Wikileaks has caused a profound change in how news and information is brought to the public. The Iraq War logs, the Afghanistan War logs and Cablegate have shone a bright light on the often murky dealings of Western governments as never before. By providing the raw data, Wikileaks has allowed ordinary citizens to become empowered in analyzing and shaping the media agenda.

Pirate Party UK remains the only British party that has been consistent and vocal in supporting Wikileaks. We are also proud of the support that our international counterparts have been giving this project. Pirate Party Sweden signed a deal to host some of the data on their servers. Our Swiss sister party helped to keep access to the information online by hosting the domain wikileaks.ch. The issue of freedom of speech is at the heart of the beliefs of Pirate Party UK. This includes the freedom to share unpalatable truths. We believe that there is an overwhelming public interest case in opening up this information.

There have been attempts to silence this vital resource for whistleblowers. Wikileaks remains under an economic embargo by Mastercard, Visa and Paypal. The Grand Jury in the US has led to a worryingly McCarthyite atmosphere. Bradley Manning accused of being the source of the Cablegate leaks, but not convicted of any crime, has been held under conditions likened to those of Guantanamo Bay.

There has been much focus on the personality of Julian Assange himself. This is in no small part due to direct threats issued by the Pentagon, and calls for assassination by certain American politicians. This violent rhetoric is entirely incompatible with democratic politics in our view. However, they fail to see that the project is far, far larger than any one individual; it is a movement taking journalism out of the hands of a privileged few. There is no going back.

One of the remarkable aspects of the comment on the leaks is their implication for our relation with the authorities. The Coalition proposed in the Strategic Defence Review the monitoring our private communications - email, web sites we visit, who we 'phone. Clearly, the argument that "if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide" is only to be applied to ordinary people. In our view the British Government have got their priorities the wrong way round. Our personal communications should be protected, whereas the matters of government and policy concerns us all.

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It is clearly time for a new relationship between the government and the citizen, doing more than just paying lip service to transparency. Revelations that, for example, the British parliament was mislead over the ban on cluster bombs, show that a 'shadow foreign policy' has been operating without our consent. There should be no place for this in the 21st century. We must not shy away from the information that tells us who we really are and what too many of our elected representatives have truly become: contemptuous of democracy. Pirate Party UK ultimately supports a kind of open politics where Wikileaks is no longer necessary.

Pirate Party Pledges:

• To increase government transparency and accountability.
• Defend the right of citizens to expose illegal practices.
• Introduce a new legal right to be a whistleblower.