This is not a lobbying scandal

I am not exactly sure what Patrick Mercer has done. He has clearly been up to no good, not for the first time. Whether he has been corrupt, well we will have to wait for the morning’s Telegraph to provide us with the details to help us form an opinion. However, the one thing I am clear about is that whatever has or hasn’t happened, it is not a “lobbying” scandal.

Once again the allegations relate to the behaviour of a politician, or as we will certainly discover in the morning politicians, not of a professional lobbyist. The temptation to blame the public affairs industry will be great, and indeed the BBC has already linked the story to the Coalition’s failure to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists.

But let me be clear the only way that the existence of a register could have stopped what Mercer is alleged to have done  (which for those of you aren’t aware is to have been paid to promote the interests of Fuji in parliament, specifically advocating for its re-admittance into the Commonwealth), is that he could have checked the identity of the “consultants” against the register and might have found they were not bona fide consultants. But then again the journalists involved in the sting might have thought about that and covered their tracks.

A statutory register will not stop politicians being stupid and/or greedy. And that is what this episode reveals. Indeed all the recent so-called “lobbying scandals” have been about politicians either being incapable of resisting filthy lucre or of being guilty of hubris, mainly the former.

It has been a long time since an actual lobbyist has been found to be corrupt. That is because the profession is well regulated and goes to great lengths to train new entrants to understand what is acceptable and what isn’t. I am not sure that MPs and Peers get the same training.

p.s.

As I have written before, I am happy to support a statutory register but am a firm believer that it should not be limited to public affairs consultants working in agencies but to all those who engage in public affairs activities including in-house practionners.  

Let's have an honest debate

If I hear one more person declare that we need to have a debate (often prefaced with the words "honest" and/or "open") on immigration, I will scream. The reality is immigration is constantly being debated. I have lost count of the number of immigration bills over the since 1997 and it has featured in every election since I can remember (and I am pretty old). The very people who demand the right to have the debate, have in fact been debating it all the time. And most of the time they have been debating using bogus fact and figures and plain old prejudice. 

I made the mistake yesterday of listening to Any Questions. I should have known better, even at the best of times it makes my blood boil but yesterday was particularly fury-inducing. One of the panellists, a supporter of UKIP made up a host of "facts" about the impact of recent immigration. None of them stood up to any scrutiny. But they will be repeated by her and others, quoted by the media and before you know they will become gospel. I am happy to debate the issue, I just want to have a debate on the facts. So just to be clear:

• illegal immigrants can't claim benefits in this country because they are illegal - you have to have a right to live and work here to claim any kind of benefit

• Council houses are not being given over to "foreigners" - there is no automatic right to social housing just because you are an immigrant. A survey by the Equality and Human Rights Commission showed that only 1.8% of those living in UK social housing were recent immigrants (ie had come to the UK in the previous five years) and most of these were people who had come to here as refugees. 

• there is no evidence to indicate that immigrants are less law-abiding than anyone else. 

I can understand the concern that recent immigrants are accepting low paid jobs and so distorting the local wage economy but it there is evidence that anyone is being paid below the national minimum wage there is a very easy answer: prosecute the employers who are breaking the law plain and simple. 


I should declare an interest, I am an immigrant, actually my family and I were asylum seekers. I grew up in this country with racism pretty much a constant feature of my life - some was unconscious and easily overlooked but lots was overt and scary. It has got better but it still exists and I really do worry that trying to pin our current economic woes on immigrants - for that is what is happening - will encourage racists.  We cannot let that happen. 

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