There was the FoI request asking Glasgow City Council to detail the cost of its many meetings across departments where one particularly resourceful reporter managed to forensically extrapolate a headline, proclaiming: “Council spent £6,000 on chocolate biscuits as families forced to foodbanks.” Genius.
For local authorities and recalcitrant civil servants, however, it’s a hindrance. While they reject attempts to strengthen the legislation to increase transparency as costly and unworkable, there is growing concern among journalists and researchers that our FoI system is increasingly being frustrated by under-resourcing and deliberate non-compliance by councils and government departments.
Yet it was only through Niall Christie’s determined efforts using FoI that TFN was able to exclusively reveal, ahead of all the leading news outlets, that Edinburgh Council had broken homelessness legislation hundreds of times. TFN discovered that homeless people and their families were being routinely forced into unsuitable temporary accommodation during large scale events in the city – such as Taylor Swift and the summer festivals – underlining the capital’s decades of underinvestment in affordable social housing. More power to FoI, we say.
The piece heads our coverage of this month’s Challenge Poverty Week, and our feature on pages 12-15 questions whether the Scottish Government is managing to grasp the nettle when it comes to poverty solutions. This follows a recent report claiming ministers don’t actually know what policies are working, have no evidence-based data on impact or outcomes and are therefore creating a strategy blind to the facts.
This, they say, could well be a big part of why successive administrations have failed to demonstrably tackle the growing problems associated to poverty across the country. We give the big anti-poverty groups their say on this.
Intertwined with this is Black History Month, a celebration of black people, their culture and their contribution to Scotland. Our good friends at media co-op have, as ever, produced an outstandingly thought-provoking piece of work with a film on the Robertson’s golly – a character with stereotypically crude features which adorned jam jars before it became a symbol of racism and oppression.
Born in Boston in 1910, golly, as he was then known, was a stranger to controversy until the 1980s when the doll was condemned as a racist symbol. After much criticism and prolonged campaigns to expose the racist history of the image, Robertson’s finally dropped the golly from its packaging in 2001. And not before time.
