Tamasin Cave, 8 February 2010

David Cameron admitted today that “secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics.”



The Conservative Party must now pledge to support the introduction of a statutory register of lobbyists, as recommended by the influential Public Administration Select Committee (PASC), chaired by Tony Wright MP.

In a speech this morning, Cameron said of lobbying: “It’s an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long...an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money. I’m talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works."

5 February 2010

Now we know the extent to which MPs are facilitating access to the House of Commons facilities for commercial lobbyists, thanks to information from the Commons banqueting office being made public.

The rules state that dining rooms must be ‘sponsored’ by an MP on behalf of an outside interest, with the MP in attendance, although David Cameron has already been pulled up on this.

Among those consultant lobbying firms out to impress their clients – almost treating the Commons as a private dinning room - are Edelman, which hosted seven functions in 18 months; Lexington Communications – two lunches, a tea and a dinner in 2005-06; and Political Intelligence, which notched up eleven dinners and receptions in just two years. Three of these were hosted by former Lib Dem MP Richard Allan, who stood down in 2005 before becoming a lobbyist for Political Intelligence’s one-time client, Cisco.

15 December 2009

The controversial biotech company, Monsanto has won the Angry Mermaid Award 2009.

At a press confernce this morning at the UN climate talks, the award-winning writer and journalist Naomi Klein anounced the biotech giant had won with 37% of the total vote.
 
Oil giant Shell took second place (18%) in the Award for lobbying to sabotage effective action on climate change, followed by the American Petroleum Institute (14%).

 Ten thousand people voted in the Angry Mermaid Award, named after the iconic Copenhagen mermaid who is angry about corporate lobbying on climate change.

Riding the crest of the wave is the ex-British Chancellor Nigel Lawson, who is rapidly re-inventing himself as a climate sceptic cause célèbre.

The timing of the leaked emails this week could not have come at a better time for Lawson, who launched his new policy think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation yesterday in the House of Lords.

Lawson calls the new think tank an “all-party and non-party think tank” and has registered it as an educational charity.

This will please the corporate lobbyists no end.  The longer they can delay action on climate the better.

But now Copenhagen’s iconic mermaid is striking back. She is pissed off with climate change and the lobbyists.

So a group of NGOs, including SpinWatch, has launched an award  – called the Angry Mermaid – to highlight how corporate lobbyists are sabotaging action on climate, whether it be at Copenhagen or domestically in the US.

Tamasin Cave 10 November 2009

UPDATE: The lobbyist's trade body, the PRCA, is now refusing to provide transparency campaigners with previous registers of lobbyists, although it says it will give them to others. To ask the PRCA to publish registers for the past year online, contact them here.

A month ago I pointed out some serious failings of the lobbyists’ trade body, the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), to provide transparency in lobbying (The state of lobbying self-regulation: Part 1).

The government has since announced that the PRCA, among others, will continue to be entrusted with the job of revealing who is lobbying whom and which areas of public policy lobbyists are seeking to influence. Despite repeated calls from MPs and campaigners, the government rejected the recommendation for a mandatory system with a statutory register of lobbyists. In its place, the public will have to rely on the industry’s own voluntary registers of lobbyists.

The criticism in my blog of the reliability of PRCA’s voluntary registers was met with a strange reproach ten days later from PRCA director general Francis Ingham: “You've been to a partial link, and so got half a register,” he said, although helpfully, he provided a URL to the most recent ‘complete’ register.

Ready to admit that perhaps, after much searching, I had only managed to find incomplete PRCA registers, I requested he send me the actual, correct registers from the last year – it’s only with past registers that Parliamentarians, journalists and the public can see influence at work. Ingham’s answer is revealing:

“If the Cabinet Office had come to me and said ‘please give us the registers from back in history’, I would make a fair effort to go back all the way that I could in a prompt and timely manner. But that’s, as I say, the government. You’re only another organisation just like ours.”

The most recent cover story was the seizure on Wednesday of large quantities of weapons on a commercial ship that was boarded by commandos 100 miles at sea and towed to an Israeli port.

It was a wonderfully staged event. Israeli police surrounded the ship standing at intervals of about five feet. They were facing the camera and the ship and not in the direction of any threat. They were very visual props.

It’s hard at this point to know the real story behind the weapons. There is enough now to give the impression this event was not all it seems to be. It feels as if the Israelis are trying too hard to market Iran as the bad guy. At a minimum the Israelis do not have their story straight.