, which defined, for the first time in a public document, the roles and responsibilities of special advisers, should be welcomed; applauds the Government's intention to publish a draft Freedom of Information Bill as soon as possible; and welcomes the intention of the Select Committee on Public Administration to undertake pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Bill. Let me try to deal quickly with what I will describe as the first part of the entertaining, if rather long drawn-out, speech of the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith). He began by talking about some of the changes that have taken place. I will not accept any criticism of a Government who have come in after 18 years of a previous Administration of an entirely different kind and made changes. When the previous Conservative Administration changed Prime Ministers, they changed personnel. That is in the nature of a change of Government. Of course, changes have been made and there will be more to come because the Government are about changing Britain. I cannot accept the idea that we should have continued exactly as before with the same personnel and the same approach as under the previous Administration.

The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed made much of anonymous comments and quotes. As I have said, he spoke with considerable humour, and, by describing those comments as anonymous, he defined the nature of the problem. The fact that they are anonymous makes it difficult for anyone, however great the will, to do anything about them. When we read in the newspaper, "Friends of Mr. Ashdown", we all know that that means the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown) or his office. We can all read the code. In fact, we read that quite frequently in the newspapers and hear it on the radio and television. The other claim—that the Liberal Democrats are as white as driven snow and that the Labour and Conservative parties are mired in this business of spinning or briefing either against parties or between parties—is something else that I cannot understand.

As has been pointed out, at the last Liberal Democrat conference, we were regaled with a number of candidates who were lining themselves up to replace the right hon. Member for Yeovil. Let us not pretend that this is a problem of only one or two parties and that, somehow, other political parties, important or large or small, are somehow immune to it or have been inoculated against its temptations.

The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed asked me what I intend to do about it. I am inclined to photocopy the Sermon on the Mount and place it on the walls of the offices of all my ministerial colleagues and their advisers, particularly that part which says: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin".