What is Direct Democracy Pt. 2
Who then do MPs serve? Like anyone in employment they seek to retain and increase their salary. In other words, they serve themselves. More dangerous for democracy is the evidence that they increasingly serve the interests of moneyed lobbyists.
As Peter Geoghegan forensically exposes in Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics democracies are in crisis as unaccountable and untraceable flows of money utterly distorts politics worldwide. Antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity and secretive lobbying bends our politics out of shape.
Lobbyists operate in the shadows deliberately and their influence increases when it goes largely unnoticed by the public. But if the reasons why companies lobby are often obscured, it is always a tactical investment. Whether facing down a threat to profits from a corporate tax hike, or pushing for market opportunities — such as government privatisations — lobbying has become another way of making money.
A Guide to lobbying and legalised bribery
Control the ground
Lobbyists succeed by owning the terms of debate, steering conversations away from those they can’t win and on to those they can. If a public discussion on a company’s environmental impact is unwelcome, lobbyists will push instead to have a debate with politicians and the media on the hypothetical economic benefits of their ambitions. Once this narrowly framed conversation becomes dominant, dissenting voices will appear marginal and irrelevant.
Spin the media
The trick is in knowing when to use the press and when to avoid it. The more noise there is, the less control lobbyists have. When talking to the government, the media is crucial. Messages are carefully crafted. Even if the corporate goal is pure, self-interested profit-making, it will be dressed up to appear synonymous with a wider, national interest, like economic growth and jobs.
In early 2011, lobbyist James Bethell of Westbourne Communications was parachuted in to rescue the £43bn project, which had initially been sold by ministers on the marginal benefits to a few commuters. Westbourne reframed the debate to make it about jobs and economic growth. The new messaging focused on a narrative that pitted wealthy people in the Chilterns worried about their hunting rights against the economic benefits to the north.
Engineer a following
It doesn’t help if a corporation is the only one making the case to government. That looks like special pleading. What is needed is a critical mass of voices singing to its tune. This can be engineered — a process often described as Astroturfing.
Buy in credibility
Corporations are one of the least credible sources of information for the public. What they need, therefore, are authentic, seemingly independent people to carry their message for them.
One nuclear lobbyist admitted it spread messages “via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throats”. The tobacco companies are pioneers of this technique. Their recent campaign against plain packaging has seen them fund newsagents to push the economic case against the policy and encourage trading standards officers to lobby their MPs. British American Tobacco also currently funds the Common Sense Alliance, which is fronted by two ex-policemen and campaigns against “irrational” regulation.
Sponsor a Thinktank
Thinktanks can provide companies with a lobbying package: a media-friendly report, a Westminster event and ear-time with politicians.
Consult your critics
Companies faced with a development that has drawn the ire of a local community will often engage lobbyists to run a public consultation exercise. For some in the business, community consultation — anything from running focus groups, exhibitions, planning exercises and public meetings — is a means of flushing out opposition and providing a managed channel through which would-be opponents can voice concerns. Opportunities to influence the outcome, whether it is preventing an out-of-town supermarket or protecting local health services, are almost always nil.
Neutralise the opposition
Lobbyists see their battles with opposition activists as “guerilla warfare”. They want the government to listen to their message, but ignore counter arguments coming from campaigners, such as environmentalists, who have long been the bane of commercial lobbyists.
Lobbyists have developed a sliding scale of tactics to neutralise such a threat. Monitoring of opposition groups is common: one lobbyist from agency Edelman talks of the need for “360-degree monitoring” of the internet, complete with online “listening posts … so they can pick up the first warning signals” of activist activity. “The person making a lot of noise is probably not the influential one, you’ve got to find the influential one,”
Lobbyists have also long employed divide-and-rule tactics. One Shell strategy proposed to “differentiate interest groups into friends and foes”, building relationships with the former, while making it “more difficult for hardcore campaigners to sustain their campaigns”
Then there are the more serious activities used primarily when big-money commercial interests are threatened, such as the infiltration of opposition groups, otherwise known as spying. Household names such as Shell, BAE Systems and Nestlé have all been exposed for spying on their critics. Wikileaks’ Global Intelligence Files revealed that groups such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and animal rights organisation Peta were all monitored by global intelligence company Stratfor, once described as a “shadow CIA”.
Control the web
Today’s world is a digital democracy, say lobbyists. Gone are the old certainties of how decisions were made “by having lunch with an MP, or taking a journalist out,” laments one. It presents a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.
One key way to control information online is to flood the web with positive information, which is not as benign as it sounds. Lobbying agencies create phoney blogs for clients and press releases that no journalist will read — all positive content that fools search engines into pushing the dummy content above the negative, driving the output of critics down Google rankings. Relying on the fact that few of us regularly click beyond the first page of search results, lobbyists make negative content “disappear”.
Open the door
Without doubt, lobbyists need access to politicians. This doesn’t always equate to influence, but deals can only be cooked up once in the kitchen. And access to politicians can be bought. It is not a cash deal, rather an investment is made in the relationship. Lobbyists build trust, offer help and accept favour.
The best way to shortcut the process of relationship-building is to hire politicians’ friends, in the form of ex-employees or colleagues. Lobbyists are Westminster and Whitehall insiders, among them many former ministers. “You may remember me from my time as Minister of State for Transport,” wrote Stephen Ladyman as he lobbied a potential government client in his new role as a paid adviser to a transport company. “I do indeed and am delighted to hear from you,” replied the official. “We would be interested to hear your proposals.” He had just opened the door.
The revolving door
There is the perception, at least, that decisions taken in government could be influenced by the reward of future employment. It’s a concern that has been expressed for the best part of a century. Today, however, the number of people moving through the revolving door is off the scale.
The top rung of the Department of Health has in recent years experienced huge traffic towards the private sector. The department that sees more movement than any other, though, is still the Ministry of Defence. Since 1996, officials and military officers have taken up more than 3,500 jobs in arms and defence related companies.
Government is the arms industry’s biggest customer and the MoD’s closeness to its suppliers is widely known. It is also gaining a reputation for its disastrously expensive contracts that deliver poor value for taxpayers and often poor performance for the military. More than one commentator has asked whether the two are connected.
Huge amounts of money utterly distorts politics worldwide. In the 2017 UK general election, campaign groups reported spending more than £41.6m between them. The Conservatives spent most at £18.6m. It fielded 638 candidates, winning in 317 constituencies. Making the cost of successful election around £60,000. In the US it is even higher, where winning a Senate seat was calculated at $8 million.
So if MPs are partisan but ineffectual self-serving middle men and women, serving only their own and the interests of donors, couldn’t we do without them? The primary concern citizens have with this is accountability.
Accountability
If MPs are partisan but ineffectual self-serving middle men and women, serving only their own and the interests of donors, couldn’t we do without them? The primary concern citizens have with this is accountability. Who would be held accountable in a United Kingdom without MPs? We cannot answer this question without first asking, who is held accountable now? Who was held accountable for the Grenfell Tower disaster? Who was held accountable for the Iraq War and the thousands of deaths it caused? Who will be held account for failing to to heed the warnings exposed by Exercise Cygnus — a 2016 simulation of a pandemic which found holes in the UK’s readiness for such a crisis.
MPs routinely dodge accountability. It is considered a sport which comes with the job — a game of dodgeball played with the press and public. Political corruption is of course facilitated by politicians. If they ceased to exist we could reduce corruption overnight.
Naturally, corruption would find other avenues to exploit, with powerful vested interests maintaining their positions outside of politics. Such illegal corruption should continue to be a police matter.
Borderline legal corruption is better known as cronyism. With an 80 seat majority the current Conservative government has committed several acts of egregious cronyism, believing it is safe to do so, years away from a future general election.
Two scandals from summer 2020 include; Robert Jenrick accepting that his approval of property developer Richard Desmond’s project on the old Westferry Road printworks was unlawful and Boris Johnson adding to the unelected House of Lords party donors and his own brother. Tory cronyism plumbed new depths during the pandemic as billions of pounds of public money was wasted. Political researcher Sophie E. Hill was able to plot the government’s Outsourcing in brilliant visual way on her site My Little Crony.
Accountability for most aspects of society could be handled by a reformed, localised, empowered and democratised civil service.
A Democratised Civil Service
The institutions that do the most work towards the actual implementation of laws — new and old — and governance of the nation as a whole is the Civil Service. In 2018 a democratic audit was commissioned and it’s findings were illuminating.
Current identified weaknesses include, ‘generalist’, ‘amateurist’ short-term thinking and planning; a ‘weak capacity to speak truth to power’; which suffers from ‘ministerial hyper-activism, [and] pointless party political policy churn’.
‘It greatly under-values the salience of digital change, evidence-based policy-making, workforce expertise commitment, and the incremental improvement of services’.
‘The ‘revolving door’ denotes a set-up where senior mandarins can retire or leave their posts, but then move into private consultancy jobs or posts in public service contractor firms.’
‘There have been some notable and recurrent lapses in the equal treatment of some black and ethnic minority citizens, women and people with physical or mental disabilities within the police, prisons service, NHS and local government, with a succession of adverse scandals. The Windrush scandal exposed a systematic race-biased Whitehall policy stance enforced over many years’.
‘Corruption blackspots remain, especially in areas like overseas sales of defence equipment, and private contractors taking over government-run services on a payment-by-results basis.’
Future threats are also identified. ‘A loss of EU migration is likely to adversely impact labour shortages, most particularly in the NHS.’
‘New public management’ strategies plus many years of austerity policies have worn thin the UK state’s capacity to cope with crises and unexpected contingencies. The August 2011 riots in London and some other cities showed one kind of vulnerability, eventually requiring 16,000 police on the streets to bring them to an end. And the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster and scandals around building safety de-regulation demonstrated another facet of the same underlying fragility.’
Direct Democracy UK believes that the UK Civil Service requires reform, but not the kind pursued by Boris Johnson with the ideology of Dominic Cummings that would kneecap and subjugate it to the current ruling party. Our reforms would build a local and collaborative Civil Service. We do not seek to secure power for ordinary citizens only to then hand it back to an unaccountable bureaucracy.
