Oh yes. Before his Blairness, who wanted lots of stuff pulped, we had the 30-year rule in the UK, and beyond that in exceptional cases up to the 100-year rule. It mean that even routine meeting minutes in the UK were always filed with the Public Records Office, but not opened for N years.
This meant you could be a politician of the day, and not have every e-mail either deleted or pored over and taken out of context. Example: Macmillan described and the Clean Air Act as a need to ‘look busy but do nothing’. 4000 people were dying a week at the height of the 1950’s smogs. They were so thick that people could not see their own feet. And yet, back in the day, that was how a lot of people though things just were. But the records were kept because history ought to belong to everyone. Thirty years meant the politicians in question got to keep their knighthoods, or whatever, so No Big Deal for them. And not really for us either, in the long term.
Now, since Our Tony had a lot to trash following the Second Gulf War, it’s has been just easier to delete the lot. And we call this the Freedom of Information Act, so it’s all about Freedom, right?
Yes, you totally ought to delete things temporarily. We won’t have any history other than the Official History, otherwise.
