Freedom of what information?

I always felt that the Freedom of Information act was going to be a bit of a damp squib because of all the exemptions it contained. Now it appears that the government is going to take a belt and braces approach to the whole issue by deleting as much of the information as possible.

The Cabinet Office has put up a hapless spokesman to try to defend this decision.

"Paying to store outdated records which are no longer any use wastes taxpayers' money," she said.

Clearly the Cabinet Office think we are all stupid. This is electronic information. It is incredibly cheap to store it. Hell, we could have a whip round in the UK blogosphere and in a couple of days have enough servers to store it all! This is just another example of government and civil service working for their own benefit rather than the public's.

As they say on Samizdata: "The state is not your friend"