There was a bit of a fuss last week when the government, it was revealed, stopped the publication of NHS budget data – expected to be shockingly bad news – because Whitehall is in ‘electoral purdah‘.
Now, as I recall, the purdah rules are really there to stop government putting out lots of good news during an election campaign and keeping the bad news until later – but it isn’t supposed to be a way of hiding the truth.
It’s up to individual government departments to interpret the rules, apparently, and so Defra released some poor news on farmland birds – maybe because they knew that no-one would care. Or maybe because they knew they could rely on the Daily Fail to find some pro-government news anyway – but see the Independent. And maybe because the people who would care most, wildlife charities like RSPB and BTO have themselves to be even more careful about what they say in election campaigns so as not to appear party political. So it would be difficult for the RSPB, for example, to say that the government wasn’t doing a very good job on nature conservation at this particular time (though the RSPB rarely says anything remotely so true and interesting about the government).
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