Beyond belief

tim — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:52:35 +0000

Any sensible Labour strategist would do well to heed left MP John McDonnell’s call for the party to focus on policies rathern than personalities, given the Brown government’s drubbing over the past month.

The batterings which Labour received in the local elections and the disastrous Crewe and Nantwich by-election are inextricably linked to its abandonment of working people and its clammy embrace of big business.

Witness the furore over the scrapping of the 10p tax rate, the looming summer of public-sector strikes over pay and the mounting fury – even unto the middle classes – at the decadent money-go-round that characterises Britain’s boardrooms.

As the GMB union has pointed out, City bonuses have risen to a record £12.6 billion at a time when the financial sector is allegedly tightening its belt due to the so-called credit crunch, sparking suspicions that bosses are simply snaffling the £50 billion kindly provided by the generous British public to revitalise the sector.

The alleged City regulator, the Financial Services Authority, is already known as the Fundamentally Supine Authority for its weak-kneed reluctance to do its job and prevent the finance sector from imploding out of sheer greed.

And now we face the prospect of former CBI chief Adair Turner – a man whose career has revolved around lobbying for ever-weaker regulation of business – becoming the new FSA chairman, appointed by, of course, this Whitehall farce of a new Labour government.

If this is what Gordon Brown means when he declares himself the right person to “steer the British economy through what have been very difficult times,” then his MPs had better start looking in the jobs section of their local paper.

If anyone thinks that Lord Turner would lift a finger to prevent another Northern Rock debacle, or act to rein in City bosses’ excessive bonuses, or seriously investigate where all these billions are actually coming from, as GMB has called for, then they are either in need of serious medical attention or are members of the Cabinet. Or both.

John McDonnell has repeatedly pointed out that the Labour Party needs to rediscover its socialist soul and begin implementing the progressive policies that will help drag it out of the neoliberal hole that it has dug for itself.

Instead, we see a flurry of Blairite and Brownite lackeys squabbling over which brand of warmed-over Thatcherism should reign supreme and issuing denials and counter-denials as to whether any of the fourth-rate “personalities” among their number will plunge a stiletto between Mr Brown’s shoulderblades.

And, while they bicker over how best to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic, the ship steams happily towards electoral oblivion.

Putting a fox like Lord Turner in charge of the City chicken coop makes about as much sense as putting the fevered egos of Cabinet ministers ahead of the good of the working people of this country, but it appears that good sense and original thinking are in scant supply in Downing Street.

Legal Blow to Secret Government Lobbying

tim — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:04:39 +0000

The Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) has lost an appeal to keep secret its meetings with business lobbying group the Confederation of British Industry. The case has dragged on for three years and originally concerned secret meetings between the CBI and BERR, which was formerly known as the Department of Trade and Industry.

Friends of the Earth asked for information about a series of meetings between Digby Jones, then boss of the CBI and Alan Johnson, DTI minister, as well as a corporate jolly for senior civil servants and CBI staff. Last year the Information Commissioner ordered the DTI to release most of the information requested.

But BERR, including Minister of State for Trade and Investment Digby Lord Jones of Birmingham - previously known as Digby Jones, boss of the CBI - appealed the decision to the Information Tribunal.

The Tribunal ruled yesterday that most of the information requested by FoE should indeed be released.

Phil Michaels, head of legal at Friends of the Earth, said: "The Tribunal has recognised the strong public interest in members of the public having access to lobbying records and has recognised that transparency is particularly important where a group like the CBI has privileged access to Government to push their views. It is crucial that the Government now changes its outmoded culture of secrecy."

A spokesman for BERR said: "We believe that there are circumstances where it is in the public interest to protect the 'thinking space' necessary for good public policy formulation and to enable the Department to have a private discourse with external organisations."

The judgement reads in part: "In our view, there is a strong public interest in understanding how lobbyists, particularly those given privileged access, are attempting to influence government so that other supporting or counterbalancing views can be put to government to help ministers and civil servants make best policy. Also there is a strong public interest in ensuring that there is not, and it is seen that there is not, any impropriety."

BERR claimed that making such meetings public would have a chilling effect on meetings between it and lobby groups. The Tribunal said it viewed such possible effects with sceptism.

BERR has 28 days to comply with the ruling or to take an appeal to the High Court.

The victory is a big filip for the wider movement, led by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency, to force the UK government to introduce more transparency into its dealings with lobbying groups. ALT is calling for compulsory registration of lobby groups and a record of their meetings with politicians and civil servants.

The full judgement is available as a 44 page pdf - follow the link below.
http://www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/Documents/decisions/DBERRvIC_FOEfi...

CBI | ukwatch.net

Beyond belief

Legal Blow to Secret Government Lobbying