UPDATE George Monbiot has written to me to point out a mistake in the piece below:

I note that in your blog post you say “This is not quite the same as listing his wealth – who knows how many ISAs and the rest he has tucked away, or the value of his house?”

If you read to the bottom of the registry, you will find that those things are in fact listed.

I have replied:

Dear George,

Thanks for reading. I do apologise. I’ll post a correction.

Yours is certainly a hugely impressive personal initiative, but for that reason it surely won’t catch on! How many of your fellow Guardian journalists would be prepared to expose themselves in a similar way.

I’d be interested in your views about how we might extend FOI to any transactions involving transfers of public money to non-government bodies and how that money is then used. That would be an important next step and would smoke out all government procurement contracts, the BBC’s salaries and benefits, DFID’s payments to charities and NGOs, and many other phenomena that would benefit from being a lot more open about what they do with public funds. Huge sums of money are involved here.

The principle here is simple: if you want public money, you have to account for the way you get it and use it. That might open the way to a further step in due course – if you want the legal benefits of being a company (or a fortiori a charity which enjoys even more tax privileges), ‘society’ expects higher levels of transparency in return.

Regards,

Charles

UPDATE 2        George replies:

I would be pleased to see the principle of transparency extended to all NGOs. On the issue of funding, I believe that all donations above £1000 – whether from the public or private sectors – should be listed. Then we’d know on whose behalf they were speaking. See: https://www.monbiot.com/2011/09/12/think-of-a-tank/

* * * * *

George Monbiot, fierce Guardianista, has come up with a novel idea: to reveal all his income, updating as he goes, in the name of ‘transparency’.

This is not quite the same as listing his wealth – who knows how many ISAs and the rest he has tucked away, or the value of his house? (Note: This is not correct – see above.) Still, it’s impressive that he goes so far.

However, he proposes to extend this to ‘the private sector’:

In this column I will make a proposal which sounds, at first, monstrous, but which I hope to persuade you is both reasonable and necessary: that freedom of information laws should be extended to the private sector.

The very idea of a corporation is made possible only by a blurring of the distinction between private and public. Limited liability socialises the risks which would otherwise be carried by a company’s owners and directors, exempting them from the costs of the debts they incur or the disasters they cause. The bail-outs introduced us to an extreme form of this exemption: men like Fred Goodwin and Matt Ridley are left in peace to count their money while everyone else must pay for their mistakes…

Freedom of information is never absolute, nor should it be. Companies should retain the right, as they do in South Africa, to protect material that is of genuine commercial confidentiality; though they should not be allowed to use that as an excuse to withhold everything that might embarrass them. The information commissioner should decide where the line falls, just as he does for public bodies today.

Hmm.

The point is that companies are just another way of describing ‘us’. And insofar as the key business of companies is making money, the way they run their costs (including above all salaries and the decisions they make on procurement) is at the very essence of genuine commercial confidentiality.

‘Government’ despite the best efforts of collectivists and meddlers of all shapes and sizes is fairly manageable in FOI terms and predictably structured. Companies in their myriad operational forms and activities are not (that’s the whole point – to create highly flexible legal space for people to be commercially inventive). So defining what is commercially confidential information is probably theoretically impossible and practically unmanageable.

But he is absolutely right to want to extend FOI to bodies that feed off public funds. So he might start with Oxfam and many other charities that depend hugely on direct government handouts. I myself proposed extending FOI to them myself a while back.

Then there’s the BBC – who doesn’t want to know what top presenters are paid? Imagine the squeals concerning privacy on that one, even though they are effectively spending taxpayers’ money on themselves.

The core logic of FOI is that taxpayers have the right to see how their money is being spent. Companies and businesses surely have a right to confidentiality in a quite different way. Monbiot’s argument to extend FOI to companies rests on a slick but unsatisfactory verbal sleight of hand:

The very idea of a corporation is made possible only by a blurring of the distinction between private and public.

Maybe, but in that sentence the word ‘public’ does not mean publicly funded. And if the real problem is that ailing companies demand bail-outs from the taxpayer, solve that one by not bailing them out.