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.

Eveline Lubbers, Letter to the editor of the Guardian, 28 October 2009.

In an excellent three day series revealing an intimate cooperation between the police and corporations under fire in gathering intelligence on activists, the Guardian published spotter cards used to identify protesters. One of the cards holds a picture of  Martin Hogbin, portrayed as an activist accused of being an infiltrator, but denying it.

This denial invites contestation, with facts confirming that indeed he did supply information to British Aerospace (BAe). The following overview is based on publicly available information, most of it online. It shows that Martin Hogbin infiltrated the Campaign Against Arms Trade from 1997 until 2003. He started as a volunteer, and worked at CAAT’s office in London as a paid campaign coordinator from 2000 until his suspension and subsequent resignation. He was a spy from the beginning until the end. The evidence consists of the results of the internal investigation of CAAT’s Steering committee sustained by sections in Evelyn le Chêne’s spy files, the findings of the Information Commissioner and legal documents substantiating that BAe indeed hired Evelyn le Chêne to spy on CAAT.