Redaction – Word of the Day

Now I have to admit that I love learning new words and this mouse has been accused of being more than a little verbose. So I am introducing a new word for today; Redaction. As I know that many of my readers (that's a human and two cats) are not in Britain and the British public has had to learn this new word today. As for its meaning... well it means censorship. Or to be even more precise the censorship of the receipts submitted by our esteemed honourable elected citizens who make up our parliament.

As even my overseas reader will know, there has been a bit of controversy here in the UK as our MPs have been making expenses claims for Duck Houses, or cleaning out their Moats as legitimate additional costs to be our representatives. As revealed by a newspaper who “obtained” copies of these receipts in their non redacted form.

The revelations the newspaper discovered has angered the electorate and created a political storm that I have never seen before, and I am older than god! While there are many trivial items that MPs have claimed for, that have made them look petty and foolish, it is the property speculation at the tax payers expense and the tax evasion that really has caused the most outrage.

Yet the Newspaper was criticised by some as the MPs were publishing (as of Thursday) their expenses anyway. Part of this criticism centred on the fact that some of these documents contain bank account details and other personal data. While I agree that this sort of personal data should be protected, these documents in their redacted form would never have disclosed any of the details that has caused the storm that has sunk about one hundred MPs.

Here in Britain there is a distaste when we see other governments use censorship, even though the British state has always done this. Even so censorship creates the feeling that governments have something to hide.

Even now with all the outcry still ringing in our MPs ears, our political leaders still don't understand what open and honest government is about. We the people are being treated like fools. So far MPs have repaid half a million pounds in wrongly claimed expenses. While this corruption is no where near the scale of what happens in other nations, it is still corruption.

In the European elections recently, two members of the racist BNP (British Nationalist Party) were elected, and it is the failure of these mainstream parties that is enabling vile extremists to be elected. The two main parties, Labour and Conservative, appear to be self serving at the best of times, and with the MPs misappropriating taxpayers money in the way they have, this attempt to keep the details of the thefts and frauds hidden via redaction only aids the extremists.

If this was not a good enough attempt to shoot themselves in the foot, this week our esteemed leader, Gordon Brown, announces that finally there will be an enquiry into the Iraq war. Except that it will be held in private. So it looks like there will be redaction on the deliberately misleading intelligence, and the legal opinion that said the war was not lawful.

All we need now is an Iranian style General Election and we really will have democracy here in Britain. Or has that been redacted too?