Writing in the Daily Telegraph today, Nick Clegg said:

When opposition politicians heard about Damian Green’s arrest, many of us asked ourselves the same question: “When did it become a crime to hold the Government to account?”

We already operate in a system where Parliament is effectively neutered, little more than a rubber stamp for legislation that ministers have already decided…

One of the weapons MPs do still have in their armoury is to play the Government at its own game. By releasing information of our own we can highlight matters of public interest that ministers would rather people didn’t know about.

With parliamentary scrutiny so feeble, the media has become a surrogate debating chamber. And when dealing with an administration legendary for its secrecy, you increasingly have to rely on whistle-blowers to see the full picture…

Our political system is already in deep trouble: sinking public confidence in MPs, feeble parliamentary scrutiny, a rigid culture of Whitehall secrecy, and an electoral system that hands unprecedented powers to governments freed from any meaningful scrutiny from other parties.

This unprecedented arrest is a wake-up call. We must save our broken democracy.