Please lobby your Members of Parliament to prevent them from exempting the details of their expenses from Freedom of Information Act requests,

Specifically ask them to vote against the draft Freedom of Information (Parliament) Order 2009 (.pdf), this Thursday.

FOIA campaigner Heather Brook clearly lays out the case for full disclosure and transparency of MP's expenses, just as is routine in the Scottish Parliament. - MPs' expenses - We have until Thursday to stop this rot

As usual, the excellent people at mySociety.org have provided some online tools to make this easy for you and your friends:

mySociety blog » MPs expenses - pulling out the stops

By Tom Steinberg on Monday, January 19th, 2009 A few moments ago the team rolled out changes to our biggest and best known site, TheyWorkForYou.com meaning that every visitor to any page of the site will be greeted with a call to arms on the issue of some MPs voting this Thursday to conceal their expenses. And after the vote, we’ll be prominently publishing who voted which way - there should be a couple of million visitors at least before the next election. Our explicit goal is to have a lot of constituents from around the country let their MPs know they won’t be impressed with a ‘yes’ vote or an abstention (the same thing in this case), and to build our Facebook group to the point where the mainstream media starts to take notice of this Net driven discontent. Please do everything you can to get as many people as possible writing to their MPs and joining that Facebook group. We’re doing our bit - please do yours. Together we can stop the encouraging trend of more openness in our Parliament scrunching into reverse.

UPDATE:

Astonishingly, we appear to have won, for now at least !

The Labour Government, despite imposing a 3 line whip to try to force this controversial nonsense through, appear to have retreated for now, and have withdrawn the controversial Order.

BBC:- Brown backs down in expenses row

mySociety blog:- Blimey. It looks like the Internets won

Thanks to everyone who did lobby their MPs through WriteToThem.com, or by other means.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance".

