Too many MPs have the wrong priorities, too many lack the right competence and too many behave badly: Guardian, 21st December

This country needs a new generation of trustworthy political leaders – in all parties – with the right priorities and the ability to lead

This is the theme of an article by Martin Kettle, assistant editor of the Guardian (right). Some of the points he made are noted below.

He reports that a week ago the Ipsos polling organisation published its annual “veracity index”, which measures the public trust in a list of professions. Nurses were top, with 88% “generally trusted to tell the truth”. Others who scored well include airline pilots, librarians, engineers, doctors and teachers. Lawyers, civil servants and the ordinary person in the street have majority trust too.

Politicians, by contrast, are generally trusted by a mere 9% of the public; in this country just one in 11 people trust politicians – 10 out of 11 don’t.

Politicians are the least trusted profession in Britain. This year’s figure is the lowest ever. Government ministers are scarcely any better, on 10%. Journalists, on 21%, well below estate agents, bankers and landlords, have no cause for complacency either.

Three glaring reasons for Britain’s political malaise shone out as a dark December afternoon unfolded. One is that too many MPs have the wrong priorities. Another is that too many lack the right competence. The third is that too many simply behave badly.

Priorities

On Tuesday, the House of Commons debated the Post Office (Horizon system) Compensation bill which goes some way to compensate victims of the Post Office’s 16-year wrongful prosecution of more than 700 post office operators over false accounting. The case is a national scandal.

But though there are 650 MPs at Westminster, a no time were there more than 17 MPs in the chamber to debate it.

MPs should spend more time on governing and holding ministers to account. They should be the parliamentarians they are, not the glorified local advice bureaux they have become.

Competence

On Tuesday, Rishi Sunak had his end-of-year session in front of the liaison committee of Commons select committee chairs. By any normal logic, this too is an important event. Watch the session, though, and you learn almost nothing at all about the big issues of the day – Gaza, Rwanda, the economy.

There should be more to the Commons chamber than the grotesquery of prime minister’s questions . . . the chamber ought to be the place to hold the nation’s attention, and currently it is not.

Behaviour: the 12th recall since 2019

On Tuesday, North Northamptonshire council announced that the recall petition against Peter Bone, the Conservative MP for Wellingborough, had been successful.

This will be the 12th since 2019 to be caused by an MP’s bad behaviour of one kind or another, ranging from sexual misconduct and bullying, to corruption, lockdown rule breaking and, in Nadine Dorries’s case, to a hissy-fit about not getting a peerage.

Parliament is failing us. Rarely has this country had more need of a new generation of national political leaders – in all parties – with the right sense of priorities, the right ability to lead and the necessary probity to be trusted. If the public does not believe what it is told and does not trust the politicians, confidence in parliament and government to solve problems that matter will not just remain low: it may even be destroyed altogether.

 

 

 

 

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Is good governance possible as wealthy donors fund British politicians?

Electoral Commission figures to be released on Thursday will show that Labour is to receive a £5mn financial boost from Gary Lubner, the former boss of Autoglass, a car glass repair company, to help it to fight the next election.

He gave £500,000 to Labour in the first quarter of 2023, on top of £200,000 in previous donations, making him one of Labour’s biggest individual donors in this parliament. Longstanding supporter Lord Sainsbury recently gave the party £2mn.

Mr Lubner (right) told the Financial Times he wanted to give Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer financial help to put the party in power “for a long time” and to build up its “capacity and capability” before the general election next year.

In December 2022 it was announced that Mohamed Mansour, an Egyptian-born billionaire would become senior treasurer for the UK Conservative Party. Through his UK based company, Unatrac, he recently donated £5mn to the ruling Conservatives. In February 2023, Mansour agreed to pay over £3million in tax following an investigation into Unatrac by HM Revenue and Customs.

This website was set up fourteen years ago to raise awareness of the ‘revolving door’, rewards for failure and widespread behind-the-scene lobbying. Frequent media exposures have failed to guide our two largest political parties away from these practices.  

 

 

 

 

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Government gives KPMG contracts worth millions, despite its repeated fines for serious misconduct and audit failures

 Yesterday the FT reported that one of the ‘Big Four’ accountants, KPMG, whose conduct is still under review by the Cabinet office, has been awarded millions of pounds of UK government contracts – even though in December last year it had pledged to stop bidding temporarily for public sector work after it was threatened with a ban over its involvement in a series of corporate scandals.

It has form

In 2013 seven senior members of the FRC scheduled to investigate KPMG’s role in the collapse of lender HBOS, were current or former employees of KPMG itself (left). Four years later,  KPMG featured in another ‘revolving door’ charge when Mark Britnell, a former director-general of commissioning at the Department of Health who became global head of healthcare at KPMG, which bids for government health contracts.

A 2018 report from Professor Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting at University of Sheffield, recorded that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) had refused to assist the French authorities and raid Lycamobile’s UK premises (Economia has now broken this link) in order to investigate suspected money laundering and tax fraud.

Following an initial denial (left, Financial Times), Economia (another broken link) confirmed that in an official response to the French government dated 30 March 2017,  a HMRC official noted that Lycamobile is “a large multinational company” with “vast assets at their disposal” and would be “extremely unlikely to agree to having their premises searched”.

The letter from HMRC to the French government added, “It is of note that they are the biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party led by Prime Minister Theresa May and donated 1.25m Euros to the Prince Charles Trust in 2012”.

With reference to KPMG’s auditing of Carillion, the Independent reported that Peter Kyle, MP for Hove, said that he wouldn’t trust KPMG to conduct an audit of the contents of his fridge.

 

In 2019 the Financial Times reported that though KPMG’s auditing of Carillion since 1999 has been under investigation by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the value of new UK public sector contracts awarded to KPMG increased more than fourfold last year. (opposite: Daily Mail graphic).

An official of the government’s Insolvency Service is now suing KPMG for £1.3bn

The charges include  failure “to remain independent from Carillion’s management” as audit partner Peter Meehan “repeatedly accepted hospitality from and offered hospitality to Carillion and its senior management” and “failed to respect the proper boundaries of the auditor-client relationship”(FT Feb. 2022).

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), a body set up by government, the UK’s accounting and auditing regulator, is funded by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), to carry out investigations into allegations of members’ malpractice or inefficiency.

In August last year, CityAM reported that FRC’s independent tribunal found that KPMG and one of its partners did not comply with the UK professional accounting principles in June, while advising on the sale of Silentnight to US private equity firm HIG Capital through a pre-pack administration in 2011. 

The ICAEW – a body that aims to maintain the highest standards of professional competency and conduct – profits from members’ fines arising from those investigations started before 2016

Professor Prem Sikka raised the KPMG/Silentnight and the ICAEW episode in the Lords, pointing out that the £13 million fine for KPMG would not be paid to the members of the Silentnight pension scheme, who had lost some of their pension rights, but to the coffers of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

He stressed that recognised professional bodies—must not benefit from the misconduct of their members, commenting: “In fact, they should be in the dock for authorising those members. What kind of supervision do they actually carry out?”

When considering reform of the Big Four, Lord Sikka (left) points out that there are constituencies wider than investor groups and City interests. His long-standing concern has been the relative neglect of those stakeholders.

He wonders if ICAEW’s management have ever met people who have lost their pensions, jobs, savings, homes due to poor accounting and auditing.

 

 

 

 

 

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Information technology: fragile, costly and unreliable

TechRadar summarises: dependence on IT has become ingrained, with most lines of business, from finance to marketing, being unable to function without their core IT systems. Its research indicates that a single major technology failure can cost a business as much as £6.9 million”

A Financial Times article recalls the judge who has called the Post Office’s insistence that the software was infallible “the 21st-century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat”.

“Technology failures are becoming increasingly common, with high-profile cases in the news on a regular basis. Companies are fire-fighting problems on a daily or weekly basis and haemorrhaging money while damaging the long-term health of their organisation in the process.

“There is an average of 25 full-scale outages that take down a global site every day, which means that even if a business is doing everything right from their end, they can still suffer downtime and loss of sales due to problems with third-party services”.

Frequent technology outages remind us of the fragile nature of modern infrastructure

TechHQ reports that financial services provider Allianz Group found that business interruptions and cyber incidents such as IT failures, outages, and data breaches were the two leading global business risks for 2019.

A study of technical outages at UK banks found that daily IT failures were common across the six leading banks, with one major incident occurring every two weeks.

It recalls the IT outage suffered by UK’s Ministry of Justice (MoJ)  that derailed critical IT systems like the Crown Prosecution Service, the Criminal Justice Secure Email system (CJSM), and the court hearing information recording system for an entire week. Legal professionals in the UK were unable to access either the court Wi-Fi system or email services from the MoJ. The outage affected hundreds of MoJ websites, preventing jurors from enrolling and delaying hearings for minor offenses by more than two weeks.

The scandal of the subpostmasters’ experience (see this post ) has drawn attention to the errors.

Marina Hyde (right) deplores the deference paid to IT even when its errors are exposed, citing two fatal errors:

⦁In 2015, in one three-year period, 2,380 sick and disabled people died shortly after being declared “fit for work” by a computerised test and having their sickness benefits withdrawn.
⦁ Social media algorithms have published content which has contributed to teenage children committing suicide.
⦁ TechRadar adds new 737 Max Boeing plane, Lion Air Flight 510, crashed shortly after takeoff. Then another did the same. Everyone aboard died. In each case, pilots had struggled against an autopilot system that took over and plunged the planes to their doom.
⦁ ExoPlatform reports that on March 13, 2015, the Paderborn Baskets, a second division German basketball team, was relegated to a lower division for starting a game late, due to a necessary 17-minute Windows update to the scoreboard’s laptop.
⦁ In late 2007, Queensland selected IBM Australia to set up a new payroll system for the 80,000 employees of Queensland Health (QH). The system did not go live until late 2010, with major defects and an additional cost of nearly $25 million. QH had to hire another 1,000 employees to undertake the payroll manually, adding $1.15 billion over eight years.
⦁ JAMIA (health & medicine) problems with health information technology are affecting care delivery and patient outcomes. Problems with IT can increase the likelihood of new, often unforeseen, errors that affect the safety and quality of clinical care and may lead to patient harm
⦁ A study of technical outages at UK banks found that daily IT failures were common across the six leading banks, with one major incident occurring every two weeks.
⦁ Software glitches are putting thousands of people at risk of paying hundreds of pounds too much tax next year, as programmers struggle to cope with an increasingly complex tax system.
⦁ HMRC are allocating funds to urgently address issues with ageing IT technology. (See parliamentary committee on HMRC’s problems with Concentrix)
⦁ HMRC pushes ahead with digital tax drive, even as it admits data security failures (Telegraph).

And the Public Accounts Committee finds that “The most concerning of all for contractors is that what HMRC actually charges is WRONG. It collects more than is due”.  TechRadar sums up: “When the technology underpinning these services goes wrong, the impact on consumers and businesses alike can be catastrophic”.

 

 

 

 

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Secret State 26: Monbiot, “Why isn’t this scandal all over the front pages?”

Transparency International republished a Devex article (7th July) which opens: “Substandard ventilators, grossly overpriced equipment, lucrative contracts awarded to companies with little or no expertise — these are just a few of the disturbingly commonplace things we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries ranging from the U.K. and U.S. to Brazil and Slovenia”. Monbiot’s latest article, summarised here, focusses on the issue of transparent, competitive tendering, “a crucial defence against cronyism and corruption, essential to integrity in public life and public trust in politics”. He points out that, during the pandemic, the government has awarded contracts worth billions of pounds for equipment on which lives depend, without competition or transparency. One contract to test the effectiveness of the government’s coronavirus messaging worth £840,000 was awarded without competitive tendering. It was issued by the Cabinet Office, run by Michael Gove, to a company called Public First, owned by James Frayne and Rachel Wolf who worked with Michael Gove when he was education minister and with other Conservative government ministers and advisers for many years. There is a precedent: in 2010, Gove’s department awarded Wolf a £500,000 contract to promote “free schools” which also did not go to competitive tender. Though the government had six weeks to prepare for the pandemic, before the deal was done it claimed that it had to override the usual rules for public procurement because it was responding to an emergency. Monbiot debunks this defence and outlines two other problems with this contract. The FT reported that around 16,000 potential suppliers contacted a 500-person buying team set up by the Cabinet Office in March to offer to supply kit for hospital staff. Monbiot points out that some had a long track record in manufacturing or supplying PPE and had stocks that could be deployed immediately. Government decided, however, to award PestFix – a pest control company with no manufacturing experience – a £32 million contract to supply surgical gowns, again relying on the emergency defence to justify its decision. To date Pestfix has procured only half of the desperately needed gowns from a Chinese supplier. Monbiot says, “I think we may reasonably ask what the hell is going on”. The Good Law Project is doing just that. It is crowdfunding a challenge in the High Court against Michael Gove, issuing proceedings alleging breaches of procurement law and apparent bias in the grant of these contracts to his long-standing associates.       .

 

 

 

 

 

Abolish political parties – 2: Voices from Canada, America and Namibia

And a cartoon from Britain

In his Modest Proposal: abolish political parties, Robert Zaretsky Professor of Humanities at the Honors College, University of Houston, refers to Simone Weil’s writing:

“All political parties share three essential traits. They are created to generate collective passions, designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of its members and motivated to seek their own growth at the expense not just of other parties, but the nation itself”. 

Andrew Nikiforuk, an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor to The Tye, in Party’s Over: Why We Need to Abolish Political Parties, refers to Simone Weil’s radical essay, published in 1950.

She called for the abolition of political parties, condemning the political parties that in 1940 helped to prepare the ground for France’s military defeat.

Nikiforuk reflects that when she observes that “nearly everywhere, instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against,” we recognize she is describing not just France 75 years ago, but the politicians who seem to be steering our own country to social and economic disaster in the United States today.

Computer scientist Eric (Rick) Hehner, emeritus professor at the University of Toronto writes: “A party controls its members by blackmail. If you ever want to advance within the party, to become a minister, or even just be a candidate in the next election, you must toe the party line.

“The people who advance are not those who have their own ideas and integrity; MPs are reduced to cardboard cutouts. Power is concentrated in the hands of a handful of people: the rulers of the ruling party. This is not democracy.

“Without political parties, elections and parliament and government all work perfectly well. In an election, every candidate is an independent, and is free to speak their mind. Voters choose the candidate they feel best represents them. In each new parliament, the first order of business is for MPs to elect the ministers of a government from among themselves. Those ministers then serve parliament. If the ministers (including prime minister) lose the confidence of parliament, then parliament can replace them, without triggering a general election. On each issue, an MP is free to vote as they think their constituents want them to vote, or to vote according to their conscience”.

He cites as working models Nebraska, in the Northwest Territories, in Nunavut, and most city and regional governments.

A search revealed that Nebraska has ‘a nonpartisan legislative body’; there are no formal party alignments or groups within the Legislature. Coalitions tend to form issue by issue based on a member’s philosophy of government, geographic background and constituency (Wikipedia).

In a recent letter to the Bradenton Herald, Anna Yoakum, who is ‘affiliated with the No Party Affiliation’, writes:

“We have always been The United States of America but have now become the Divided States. This is not what or who we are.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to abolish our party system. Politics has become more divisive than rooting for our favorite sports team. We are wallowing in a mentality of us against them. Our Congress gets little done as they’re too busy opposing one another, blocking bills, instigating endless filibusters and campaigning party against party.

“Court justices would be unbiased politically, as there would be no party to be beholden to; there would be no gerrymandering; nor voter suppression nor voter intimidation nor voter fraud. Big money wouldn’t be able to buy a party, most importantly we would just be voters voting for who we feel is best.

“Without the divide of parties Congress would work together, actually accomplishing something. The House of Representatives, Senate and presidency would work as our founding fathers envisioned: “Together for the Good of America”.

Nyasha Francis Nyaungw reports in Namibia’s Observer that Angelina Immanuel (left) from Namibia, who is running as an independent candidate in the Ondangwa Urban by-election scheduled for June 15 has made a case for the abolition of the country’s political party system which she says has not worked in the last 29 years.

In her promise to the residents of Ondangwa, Immanuel argues that the current political party system has brought about corruption, maladministration, incompetence, weak leadership and sluggish development patterns.

She says the system has led to a situation where individual weaknesses, failures and capabilities are not assessed by the electorate who are told to vote for candidates just because they belong to a certain political party;

“The candidates that come from these political parties and eventually win are thus not loyal to the residents and only listen to the instructions and wishes of those running political parties in Windhoek. The residents and citizens’ concerns, no matter the amount of protests or complaints they make, are not listened to unless people in Windhoek say so.”

 

Time for change?

 

 

 

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Attorney General tells ‘turkeys’ that Christmas is coming

Shocked by the unbridled tone of the Attorney General in the Commons today – recorded here – his fury mounting after the second minute – I searched online for information which would shed light on his character.

When practising as a barrister, Geoffrey Cox frequently led in commercial actions and arbitrations overseas, appearing in the Dubai International Finance Centre, Mauritius and the Cayman Islands. He served as MP for Torridge and West Devon from 2005-15.

• In September 2014, it was reported that Cox was one of a number of individuals investing in the Phoenix Film Partners LLC scheme run by Ingenious PLC which HM Revenue and Customs(HMRC) had alleged to be a tax avoidance
• In 2016, at that time Britain’s highest-paid MP, it was reported he had a number of office expense claims for items, such as a 49p pint of milk, rejected by the Commons authorities.
• In January 2016, Cox, a landlord, backed the Conservative Government in voting down an amendment in Parliament on rental homes being “fit for human habitation”.
• He was a member of parliament’s Committee on Standards and the Committee on Privileges, ‘the sleaze watchdog’ but was the subject of an inquiry in 2016 after ‘neglecting to register more than £400,000 of outside earnings.

In February 2016, Cox announced in the House of Commons that he supported the case for leaving the EU and would campaign and vote to do so in the forthcoming referendum.

He was appointed to the Cabinet as Attorney General for England and Wales and Advocate General for Northern Ireland by Theresa May in 2018 and, in February 2019, was put in charge of negotiating changes to the Northern Ireland backstop in the EU withdrawal agreement.

On 24 September 2019, minutes of a conference call seen by Sky News revealed that Cox had advised the government that the prorogation was lawful and constitutional and that any accusations of unlawfulness “were motivated by political considerations”.

On the same day, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled unanimously that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament – as advised by Attorney General Cox – was unlawful.

 

The reasons for his astonishing parliamentary outburst can now be understood.

 

 

 

 

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Shining a spotlight on four government agencies: an educational psychologist, a cook, a farmer and an accountant

 

The relatively powerless are harassed: corporates survive censure unscathed

OFSTED had not inspected more than 1,600 schools that were judged “outstanding” by it for at least six years – and of those, almost 300 had not seen an Ofsted inspector for at least 10 years, according to a report by the National Audit Office – see chart on page 27 of the report.

The case of Waltham Holy Cross is ongoing. Last year the government decreed that Waltham Holy Cross would be handed over to Net, a chain of academy schools in May. As the NAO records, this has already happened to over 7,000 other state schools in England since 2010: public assets built and maintained by generations of taxpayers are being given away. Waltham Holy Cross parents made almost 100 freedom of information requests which revealed errors in the draft Ofsted report and that Net was being sounded out on “their appetite to take on this school” in January, over a month before the Ofsted verdict was published. News of teachers and parents there – and in other parts of the country taking action to prevent this ‘forced academisation’ may be read here.

In an article in the Times Educational Supplement (TES), head teacher Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said “Ofsted and the government are the source of much of the stress and anxiety on staff through an extremely high-pressure accountability system and concluded ‘the accounts above reveal an inspection system that appears in too many cases to be doing great damage. My sense is that it’s time to stop quietly accepting that the way Ofsted is, is the way Ofsted should be”.

This month. four years later, TES readers discussed overhauling Ofsted, a ‘toxic’ system. One letter, whose signatories included Dr Richard House, chartered psychologist, former senior lecturer in education studies, Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Tim Brighouse, former schools commissioner for London, was provoked by a recommendation by Ofsted head Amanda Spielman to shut down what she labelled as “failing Steiner schools”. The signatories are founding a campaign to bring about the replacement of Ofsted with a new inspectorate that is ‘empowering, collaborative, and understanding and respectful of pedagogical difference’.

Unthinking adherence to FOOD STANDARDS AGENCY bureaucracy led to the unjust downgrading of a new small business, damagingly reported in local paper

As the public perception is that businesses with a one rating will give customers food poisoning, a cook-manager has criticised the food hygiene inspection system after her business was given a one rating out of five – though hygiene and food storage was rated highly.

At a (requested) pre-opening inspection by the council in March 2018, no reference had been made to the need for a staff manual and staff training procedures but this ‘one-person’ operation was ‘put on a warning’ for not having a staff training manual – though no staff was employed – and was told that a tick paper exercise (officially a ‘documented food safety management system’) is required for all aspects of work.

The work required to maintain cleanliness and produce wholesome food appeared to be discounted and a paper exercise – easily forged – was prioritised. The District Council inspectors were unhelpfully applying the rules of The Food Standards Agency, a non-ministerial government department, to the letter and not the spirit of those regulations.

Solution found and accepted: a whiteboard was put up in the workplace, a photo taken once a week and an online manual was printed.

On several farms which had passed inspections by the ASSURED FOODS STANDARD (Red Tractor) agency in July 2018 serious cases of animal abuses were reported in the media.

A farmer recently wrote an article in the Western Daily Press foreseeing the advent of similar tick-box regulations:

“What I have been pulled up on is the fact that I do not keep written mobility and condition records. These are not yet enforceable under the scheme – but I have reason to suspect they soon may be.

“The only thing that will be achieved by keeping written records will be the creation of more work for the assessor; more forms for him to sit down and read through and check; one more task to help fill his required nine-to-five working day.

“And let’s suppose I decided to cook up a completely bogus set of records. How would he even know?

“When the Red Tractor scheme was launched the president of the NFU (under whose wing it actually operates) was Ben Gill who told us all how vital it was going to be in supplying the nation with safe, wholesome food which consumers could buy with confidence while, equally, bringing more prosperous times for farmers.

“What I see now is an organisation riddled with pointless bureaucracy (I understand another tier of inspectors is in place to check on the assessors).

“I see, equally, an organisation which appears to operate dual standards: one for the soft-target, small producers like me and another for the industrial giants such as Moy Park, over whose portals the Red Tractor flag proudly flies but where recent footage captured undercover at Moy Park showed stinking, squalid poultry houses where chickens will be lucky to survive their miserably short allotted span”. He ended with two pertinent questions:

• if Assured Foods was aware of conditions at this plant why did it not intervene?
• And if it wasn’t aware, why not?

The FINANCIAL REPORTING COUNCIL, the UK’s accounting and auditing regulator, is regrettably funded by the audit profession and its board of directors is appointed by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Its monitoring of out-sourcing firms such as Capita and G4s in several sectors, including health, social, military and prison services has not led to effective disciplinary procedures – in fact they continue to receive lucrative government. The Financial Times reported yesterday that though its auditing of Carillion since 1999 is under investigation by the Financial Reporting Council, the value of new UK public sector contracts awarded to KPMG increased more than fourfold last year. In 2013 seven senior members of the FRC scheduled to investigate KPMG’s role in the collapse of lender HBOS, were current or former employees of KPMG itself.

Prem Sikka, professor of accounting at the University of Sheffield, has posted almost 400 FRC entries on the AABA website (now well hidden by search engines). A recent article adds news of another appointment: Revolving Doors: FRC appoint new member to the Audit and Assurance Council – former PwC and Royal Bank of Scotland  exec .

Professor Sikka has said he is worried that the government is rewarding these firms with valuable contracts when they have been undermining the public purse through their involvement in several tax avoidance scandals (FT: 29.7.19).

 

The ‘soft targets’ are harassed: corporates survive censure unscathed

 

 

 

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FT highlights corporate financial rewards for MPs, April 2018-April 2019

In 2009 this site was set up to report on the distortion of policy-making by those on ‘an inside track, largely drawn from the corporate world, who wield privileged access and disproportionate influence’ according to a 2009 report by the Parliamentary Public Administration Select Committee [PASC].

Tactics covered, such as the ‘revolving door, rewards for failure, widespread behind-the-scene lobbying and party funding, continue to block effective action addressing the social, environmental and economic challenges facing this country.

It became common knowledge, with the growth of social media, that those on the ‘inside track’ are skewing parliamentary decision-making and revelations of this corruption are now accepted as the norm. Therefore, after December 14th 2013, individual examples of this practice were no longer listed.

Today, award-winning journalist Owen Walker has once again highlighted the close relationships between politicians and investment fund managers

Mr Walker is a commissioning editor for the Financial Times, selecting and commissioning writers to write specific articles. He has previously edited specialist FT publications on corporate governance, retail investment and pension scheme management. Barbarians in the Boardroom, his book on activist investors, was published in June.

They bring stardust – really?

Last May, Owen Walker (right) quoted David Pitt-Watson’s explanation. This visiting professor of finance at Cambridge Judge Business School said that much of the appeal of recruiting former politicians is the stardust they bring.

He also pointed out the down-side: “If you take up demanding roles in addition to being an MP, your constituents are going to be asking ‘do you not already have a full-time job?’ “

Insuring against loss of office is nothing new; Mr Walker notes that every UK chancellor since 1983 has taken up a position in investment management after leaving the Treasury, giving names and dates.

In today’s article he records that asset/investment managers paid MPs at least £126,000 in speaker fees, thousands of pounds’ worth of hospitality and more than £110,000 for advice during the year April 2018-April 2019. Readers may read names and amounts by clicking on the link above.

 

 

And now it’s 2019 – time for change!

 

 

 

 

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Public trust has plunged in recent years as corruption plagues politics

A recent Telegraph investigation (paywall) revealed that senior MPs and peers, including many ministers, have given access to Parliament to spouses involved in lobbying for companies and campaign groups. Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland Secretary, and Sir Kevin Barron, the chairman of the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee (Telegraph, ‘sleaze watchdog’, are among 900 parliamentarians whose partners hold “spouse passes” entitling them to around-the-clock access to the Palace of Westminster despite their work for organisations that lobby MPs and ministers over policies and funding.

Transparency International UK (UKTI) has published a policy paper on politics and report on the Revolving Door.

They note that in recent years politics in the UK has been plagued by corruption scandals and public trust in politicians is plunging.

These scandals have exposed serious fault lines in the UK political system, and have raised particular concerns over the following:

• The regime for parliamentary expenses
• Lobbying of politicians by those who can apparently buy access that influences legislation spending priorities or policy decisions;
• The revolving door between government and resources-resources-business;
• Political party funding; and
• Oversight regimes.

They explain that the problem lies when it happens behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny. It can lead politicians in office to steer away from good government. Their decisions can benefit those who fund them. The public interest comes second. Special interests, backed by money, may sway decision-making and undermine democracy.

Opaque lobbying practices backed up by extensive funds at the disposal of interest groups can lead to undue, unfair influence in policies – creating risks for political corruption and undermining public trust in decision-making institutions. We can attribute this factor, in part, to the crisis of confidence in politics we have seen unravel in the UK in recent years, resulting in apathy and low voter turnouts.

TI-UK believes regulation needs to address both those who seek to influence inappropriately and those who are being lobbied:

• Money should not be a distorting factor in forming policy or gaining access to decision makers.
• Lobbying on any particular issue or decision should be visible and have an audit trail.

Such information should be presented in a manner that is accessible and comparable for the public, media and civil society to scrutinise.

The report on UK corruption by TI-UK revealed that the British public perceive political parties to be the most corrupt sector in the UK and parliament to be the third most corrupt. It concludes there is a danger that the public will cease to regard decisions made by government and parliament as legitimate and fair; this represents a serious threat to British democracy and ultimately, to the rule of law.

 

 

 

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