Barry Gardiner Quotes

The government's instinct is to shroud itself in secrecy - to act like the office of a president instead of as a collective cabinet government held to account by the elected House of Commons.

I promised to run the most open and transparent administration in Britain. That is why, with this brutally honest and unprecedented progress report, I am determined to level with Londoners.

The Transparency Bill is something we should all support - practical steps in promoting an open and accountable democracy.

Ever since I arrived in Washington in April 2009, I have been fighting for more transparency and accountability in government.

I will run an open government that speaks with honesty, seeks opinion, listens to its citizens.

Accountability and democratic choice, I deeply believe, are guaranteed by rigorous scrutiny only.

We need to keep pressure on our own governments to force more and more transparency.

Any spending should be debated openly on the floor of the House and voted on in open session, with the American people having a chance to watch and listen.

I have been instructed by cabinet and caucus members at our last secret meeting that we need more openness in government, but, like, not too much.

The overarching purpose of access to information legislation … is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry.

We are world leaders in open and transparent government.

The only way we are held accountable is if people know what government is doing.

Right to Information is a small concrete step in making our polity more democratic.

We are trying to make politics more open. It became a Ukrainian tradition to make decisions behind closed doors.

I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates.

Thank God for our form of government. The media won't let there be any cover-up.

And one of the things I've tried to do in my first months in office is to give more Georgians - reporters and members of the general public alike - a closer look at how their government works.

If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that's a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that's a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public.

The politics of the Cape Town Metro, which allows an executive Mayoral committee to make secret decisions which affect you, behind closed doors, is wrong!

People feel that they're being required to meet all sorts of regulations and rules and requirements in their areas of work and MPs are not imposing those sort of restrictions on themselves.

Obama has already rejected the bright sunlight of public knowledge, which is democracy's great disinfectant and cure.

I think the good old British democracy should keep scrutinising and pressing to get the truth out.

Remarkably, governments are beginning to embrace the idea that nothing enhances democracy more than giving voice and information to everybody in the country. Why not open their books if they have nothing to hide?

The movement towards radical transparency and accountability has been gaining steam for several decades.

Oppositions are not there to get legislation through. Oppositions are there to hold the government to account.