Saving democracy, one Excel spreadsheet at a time
In November 2016, Amy Siskind, a US activist, started a spreadsheet, the Weekly List, which tracked the “erosion of norms” taking place under Donald Trump’s regime. She explained: “Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.”
Inspired by Amy’s example, we decided to start our own list – a weekly record of all the ways, big and small, in which our government is seeking to undermine our democracy and the institutions which are supposed to hold it to account. Keeping the Receipts is our latest project – a series of open source public ledgers where we will log deviations from the democratic norm, line by line and day by day. Attempts to silence the media, to undermine the judiciary, to bypass parliament, to privatise the NHS, to compromise our electoral processes, allegations of cronyism and corruption, breaches of the ministerial code, we are recording them all.
Keep up to date with the latest ‘receipts’ by following our @receiptkeepers Twitter account or take a look at our databases below.
The Receipts
Democracy database
We cannot take our democracy for granted. Boris Johnson’s proroguing of parliament; a raft of authoritarian new legislation which threatens our rights and freedoms; a systematic attack on the institutions which hold government to account; the gradual erosion of the checks and balances which underpin a healthy society – we’re recording it all here.
The Crony Chronicles
From lucrative government contracts to a seat in the House of Lords, we’re keeping tabs on the many ways in which being a Conservative Party donor pays. Call it cronyism, call it a chumocracy, call it what it is – corruption – we’re keeping the receipts here.
The great NHS sell-off
The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the NHS to the brink. But rather than using the crisis as an opportunity to invest in a properly funded public health system, the government has accelerated its policy of privatisation, outsourcing key contracts to private firms, with little oversight or due diligence. The result? An increasingly fragmented and underfunded NHS being parcelled up and sold off to the highest bidder. We’re keeping the receipts here.
Covid contracts database
At the start of the pandemic we discovered there was no centralised database of all government Covid-19 contracts, so we set up our own, a comprehensive open-source ledger, updated weekly, which you can find here.