Not Behind Closed Doors: Historians and Coalition Governments
On
Saturday 28 March on Channel 4 aired a play, Coalition, written by James Graham, about how the 2010 Government
was formed in May of that year.
While
I wouldn’t go quite as far as Adam Ramsay
(www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/adam-ramsay/newspapers-are-preparing-for-coup-and-labour-is-doing-nothing-to-stop-them
) in suggesting that the Tory media has been prepared for a May ‘coup’ where
Cameron is installed in No.10 one way or another even if Labour has more seats,
statements such as that by Danny Alexander that whether there is another
Tory-LibDem Coalition is in the hands of electors do need to be questioned.
Coalition is not an option either on the ballot paper or something any party is
campaigning for.
It’s
too soon for historians to form a judgement on the impact of the last five
years of Government, not least because it will still be several decades yet
before a range of official papers is available. Recent years have seen a range
of measures around data protection and freedom of information that have
provided some kind of framework on how information is held about people, what
is held and how people can access this. As Graham underlined in an article
about his play in the London Evening
Standard (23 March) very little is ever likely to be officially known
about the five days of discussions in May 2010 that led to the Tory-LibDem
Coalition.
Graham
writes ‘what happened in those rooms was not recorded. No minutes were taken.
The civil servants were sent out of the room’. He goes on ‘if we ever want a
truly accurate record of what happened, it’s not the official archive that will
do it, we’ll need to be rounding up BlackBerries’.
Historians
rely on archives for much primary research, but of course they are not the only
source. Participants in the 2010 talks have written accounts of them and some
have clearly talked to Graham as he was writing
the
play. Official records are usually a note of key points and
decisions rather than blow by blow accounts but even so their absence removes
an important part of the research framework for a modern political historian
seeking to establish the realities of political power in early twenty-first
century Britain
The disdain for keeping official records has been
underlined since by stories that Ministers such as Michael Gove used private
e-mail addresses for official exchanges precisely to
avoid these being captured as part of the record. Of course
one can overplay the importance of this. In the days before e-mail that same
exchange might have been had face to face (with no witnesses) or perhaps over
the telephone where it was possibly less likely to be captured. One might ask
why Governments ever kept records. It was certainly not so that future
generations of socialist historians could find out what they had been up to!
The
answer is that the ruling class relies not just on the memory of individual
figures but on a bureaucratic structure that keeps records of events and
decisions. So, for example, if the issue of a Coalition does arise again in
May, Civil Servants should have been able to check back for the framework of
how this was done in 2010.
The
experience of 2010 does suggest that for the purposes of historical research
and so that our successors can get to find out what went on in Government,
there does need to be some further measure
to ensure appropriate records are kept. Perhaps there needs to be an official
Government history department, overseen by elected MPs, specifically
charged with making sure that a proper record is kept of all meetings and
events.
It
sounds tedious but aside from its historical value, it is also about democratic
transparency and accountability. In an open society the process of Government
should not be going on behind closed doors.
Keith
Flett
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