The revelation today that DBERR officials supplied police intelligence data to the German energy company E.ON executives in order to thwart environmental protestors over Kingsnorth lays bare several truths about the nature of the State and the current regime. The idea that the civil service impartially holds the ring between conflicting forces in support of the public interest is blown away for the fanciful shibboleth it always was. It clarifies the mindset of the government that business-as-usual should routinely trump climate change concerns, even to the point of neutralising them altogether. It exposes the government machine as little more than an adjunct of business, using the State’s intelligence data to advance a highly controversial commercial interest. And it reveals the development of a highly authoritarian streak, which came through strongly in the policing of the G20 protests, that demonstrations are somehow illegitimate.

Nor is civil service partisanship in favour of the Kingsnorth carbon factory a unique discovery. Exactly the same collusion was revealed a year ago between Department of Transport officials and BAA over trying to force through the Heathrow third runway in the teeth of the climate change evidence. Freedom of Information applications actually revealed that DT had even gone so far as to give BAA full access to the environmental data so that they could re-engineer the information (e.g. by excluding incoming flights from the calculations) in order to produce the ‘right’ result and remove the environmental block by artifice.
This conspiracy against the public interest needs to be stamped on hard. The civil service code of conduct should be sharpened to make clear beyond any doubt that all such practices are totally unacceptable, and any official found indulging in them should be sacked. Where such activities are brought to light, they should be dealt with forcibly by civil service managers, not swept under the carpet as regularly occurs now. And the convenient protocol, that when official misdemeanours hit the fan the minister defends his department and takes the blame, should be dispensed with as the constitutional fancy it is. Tthe officials in question should be liable to be called before the appropriate Select Committee to justify their actions, and if they cannot, to be publicly hammered, named and shamed, and where necessary called to resign.

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