If you were to draw up a tag-cloud of common phrases that dominated the political blogs in 2009, as the year wore on, you would have seen the dominance of the word “liberty” giving way to an increasing concern with “transparency.” But the left should not allow this concept to be dominated by the right.

Between Heather Brooke and the Telegraph, we’ve also seen MPs being the butt of the demands for disclosure – often in excruciating detail. In both cases, the left have found themselves on the back foot in these discussions, allowing our perceived shortcomings to reflect badly on the Labour government that introduced the Freedom of Information Act in the first place.

Now, it seems that – as the election draws nearer – we’re allowing David Cameron to use a half-formed notion of “transparency” as the foundations for his “Post-Bureaucratic Age”. This concept (or #PBAge as it has inevitably been tagged) borrows the fluffy clothing of behavioural economics and webby goodness. But it’s an aggressively Thatcherite programme in drag. Demands for more “transparency” are at its heart. In yesterday’s speech, Cameron makes a range of laudable proposals about increasing the capacity of well-heeled and resourced pressure groups ordinary people to participate in the legislative process. He also refers to the Tory’s plan to make the tendering of public services more transparent.

The left should be looking to take this one step further:

• What about opening up the delivery of those contracts? Let’s see the private contractors exposed to every bit as much scrutiny as the public sector are, and then we can make a call on the question of whether private provision is actually more efficient or effective.

• Let’s see people who are suspected of tax-dodging being subjected to the same level of scrutiny as the considerably-cheaper-on-the-public-purse benefit cheats.

• And what about more transparency in the way that the more socially useless parts of the finance sector increase short-termism by the way that they speculate? What about more transparency for fund-managers? In this post by Tom Powdrill about the Kraft/Cadbury takeover, we see opaque fund-managers speculating against jobs to create a less valuable company. And what about exposing the estimated $390 million in fees on that bad Cadbury deal?

• When do politicians meet commercial pressure groups, and where do they get the research that they introduce into debates? Surely shareholders should know every penny that is spent on lobbying – what is being advocated and who is doing the advocacy? When do wealthy organisations provide cheap interns and secretarial services for MPs and public committees and what do they get back?

• When do newspapers carry stories that are favourable to their proprietors commercial interests? Surely journalists should source assertions that they make so we can see who is influencing public debate? Good journalism should be subject to a great deal more fact-checking than it is currently, and Left Foot Forward’s very own Andrew Regan has a good tool that could be adapted to this purpose.

So far, all of the demands for transparency have been placed upon either democratic institutions or public service broadcasters. That tells you everything you need to know about who is making the running in this debate so far.

Now, maybe it’s time they had a taste of their own dogfood?

The Sun’s abandonment of Labour has been addressed in different ways by left-leaning bloggers.

Soho Politico sees an opportunity to question what Tory leader David Cameron has offered – and whether the Tories’ willingness to scrap OfCOM and usher in an era of lighter regulation and more Fox News-esque partisan TV is quite English enough for us.

Certainly, it is hard to see this move as an example of News Corporation’s confidence and political competence. It cannot be comfortable for them to read Charlie Beckett, among many others, pointing out that The Sun is not the force it was.

Following James Murdoch’s speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival, the inept way that The Sun switched – not even getting its own story straight in Scotland – will raise further questions among News Corp’s shareholders.

Sadie Smith has a funny post up about how Labour should respond to this ‘jilting’ – should Labour beg The Sun to change its mind, or should the party go all Gloria Gaynor on them?

Sadie neglects to mention the third option, namely to get even and not angry. One possible way of doing this is to follow the advice from Bad Conscience, that Labour has nothing to lose by reawakening the question of media concentration – a long-standing (pre-Blair) obsession of Labour’s.

There are easier, more concrete, opportunities to do this. Last week, Left Foot Forward published a list of the various free-rides that new Labour gave to BSkyB. All of these options could be credibly threatened as pre-election measures. Labour could apply the levy that every other major European Union country does on boxes like the one used for Sky+.

The Government could allow the main TV channels to apply the kind of re-transmission fees that apply in almost every other EU country. There is no reason why BBC, ITV and Channel Four programmes should provide the free carrot that BSkyB get in attracting over £3 billion in subscriptions revenues.

In the 1980s, the UK inserted the words ‘where practicable’ in EU regulations (pdf, p31) that were designed to ensure that future multi-channel broadcasters would make programmes instead of importing content from America.

This qualification was used to excuse BSkyB from the obligations that ensure that other major European broadcasters like Canal+ actually make programmes.

The justification for allowing this exception was that it would stymie new entrants into the market. But as subscriptions now account for more revenue than advertising in UK broadcasting (with BSkyB enjoying a massive monopoly position here) now would be a good moment for a UK regulator to start asking what is practicable, and what is not.

In the 1990s, there seemed to be two kinds of people in the Labour Party. Those who treated winning the election as the top priority, and those who were unwilling to enter into any kind of Faustian pact with Rupert Murdoch.

The whole deal was sealed by an informal – almost anti-intellectual – self-censorship among senior figures in the party. There was almost an omertà among senor advisers – a subject that could never be broached.

It is a pact that may have run its course. There is now a good deal less certainty about the degree of success that a good relationship with News Corp can guarantee, while on the wider front, newspapers generally have been gradually losing influence anyway. In a climate of hyper-scrutiny, these pacts may soon be obsolete anyway.

Tie this up with Labour’s waning electoral fortunes and it may be reasonable to guess that the deal will soon be history.

But how much has it cost us? Well, firstly there was a veto on some areas of public policy which appeared largely to reflect personal beliefs at the top of News Corp or the kind of prejudices on issues such as immigration or law and order that sell newspapers.

But the less-discussed but no-less-interesting question is the damage to the public interest arising from the regulatory free-ride that BSkyB have been given. Anyone watching OfCOM and Digital Britain’s contortions over how a relatively small funding gap in public service broadcasting can be filled can see lots of painless cut-and-dry options written off because of this veto.

In every other European Union country, broadcasters are obliged to make a reasonable quantity of TV programmes. In the UK, BSkyB have been exempted from the “Television without Frontiers” (TVwF/AMS) content regulations because of a long-standing UK-sponsored loophole (p.31) and an unwillingness to even broach a subject that would solve problem of Public Service Broadcasting’s (PSBs) funding gap at a stroke.

BSkyB’s subscription revenue is over £3 billion (subscriptions now outstrip advertising as a source of TV revenue) yet 90 per cent of UK originated content is made by PSBs. Anywhere else in the EU, this would have resulted in a regulatory obligation to re-invest substantially in locally originated content.

The 9 million BSkyB subscribers spend the majority of their time watching traditional PSB-created content – over £3 billion per year in content that BSkyB carry at no cost. Subscription revenue now outstrips advertising revenue in the UK and BSkyB take the lion’s share of this. The subscription platform that BSkyB use would only attract a fraction of those subscribers if PSBs weren’t on it. In almost every other EU country, those PSBs would receive re-transmission fees. But not in the UK.

20 per cent of UK households (projected to rise to 75 per cent by 2013) have digital receivers that allow them to record and avoid advertising. It diminishes the value of ad-slots and it’s a variation from the terms that the programmes are broadcast on. In every other major EU economy, there is a £10-£20 levy on such equipment, but as Sky+ is the most widely-sold PVR in the UK, it is not on the cards here.

By ruling out these options, the government is unable to tap and £50 billion+ marketplace of products that benefit from the fact that the UK has popular quality TV content. Un-noticeable levies that are in place throughout the EU could generate enough cash to fill the projected PSB funding gap. It could also create huge investment in drama, kids TV and a revival of local and regional news.

The costs to our democracy and culture are huge. But purely in economic terms, we can now see the price that we’ve paid for News Corp’s co-operation.