Holes in Our Island Story

Academics at those hotbeds of left revisionism, Oxford and Cambridge, are considering legal action against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Despite three and a half years of open government, free speech and rolling back the state, the Ministry of Wogs, Frogs and Huns is hoarding over a million files, some of which date back to the 1840s. Possibly the Government fears embarrassment over the Irish famine, the Anglo-Sikh wars or the extinction of the Great Auk; nevertheless, the FCO's continued concealment of the files is illegal even by the rigorously undemanding standards of British democracy. In fact, the thirty-year limit for declassification is being gradually relaxed into a twenty-year limit; fortunately, the FCO has the perfect excuse for failing to meet its legal obligations under the new rule, namely that it is far too busy dealing with the backlog from its failure to meet its legal obligations under the previous rule.