Chris Grayling, UK Tory MP and leader of the House of Commons: The Freedom of Information act isn't for journalism, it's for "those who want to understand why and how government is taking decisions." If you want to hold your government accountable, you, personally, should do it, without any help from the press. It will make Britain great again.
Perhaps you could use FOIA requests to discover an important, damning fact about your government and then call them up and have a conversation about it. In any event, that'll be all that's left once Grayling's crackdown is complete — but on the plus side, he'll save all that tax money that journalists were costing as they rooted out corruption and waste.
Grayling said: "The irony is that the person who said that he regretted the Freedom of Information Act 2000 most was the former MP Jack Straw, who introduced it.
"He said that he looked back on it as one of the things that he had got wrong. This government are committed to the act, but we want to ensure that it works well and fairly, and cannot be abused or misused.
"It is, on occasion, misused by those who use it as, effectively, a research tool to generate stories for the media, and that is not acceptable. It is a legitimate and important tool for those who want to understand why and how governments make decisions, and this government does not intend to change that."
Leader of the Commons Chris Grayling criticises use of FoI requests as a 'research tool' to 'generate' stories
[Rowena Mason and Nicholas Watt/Guardian]
