In Norway, the income and tax paid by every citizen is on the web. Perhaps the UK isn’t quite ready for the Norwegian system, but how can there be a proper debate about pay, tax and bonuses if we don’t know what anyone gets?

We now know that Network Rail bosses are not taking their bonus. And we know that Goldman Sachs bankers are said to get £1/4m on average. Shouldn’t we also know at least the ratio of highest compensation to lowest compensation (and to the average) within any organisation? The Network Rail Sustainability Report does not mention the issue of pay, except to talk about how much its staff are giving to charity as if Network Rail had given it.

We should start with this kind of transparency for all organisations in which the state has a controlling stake. Isn’t this one of the things that being a stakeholder is supposed to be all about?

Live discussion on the Guardian Sustainable Business website on Thursday 19th January with me, Andrew Simms, Alison Braybrook and Ed Gillespie.

Technology can facilitate freedom and civil rights. But it can also facilitate oppression. That doesn’t make it neutral, it just means the jury’s still out.

There are a lot of interesting things going on that build on the apparently anarchic style of new technology – at least in California, as April Dembosky’s FT article describes. But there are also real problems with the use of surveillance technologies, as Salil Tripathi relates.

Having good points and bad points does not make a person, a company or a technology ‘on balance’ about neutral. It just means that our critical faculties should not be suspended.

Unless you are a company, when it is all up for grabs…

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has challenged HM Revenue and Customs to come clean in its dealings with them. In the view of the Chair of the Committee, confidentiality should not be used as a cloak for companies. Whether this is evasion or avoidance by the Revenue, it challenges the supremacy of parliament and seriously threatens democracy.

Meanwhile UK Uncut is trying to take HMRC to court for getting into bed with the very companies from which it is trying to extract tax.

In part it is the complexity of the tax regime that is to blame. One solution, proposed by conservatives, is for a flat rate tax. For individuals this becomes regressive, so that the poor are more badly affected than those with money. But for companies, the same system would be far more progressive than the current arrangement, in which the large pay far less than the small.

Guardian Sustainable Business website blog on my predictions for 2012 – regulation will move centre stage.

How should the media be regulated?

The painful accounts of intrusion into private lives by the newspapers that the Leveson Inquiry has revealed should provoke some government reaction. Is there a danger that ‘good’ journalism will be regulated away in some fashion in the name of protecting privacy? Will some instances of bad behaviour by those who should know better be missed if privacy is protected? Probably. But it seems a price worth paying. And of course most ‘good journalism’ does not involve exposing salacious details of people’s lives.

I believe transparency is a good thing – but only until it does harm. The harrassment that goes with exposing private lives to the public very rarely has any justification, except to those who profit from it.

The key to any useful regulation of the media is to distinguish properly between what the public is interested in and what is in the public interest. The former should always be trumped by privacy; sometimes the latter should not.

The European Commission has published a new strategy on CSR. This is a substantial improvement on the old one which endorsed the weakest kind of voluntary approach.

It also begins the process of integrating (and promoting) the principles of the OECD, the ILO and ISO 26000. In fact the fingerprints of ISO 26000 are all over it – beginning with the definition of CSR which is a simplified version of that in the ISO standard.

The EC has also added three principles of good tax governance which is an important new contribution. And it recognises its own key role in procurement.

It still has its problems though: quite how it aims to reconcile a meaningful consideration of social and environmental issues in procurement ‘without undermining the principle of awarding contracts to the most economically advantageous tender’ is not at all clear. And the endorsement of the GRI is rather limited.

When Wikileaks made its disclosures about the war, the banks’ paymasters – Visa, MasterCard and Paypal – panicked. The decision to deprive Wikileaks of the means to receive money has nearly brought it down.

Is this a victory for law and order or the suppression of the right to free speech and a frustration of democracy?

By deciding to take action against Wikileaks before any crime by Wikileaks had been proved, they are setting a very dangerous precedent: if such pre-emptive action is justified, why do they not take action against all sorts of other people and organisations that have been accused of a crime? Are racist organizations denied their services?

No doubt they will have a worked-through policy for which activities they are prepared to block on their own account before knowing that a crime has been committed. If they think of themselves as ‘corporate citizens’, we should be told about this policy and how it led to the Wikileaks decision. Or perhaps they don’t have one…

Maybe next time they won’t react quite so swiftly.

My new book on ISO 26000 is now out!

With a Foreword from Kevin MCKinley, Deputy Secretary-General of ISO and a Preface from Jorge Cajazeira, the Chair of the Working Group that developed the standard, this book provides the background and some deeper insight into the interpretation and implications of ISO 26000, as well as into how it might be used. Aimed at both specialists and non-experts alike, this definitive guide should be the first point of reference for all those working on responsibility issues within companies and other organizations as well as those working in the field of standardization and in academia.

With chapters from the following experts involved in the development of the standard: Khawla AI-Muhannadi (Bahrain), Sandra Atler (Sweden), Aron Belinky (Brazil), Alan Fine (South Africa), Jonathon Hanks (South Africa), Adrian Henriques (UK), Dwight Justice (Belgium), Gwennan Manseau (USA), Martin Neureiter (Austria), Bart Slob (the Netherlands), Chen Wang (China), Miles Watkins (UK), Stepan Wood (Canada) and Lucy Yates (UK).