[A-List] Squandered

[Bill Totten]

This is how a government elected to stamp out sleaze became worse than
its predecessor.

by George Monbiot

The Guardian (January 27 2009)


So now the circle is closed. The government which won a landslide
victory in 1997 after Tory MPs were revealed to have taken cash for
parliamentary questions now faces far graver allegations: cash for laws
{1, 2}. Along the way, almost every policy which distinguished it from
John Major's corrupt and pointless regime has been abandoned.

The difference between these two moments - 1997 and 2009 - is that now
there is nowhere to turn. There are the minor parties, but they have
been systematically excluded by another broken promise: the failure to
reform the electoral system. New Labour has engineered the worst of all
worlds: it has sustained a system which ensures that only one of two
parties has a chance of power, and it has rooted out the policies which
made a choice between the two worthwhile. At least when the Tories were
in government we could dream of something better.

It is fitting and unsurprising that the scene of the new scandal is the
unelected second chamber whose proper reform Blair and Brown have spent
twelve years avoiding. The deregulation of the banks, the love affair
with the neocons, the failure to tax the rich, Peter Mandelson ... is
there any slithering cop-out which has not now returned to haunt this
government?

The premise of Robert Harris's novel The Ghost (2007) - that Blair's
premiership was the creation of a foreign intelligence service - is
correct in spirit if not in substance. For twelve years the government
of this country has acted as an agent of other powers: the US; big
business; big money; anything except the electorate. It is hard now to
believe that it was elected in a frenzy of hope very much like the
excitement surrounding Barack Obama.

Tomorrow, with impeccable timing, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency
launches its campaign in parliament for public scrutiny of the contacts
between legislators and professional hustlers {3}. There's a major
lobbying scandal about once a month in this country, and no one who is
aware of the government's failure to regulate this industry should be
surprised. It was elected to stamp out sleaze, but since 1997 it has
done almost nothing.

So do our noble lords, unmolested by the law, routinely put the
interests of business above those of the people who didn't elect them?
As SpinWatch records, in 2007 some of them were selling parliamentary
passes to lobbyists for defence, transport, freight and legal companies
{4}. In October of that year the Labour peer Lord Hoyle admitted that he
had been paid by an arms company rep to introduce him to the minister
for defence procurement, Lord Drayson {5}, although Lord Hoyle was
cleared by a house of lords committee in May 2008. Last year, Lady
Harris gave a researcher's pass to Robin Ashby, whose company lobbies
ministers on behalf of BAE Systems and other weapons manufacturers. Lady
Harris is paid by Mr Ashby as an adviser to another company he runs {6}.

But the problem is not confined to the House of Lords. Lobbying
undermines democracy throughout the British government. In March last
year, for example, we discovered that the government passed data which
it had withheld from the public to the airport operator BAA. The data
showed that a third runway at Heathrow would immediately breach European
noise and pollution limits, ensuring that it could never be built. BAA
and the government worked together to re-engineer the figures to fit the
limits. Their fake data was then presented to the public in the
government's consultation paper {7, 8}. It was used again this month to
justify the decision to approve the third runway. This is the kind of
wheeze you'd expect in Nigeria.

Like Nigeria, the UK has no effective safeguards against such collusion.
As the House of Commons Public Administration Committee points out,
"lobbying activity in the United Kingdom is subject to no specific
external regulation" {9}. Nor is it subject to anything resembling
self-regulation. The sleazebags who suborn our representatives operate
in a world without rules.

On the other side of the fence, there are a few feeble constraints on
the behaviour of MPs and officials. For example, former ministers and
civil servants who want to work for the companies they used to regulate
have to apply to the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. Its
members are a representative sample of British society: three lords and
three knights, all white, all male, all educated at Oxford or Cambridge,
all over seventy {10}. These young firebrands never stop anyone from
taking up a post in business, advising only that former ministers and
officials do not become "personally involved in lobbying" for twelve
months after they leave the government {11}. This doesn't prevent them
from telling their new employers who needs to be lobbied and how, and
where the most lucrative opportunities might lie.

The rules have actually slackened over the past few years. The new
ministerial code published in 2007 dropped the requirement that meetings
between ministers and lobbyists should be recorded {12}. It's not just
that contacts between legislators and business lobbyists are virtually
unregulated; we're not even allowed to see what's going on.

Earlier this month, the public administration committee proposed a
series of anti-corruption rules. They're a reasonable start, which would
take us more or less to the position the United States reached in 1946,
when the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act was passed. Since then the
US Congress, which admittedly has even graver cases of corruption to
contend with, has passed a series of further laws, culminating in the
2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. Anyone can now see, with
a quick internet search, who is lobbying whom, whom they represent and
how much they are being paid. Lobbyists who fail to comply with the
rules can be imprisoned for five years {13}. Last week Barack Obama
signed an executive order banning everyone working for the government
from participating in any matter relating to their former employment for
two years after leaving office {14}.

But even the public administration committee's timid and dated proposals
have been received with horror by government ministers. The Cabinet
Office minister Tom Watson told the committee "we have a pretty good
system in the UK" and demanded that it show him evidence of a systemic
problem within the lobbying industry {15}.

Some of us believe that a major scandal every few weeks is as much
evidence as anyone would need, but Watson's Fork is a cunning device.
Without the regulations the committee proposes, whose purpose is to open
the system up to public scrutiny, it's impossible to accumulate the
comprehensive evidence Mr Watson demands. Without this level of
evidence, he won't introduce regulations.

So what else should the government expect? The sleaze scandals, as they
did during the dying days of the last Conservative government, will now
emerge thick and fast, as disillusioned officials risk their liberty by
leaking documents that should have been freely available, and
journalists, scenting blood, close in. Labour will be driven from office
with the same howls of execration that saw off the Tories in 1997. But
this time there'll be no bonfires, no bunting, no dancing in the
streets, just the tired shuffling sound of a million more voters turning
away from politics.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Jonathan Calvert, Claire Newell and Michael Gillard, 25th January
2009. Whispered over tea and cake: price for a peer to fix the law. The
Sunday Times.

2. Philippe Naughton, 26th January 2009. Peers apologise, but deny
wrongdoing, as Sunday Times releases audio. Times Online.

3. Lobbying Exposed, 28th January 2009, 10 am, Portcullis House. The
Alliance for Lobbying Transparency.

4. SpinWatch, April 2008. Lobbying: Access and influence in Whitehall -
Public Administration Committee. Supplementary memorandum.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpubadm/36/36we36.htm#note121

5. David Leigh and Rob Evans, 26th October 2007. Peer was paid to
introduce lobbyist to minister. The Guardian.

6. James Macintyre, 26th June 2008. Exposed: the arms lobbyist in
Parliament. The Independent.

7. Marie Woolf and Jon Ungoed-Thomas, 9th March 2008. Evidence fix led
to third runway being approved. The Sunday Times.

8. See also Toby Helm, 18th January 2009. Fury at airport lobby links to
No 10. The Observer.

9. House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, 5th January
2009. Lobbying: Access and
influence in Whitehall. Volume I, para 44.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpubadm/36/36i.pdf

10. http://www.acoba.gov.uk/about_us.aspx

11. House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, ibid, para 96.

12. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, cited by the House of
Commons Public Administration Select Committee, ibid, para 187.

13. Craig Holman, 2008. Making the US Lobbying Disclosure Act Work as
Intended: Implications for the European Transparency Initiative. Public
Citizen.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/comparl/afco/hearings/20071008/holman_en.pdf

14. Barack Obama, January 2009. Executive Order - Ethics Commitments by
Executive Branch Personnel.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrder-EthicsCommitments/

15. Tom Watson, 19th June 2008. Public Administration Committee -
Minutes of Evidence.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpubadm/36/8061901.htm

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

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