Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
1
1
1
2
1
1
accessible to most people prepared to make a little effort. To be sure, users need
an Internet connection, and it remains the case that the poorer members of
society do not have this, but there are terminals in public libraries for those
lacking the technology and expertise there to help if citizens wish to find out more
about how we live. Hard-copy prices have soared, but electronic availability of
government statistical (and more) information has been one of the unsung
success stories of recent years.
While marketisation of government information services has given rise to
concern, it is the second trend – the propensity for government to intervene in
ways that threaten the integrity of the data – that has caused most upset in recent
years. This development may be conceived as an assault on the public sphere by
motivated sections that manipulate and even manufacture distorted information
to further their own ends. As such, statistics are now seen not as disinterested
information, but as a tool of government policy. A more profound blow to the
public sphere is hard to envisage.
In Cooking the Books (Lawson, 1989), it was alleged that the Thatcher governments
throughout the 1980s intervened in government information services in
ways that led to their corruption. The Channel 4 documentary discerned three
stages of the production of statistics, during each of which there was political
manipulation. These were the stages of commissioning, compilation and publication.
Journalist Melanie Phillips, the most assiduous chronicler of these – and
there are a host of examples – interventions, concluded then that ‘sensitive statistical
information is now manipulated and abused almost as a matter of routine’
(Phillips, 1990). The criticism of government interference in official information
has continued far beyond the Thatcher years, up to and including the Blair period
since 1997. Thus during 2004–5 there were doubts raised about the veracity of
statistics on immigration, with rumours of unchecked ‘asylum seekers’, guesstimates
of the numbers of illegal immigrants in the UK, and obfuscation about the
estimated number of migrants expected from Poland when it joined the European
Union. Recurrent assertions were made that politicians were covering up the truth
for reasons of expediency.
There is anecdotal evidence of public scepticism about the reliability of official
statistics, and a serious consequence of this suspicion is that government
information across the board comes to be distrusted. Tabloid and populist media
especially have cultivated a knowing distrust of virtually any government information
on the basis of demonstrable instances of political interference. A
consequence is recitation of pseudo-insightful clichés – ‘you can’t trust anything
they say’, ‘there are lies, damned lies, and statistics’ – that serve to dismiss any
attempt to present quantitative evidence, still less to engage with the genuine
difficulties entailed in gathering reliable statistical data, on vital matters such as
income distribution, employment and migration patterns. With this distrust
comes impoverishment of a foundational element of the public sphere and serious
threats to the quality of public debate (Levitas and Guy, 1996). Should the Office
of National Statistics (ONS), the body responsible for statistics in the UK, become
perceived to be an arm of government, then a vital part of democracy itself is
damaged.
189