Brendan Ryan (Labour)

This Bill is fundamentally wrong. I have followed the debate in the House or on the monitor in recent weeks and nothing that I have seen on television or read in the newspapers offers evidence of a threat of any kind to the workings of government. I would not wish to be involved in anything that would seriously hinder the efficient work of government. However, the Minister seems to have forgotten that the Government acts on behalf of the people, the phrase is not government of the people but government for the people.

On many occasions the Minister has talked as if this Bill is regulating a local licensed vintners association. He is spending other people's money and is very good at telling us this. Now he tells us that the Bill will make it easier for him and his colleagues in the Government to spend other people's money and to do things on their behalf by not letting them know what is going on. There is no logic to this.

The idea that politicians are afraid to express their opinions is a myth. I do not know whether it is the Catholic Church or what has infected people's thinking but the idea that intelligent dissent in any way weakens an organisation is manifest nonsense. Intelligent dissent revitalises and energises an organisation and embarrassment will arise only from the recording of differing views when those views are not intelligent. Most of the people whom I have met who are connected with government are intelligent. I am certain that all civil servants in senior positions are intelligent. Thus the issue of unintelligent dissent does not arise and the argument for carrying the Bill forward is palpable nonsense.

The argument is really about convenience and control. The convenience is that the Government would rather not have to think about individual matters. More fundamentally, the final say does not rest with it but, in most cases, with the Information Commissioner. This involves the withdrawal of that small but vital degree of independent evaluation of whether the Government is acting in the way that it claims to be acting.

The Bill is a short-term remedy because when the Government loses the next general election, as I am certain it will, one of the first things that will happen is that the provisions of the Bill will be revised.