23 October 2009

The Government has dropped the ball on political reform – and ignored public concerns – by refusing to force lobbyists to operate in the open.

The Government’s long-awaited response to the Public Administration Select Committee’s (PASC) report into lobbying, announced this morning, dismissed its key recommendation for a compulsory register of lobbyists.

A simple statutory register of lobbyists, which has the support of some 200 MPs, would require all lobbyists to operate transparently and ensure that the public can see who government is really listening to, and the extent to which national policies are being influenced by mainly commercial interests.

This week sees the 2009 Turner Prize nominees go on show at the Tate gallery, the opening of the Frieze Art bonanza in Regent’s Park and SpinWatch’s first foray into the world of art. We have teamed up with two artists, Hollington & Kyprianou, for an exhibition at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol as part of its C Words show on climate change.

C Words is a two-month festival of events organised by the art-activist group Platform in the lead up to the COP15 climate talks in Copenhagen.

The SpinWatch collaboration sees Hollington & Kyprianou present ‘Adams & Smith – Auctioneers of Late Capitalist Period Artifacts’. Set 25 years from now, the exhibition features thirteen everyday objects that have ceased to exist in this imagined future.

These are accompanied by often witty, fictional tales of their demise and a ‘selected provenance’ supplied by SpinWatch, detailing the role PR and lobbying played in sustaining their existence: from greenwashing by the cement industry, negative campaigning by bottled water manufacturers, to the 'revolving door' between the banking sector and its regulators. 

C Words runs from 3 October to 29 November at the Arnolfini in Bristol (more details here). The Guardian has also produced a short film on the exhibition, and the ‘auction’ catalogue can be viewed online or downloaded from Hollington & Kyprianou.

Yes, says David Miller, 11 October 2009

It is well known that Alex Salmond was an economist with one of Scotland’s biggest banks in a previous life.   His background is not out of place alongside those of  his colleagues in the Scottish and Westminster Parliament’s. 

In the last thirty years the proportion of elected representatives from working class backgrounds has declined precipitously.  Now we have career politicians.  The expenses scandal is the logical outcome of this corrupting process. The public look on in scorn and bafflement.  Seeing no alternative to business friendly parties they either don’t vote or are pushed into the arms of the far right.  And those that are turned off the most are those at the bottom of the class hierarchy.  The poorest Scottish constituencies are exactly the same as those with the lowest voter turnout.

Some try and pretend that class has been abolished.  They dismiss the fact that most Scots still stubbornly see themselves as working class and wish away inequality by noting the decline of the ‘manual working class’ and the rise of the service sector.  But social class has no more disappeared than a job in a call centre is well paid professional post.

“Too many public affairs agencies out there still choose not to be regulated,” blogs Francis Ingham head of the PR trade body, the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). He's referring to the very many UK lobbying firms that refuse to declare their clients by signing up to one of the industry’s voluntary disclosure schemes (the PRCA is one of the three trade bodies that overseas this system of self-regulation).

A slightly sanctimonious Ingham then declares that the PRCA will be “naming and shaming those companies – and their chiefs… because it’s time they realised the threat they pose to the industry that they purport to love.” The ‘threat’ they face is a compulsory, statutory register of lobbyists.

Any measure to genuinely increase transparency is to be applauded. But the PRCA getting heavy with the rest of the industry? Is the system it operates really all it’s cracked up to be?

Monday, 5 October 2009

So, Brighton last week didn’t quite turn out to be a lobbyist-free zone, but the real party, the one lobbyists have been gearing up for starts today.

Publicly, the Tories have been at pains to put distance between themselves and the lobbying industry. On a number of occasions over the past couple of months they have had to rebut lobbyists’ claims that Tory policy is up for grabs. Take their “anger”, for example, at one senior lobbyist who took the liberty of inviting his corporate clients to become “a trusted partner of the government-in-waiting”.

Shadow minister, Francis Maude shot back with a demand for greater “openness and transparency” from lobbyists, namely that they should all 1) come out of the shadows and 2) make public who their clients are.

Is this the Tories getting tough on lobbyists? Not really. Lobbyists have been encouraged to operate in the open and voluntarily declare clients since the cash-for-questions scandals of the nineties. Fifteen years on, a sizeable proportion still refuse to come clean.

Tom Griffin, 17 September 2009

Events in London in recent weeks have highlighted the growing collusion between American neoconservatives and the European far right in stirring up hatred of Muslims.

Richard Bartholomew has details of a meeting at the George Restaurant in east London in August attended by Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer and Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion at the invitation of the Christian Action Network. Also invited were the English Defence League, the group responsible for a number of recent violent anti-Muslim protests.

Robert Spencer says on his blog that he and Murray refused to meet with the EDL, and cites Adrian Morgan as a witness to this version of events. But the presence of Morgan, who did meet the EDL, is itself evidence of the emerging relationship between the neocons and the far-right.

Morgan is a contributing editor to Family Security Matters, which has been described as a front for the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think-tank run by the ultra-neoconservative Frank Gaffney.

by David Morrison, 8 September 2009

“Success is freeing the civilian population of southern Israel from the fear of an incoming Hamas rocket.” [1]

Those were the words of Israeli spokesman, Mark Regev, in an interview with David Fuller on More4 News on 9 January 2009, two weeks into Israel’s assault on Gaza.

By 9 January, Israeli forces had killed nearly a thousand Palestinians, ostensibly to achieve this success, but rockets were still being fired out of Gaza into Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian groups – and continued to be fired after Israel halted the assault ten days later.

In fact, Israel had achieved the success of “freeing the civilian population of southern Israel from the fear of an incoming Hamas rocket” months earlier. It did so, not by taking military action against Hamas, but by negotiating a ceasefire agreement with it in June 2008.

Under the agreement, brokered by Egypt, in exchange for Hamas and other Palestinian groups stopping the firing of rockets and mortars out of Gaza, Israel undertook to lift its economic blockade of Gaza and cease military incursions into Gaza. The ceasefire was to be for six months initially, but, if successful, it was to be renewed and to apply to the West Bank as well.

Published 2 September 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b3443: Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b3443

Marisa de Andrade, freelance journalist marisa.de-andrade{at}strath.ac.uk

Despite measures to improve transparency of research funding, Marisa de Andrade finds there is still scope for confusion

On a Friday night in March 2009, I joined more than 30 doctors gathered at the Gleneagles Hotel for predinner drinks. We were attending a weekend meeting at the invitation of the University of Dundee’s Hypertension Research Centre and Medicines Monitoring Unit after "positive feedback" from a similar gathering in January. Both meetings aimed to provide practices with sufficient information about the Standard Care versus Celecoxib Outcome Trial (SCOT) to enable general practitioners to decide whether to participate.

The invitation did not mention Pfizer, although the drug company was providing £26m (€30m; $43m) for the study.¹ Instead, the trial was described as "an academic, investigator-initiated study, requested by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) and sponsored by the University of Dundee." The university is working in partnership with the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen and collaborating with researchers from Nottingham University and the University of Southern Denmark.^{2 3}

The SCOT application form submitted to the NHS research ethics committee indicates that Pfizer is the sole funder of the study.

The trial is designed to compare the cardiovascular safety of the cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitor celecoxib with that of other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) in men and women who are over 60, who already take a non-selective NSAID regularly, and who do not have established cardiovascular or peripheral vascular disease or severe heart failure.³

Tom Mills and David Miller 26 August 2009

A Spinwatch investigation

Investigations by Spinwatch reveal that a group of freelance terror trackers who promote stories about the threat from violent Islamists have been involved in exaggerating and even fabricating such stories, which they then comment on in the national press and on network television and radio. The group – which has now fallen apart – was centred on freelance spy Glen Jenvey and Conservative Party member Dominic Wightman, who uses the pseudonym 'Whiteman'.

The barrage of stories from official sources and from terror 'experts' suggesting that Britain is under serious and extensive threat from Islamists and that Islam as a religion is particularly prone to extremism has been boosted by some stories that have little basis in fact. These have included:

• An alleged attempt to plant a story about terrorist grannies planning to blow themselves up in British supermarkets
• An attempt to suggest – quite falsely - that campaigners against the Israeli attack on Gaza were actually planning to target British Jews
• The creation of a fake allegedly Islamist website in a bid to entrap suspects.
• Spying on Tamil activists in the UK.
• A fraudulent fundraising effort in the 1980s which was claimed to be to aid the African National Congress

The group behind these stories – Vigil – is a convenient label for a number of people who are linked on the one hand to elements of the British far right and on the other to networks of neoconservative ideologues in the US and UK seeking to exploit the genuine threat faced by UK citizens - Muslim and non Muslim alike. In this case behind the anodyne label of 'terror expert' there is a story including alleged spying, deception, fraud, assault, and a falling out over money.

David McQueen 25 August 2009

This may be the only review you will read of Edwards and Cromwell’s new book Newspeak in the 21^st Century. Their last important challenge to the corporate media Guardians of Power (2006) was never mentioned, let alone reviewed in the mainstream press. The one exception, we are told in the opening chapter, was a piece in The Herald by Martin Tierney who lost his column after his review of another critical, anti-capitalist work by Barbara Ehrenreich met the disapproval of a senior editor. Newspeak picks up and elaborates on many of the themes covered in Guardians of Power which also examined the consistently distorted, power-friendly performance of the mass media, especially in the ‘quality press’ and supposedly authoritative news and current affairs programmes.

Edwards and Cromwell are the founders of and principle contributors to the media watchdog site Media Lens - a widely-read and influential thorn in the side of the liberal media that has often publicly irritated or infuriated mainstream journalists in revealing ways since it was set up in 2001. The authors’ consistently sharp, uncompromisingly radical critique of the ‘free press’ and of broadcasters such as the BBC has served as a rallying point for a section of the public who have grown weary of the media’s subservience to state and corporate interests. Media Lens, for example, provided a lifeline for readers alarmed by the chorus of pro-war material and disinformation in the media leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and who are shocked by the collective amnesia gripping the same organs of opinion in the post-war period, an amnesia which threaten further catastrophe in Iran and beyond. Readers of Media Lens’s updates are encouraged to engage in polite emailed correspondence with reporters and editors, particularly of supposedly independent, liberal newspapers, programmes and institutions such as The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, Channel 4 News and the BBC following up on articles and reports that belie their tough, interrogative or ‘left-leaning’ reputation.