It takes a special kind of incompetence for a government to lose a vote for the chair of one of parliament’s most important committees when they have handpicked a majority of its members. Boris Johnson managed this feat on Wednesday, when maverick Julian Lewis was elected chair of the intelligence and security committee over serial bumbler Chris Grayling.
The consequences for Johnson are immediate, as the committee has now voted to release the report into Russian interference in British politics, a report which is believed to include details of the links between the Conservative party and Russian oligarch wealth. It is a scandal that Johnson succeeded in suppressing this report for so long.
To divert attention, the government spin machine went into overdrive, insinuating that it was former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who had colluded with the Russians during last year’s election, by campaigning against the government’s secret trade talks with the US. The government, Donald Trump-style, is deflecting from its own ties to foreign money and its disgraceful censorship by throwing around fake news.
The facts are very different. More than two years ago, my organisation, Global Justice Now, asked the government to give us details of the trade talks they were holding with more than a dozen countries, including the US. It was basic stuff – when the meetings took place, who attended the meetings, agendas and notes. “No,” came back the official freedom of information reply, “all such information is confidential.”
We appealed, and were told we’d been treated a little unfairly. We could see some of the papers we’d asked for. In anticipation, we opened the reams of documents we’d been sent, only to be disappointed. The papers were almost entirely redacted – black pen leaving not much more than page numbers visible (in one case, redacting even that).
A few months later, Corbyn held up the redacted papers in a 2019 election debate. His point was that if trade deals with countries like the US were so central to the future of Britain, the public had an absolute right to know what was being agreed in our name.
A few days after the debate, we were sent a link to a Reddit page, where we found leaks of the very papers we’d been given in blacked-out form. The leaks showed that our concerns were well founded, and that negotiators were indeed discussing policies that could affect our food standards, our NHS, and our ability to deal with the climate crisis. Corbyn then held a press conference to bring the papers to attention and highlight the serious dangers of a US trade deal under a future Johnson government.
We have no idea who leaked the documents. My suspicion is it was an official disgruntled with the way the government was being clearly bullied by the Trump administration over Brexit, and concerned that we would end up with a devastating trade deal with the US. Certainly that’s what the narrative the leaker posted on Reddit pointed to. Given this information was originally posted well before the election was declared, and sat on Reddit in obscurity for several weeks, generating publicity seems not to have been their strong point.
The government’s strategy this week is clearly to belatedly discredit these papers. They can’t be allowed to get away with this. No one has denied that the content of the trade papers is real. In fact, government ministers accepted this during the election campaign. No one suggested they’d been tampered with. And everything we’ve found out subsequently underlines our concerns about the US trade deal: from our government’s flip-flopping on importing food produced to lower standards, to US statements that levying special taxes on Facebook, Amazon and Google would be virtually impossible under that deal. In fact, we now know that the US trade deal will certainly feature a digital trade chapter, which is highly likely to make it more difficult to regulate the big tech corporations that are having such an impact on our democracy.
What the whole incident really underlines is Johnson’s commitment to secret government. Like the Russia report, the trade papers should have already been in the public domain. Allegations of foreign interference in elections, and trade deals that will change the way our economy and society work, are things we all need to know about. Johnson has shown the depth of his commitment to keeping such information from us – and deliberately spreading disinformation when there’s any attempt to expose the facts to the light of day.
The past week has also shown that this approach might be too much for some of his own backbenchers. The release of the Russia report at long last is very welcome. So too are backbench Conservative amendments to the trade bill, which will be debated next week. Johnson has refused to give parliament any meaningful powers over trade policy, making ours one of the most secretive and unaccountable trade systems. This includes denying MPs the right to see any trade negotiating papers, which they need to if they’re to scrutinise the executive. Unhappy Tory MPs, worried about the government breaking manifesto promises on food standards, have threatened to change that next week.
In trying to tie together the Russia report with the US trade documents, the government hoped to distract and confuse. But there is a link, in that both documents show a deeply paranoid government, committed to secrecy, and prepared to go a long way to prevent the transparency and debate that democracy requires to thrive. We mustn’t allow them to get away with it.
• Nick Dearden is director of Global Justice Now (formerly World Development Movement)
