Practically every politician of every persuasion may have it in for the banks, but not our Boris. The heavy-weights of London’s financial services industry have been schmoozing the London Mayor to assist them in their fight against EU regulation of the industry.
Particularly in the lobbyists’ sights is the EU’s AIFM Directive which intends to tighten up regulation on hedge funds and private equity, both of whose antics are seen to have contributed to the financial crisis.
Simon Walker the CEO of the BVCA – or British Venture Capital Association – that represents 95 per cent of all UK-based venture capital firms, has been working to butter up Boris nicely to help them make their case.
Some six months on, the government is still wrestling with how it's going to reform the lobbying industry.
It could force lobbying into the open with a statutory register of lobbyists, as recommended by a Committee of MPs in January and supported by a further 200 backbenchers. If so, we could soon know who is lobbying whom in government and which areas of public life they are seeking to influence, whether it's defence procurement decisions, climate change policy, private healthcare contracts, tax breaks for the super-rich, etc.
Or the government could rely on the industry to voluntarily open itself up to public scrutiny.
Yesterday’s papers revealed that government spent some £37million in 2007-08 lobbying itself. Taxpayers’ money, in other words, is being used by public sector bodies and publicly-funded think tanks and charities on political campaigning - or 'government lobbying government'. Matthew Sinclair of the TaxPayers' Alliance, authors of the report, thinks this is “shocking”.
What’s shocking is what the report doesn’t reveal. £37 million represents a tiny fraction of the £1.9 billion UK lobbying industry, the vast majority of which is spent by business. If anything “distorts decision making in favour of the interests and ideological preoccupations of a narrow elite” to quote the report, it is this.
Nottingham postgraduate student and an administrator were arrested in May 2008 and held for six days by counter-terrorism police after a document known as the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ was found on the administrator’s computer. The student had sent him the document some months previously as he wanted his advice on whether or not it was a good source to use in his MA dissertation – which was on Al Qaeda. The student, before his arrest, did ask a lecturer at the university if it would be alright for him to use as a source. This lecturer, after checking the document out, agreed.
What exactly is the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’? It is a handwritten document (originally in Arabic) that was found in Manchester in 2000 by the police and translated by them into English. Its real title is ‘Declaration of Jihad against the Country’s Tyrants’ (or sometimes ‘Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants’) and appears to have originated in Egypt in the early 1990s. It was designed to be used by Islamists opposing the Egyptian government in particular and secular Arab regimes more generally in the 1980s/1990s. The words ‘Al Qaeda’ actually do not appear in it once. It was only given the title ‘The Al Qaeda Training Manual’ by the US Department of Justice (US DoJ) which was using this document (having obtained it from the British police) as evidence in the trial in New York of the East African embassy bombers in 2000. The name was changed presumably in an attempt to ‘sex up’/‘spin’ the document to make it sound more ‘incriminating’ to a jury.
How often do we feel like the government spends too little time listening to ordinary people, and too much time listening to commercial lobbyists working for corporate interests.
Whether it's the aviation lobby gunning for airport expansion, the car industry fighting legislation to tackle emissions, or the financial sector trying to water down regulation, companies spend a lot of money trying to influence government. Currently we've no right to know what these lobbyists are up to.
We have a chance right now to stop this secrecy. An influential committee of MPs has told the government it's time to force lobbyists to register their activities. This would mean we could see who's lobbying whom, and which areas of public policy they are seeking to influence. The government has just said it will make a decision on whether or not to act before Parliament breaks for the summer. The minister in charge, Angela E. Smith, says she hasn't made her mind up yet.
'It is sometimes possible to think here in the world of specialised journalism', reads a bracing editorial in Research Fortnight, 'that public relations is closing in for the final kill.'
The editorial surveys the seven research councils, the main science and social science funding bodies in the UK. 'How many communications managers, press officers, science writers and assorted PRs do they employ?' Noting there are 'maybe 50 in total', it also notes that UK universities typically 'must now have between three and 13 communications professionals, depending on how ‘world class’ it is.' This gives a total of perhaps 500 PRs between the 150 of them.
Conservative MP Jonathan Djanogly has just had his expenses raked over for a second time by the Telegraph. But it’s what the shadow minister for 'Corporate Governance' does in his spare time that potentially warrants more scrutiny.
Djanogly lists as his second job, ‘Partner, S. J. Berwin, LLP, solicitors’. Thanks to new rules on outside earnings, sometime soon we’ll learn exactly how much he earns at this commercial law firm. What we won’t know, however, is what exactly he does for them.
Recent weeks have seen an explosion of interest in Twitter, a social networking application which has been used by thousands of internet users to pass on news, views and rumours about the situation unfolding in Iran in the wake of the disputed presidential election.
The Iranian struggle is not however, the first conflict in which emerging ‘Web 2.0’ social media technologies have played a significant role. Israel's offensive in Gaza in December 2008 - January 2009 provides an important precedent which shows that, despite its undoubted potential for empowering new forms of bottom-up organisation, the social web is not immune from very traditional propaganda techniques.
Simon Lewis, the Prime Minister’s new official spokesman, says he only took the job on condition it would be non political and that he would be able to conduct himself with civil service neutrality. Unlike previous Downing Street directors of communications such as Alastair Campbell, Lewis is not a Labour Party appointee. He has accepted a two-year civil service contract and when asked (at a debate in London at the Reform Club 1.7.2009) whether he would like to remain at No.10 should David Cameron defeat Gordon Brown in the general election expected in May 2010, he made it clear he has an open mind and intends to wait and see what happens.
Appointing Lewis represents something of a departure for the Downing Street press office because he comes from the world of corporate communications and has not worked directly for the news media or been a career civil servant.His declaration that he would abide by civil service neutrality was perhaps only to be expected but he was adamant that wanted to be part of Britain’s “much under-rated permanent civil service” and help the government of the day achieve the level of transparency which the corporate sector had been forced to adopt.
Lewis spent two years at Buckingham Palace as the Queen’s press secretary in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but most of his career has been with FTSE companies such as Nat West, Centrica and most recently Vodafone for which he was group director of corporate affairs. His brother is Will Lewis, editor on chief of the Daily Telegraph, and the lesson he drew from the whole saga about the abuse of MPs’ expenses was that it would be unwise to write off the printed media because as a result of its exclusive coverage, the Telegraph had sold more newspapers than at any time since World War II and the death of Diana.
Lewis was adamant that the independence of the civil service needs to be sustained: As a civil servant in Downing Street I shall be communicating on behalf of the government, not on behalf of a political party. I only accepted the job on that basis. Being a civil servant gives me more credibility and a sense of pride to be joining a much under-rated civil service…It is important there are people in the civil service who bring neutrality to communications…Authenticity in communications is the key, the more authentic the more likely the message will be received”.
When asked whether he would seek to curb the leaking of ministerial announcements in advance of parliamentary statements, Lewis acknowledged that the 24/7 media environment had forced politicians to respond to the news agenda and the response of the government had been that the “engine has to be fed”. But he hoped politicians would come to realise that they “did not always have to respond to the media machine…Perhaps the political class have to find a new way to set the agenda”.
Part of the problem was that national politics had become “more prominent” than in the past and that local people had lost contact with local politics. He hoped that in the wake of the scandal about MPs’ expenses that people would engage more and “make a real contribution to localism”.
One consequence of MPs being forced to accept greater disclosures about their pay and allowances was that it would in turn put pressure on the entire political process and the news media to become more transparent. Lewis believed that the corporate sector had gone further than either political parties or the news media to embrace transparency.
Companies had been forced to be far more open about their financial affairs; full disclosure was required in annual accounts and reports and about directors’ remuneration.My hunch is that the British people will now have more influence on politics…I shall be interested to see what turnout we get in the next election and what local electors decide about some of the MPs who have been in the news”.
2.7.2009 END
Speaker’s call for an end to ministerial leaks: Downing Street’s new media chief could play a role
Simon Lewis, the newly-appointed director of communications in Downing Street, might be forgiven for thinking his only role will be to pull down the shutters on the last chance saloon for the Labour Party’s discredited spin doctors. But although the Prime Minister has probably less than a year in power, Lewis does have an opportunity to turn a new page in the government’s relationship with the news media and roll back the abuses which were institutionalised by Alastair Campbell and which spawned the Damian McBride scandal.
Book Shop
Practically every politician of every persuasion may have it in for the banks, but not our Boris. The heavy-weights of London’s financial services industry have been schmoozing the London Mayor to assist them in their fight against EU regulation of the industry.
Yesterday’s papers revealed that government spent some £37million in 2007-08 lobbying itself. Taxpayers’ money, in other words, is being used by public sector bodies and publicly-funded think tanks and charities on political campaigning - or 'government lobbying government'. Matthew Sinclair of the TaxPayers' Alliance, authors of the report, thinks this is “shocking”. 
Rod Thornton, 5 August 2009 
