06 Mar 2014 23:24:42
It is an attractive theory that taps into both a contemporary sense of political alienation and the tide of anti-corporate feeling following the banking crash. But does it actually stack up?
This book's big insight is that lobbyists are no longer courtiers at Westminster, but are an indispensable part of the court. As the state shrinks, they are enterprisingly filling the gaps. Got big plans for public services, minister, but don't know how to deliver them on the cheap? Why, the private sector has the answers. Don't have the expertise to draft this complicated legislative amendment – or the experienced journalists needed to find real scoops for your newspaper? Here's something we wrote earlier. Revolving doors between Whitehall, the lobbying industry and the media, each busy hiring the other's talent, only increase the dangerous illusion of being all in it together.
Perhaps the most striking chapter in the book describes how technology companies in America campaigned to foster a view that state schools were failing – in particular by funding a series of films about crummy schools and heroic individual teachers battling the system – before profiting from selling IT "solutions" to the new schools springing up to replace failed ones. Their argument sounds eerily familiar to anyone who has ever heard a Michael Gove speech: schools fail the poor, bad teachers are to blame, free schools are the answer, hesitate and you'll lose the global race. Is it a coincidence that we have since seen a Gove project to give all British 11-year-olds access to tablets, and a push on teaching children to code? Or could it be evidence of tech companies quietly hijacking public service reform for their own ends, possibly at the expense of things that might serve children better? It is at points like this that you see what a fascinating book this could have been. It is a shame it takes seven somewhat dense chapters to get there.
The story of how lobbyists exaggerate, distort and manipulate public opinion is certainly a fascinating one, and as directors of the campaign group Spinwatch – which scrutinises the lobbying and PR industries – Cave and Rowell are well placed to tell it. They lay bare the tricks of the trade, from "astroturfing" (whipping up what looks like grassroots protest against new regulatory threats, but is in fact a front for industry interests) to using thinktanks as "wonk whores" that can push helpful ideas. We see how the sugar industry has aped tobacco tactics to deny its product is bad for your health, then delay action for as long as possible; how public consultation is rigged to get the "right" answers. There is a frustratingly short but timely section on how Big Oil sought to muddy the climate-change debate by exaggerating disagreement among scientists, while the authors pointedly question how someone like Nigel Lawson – with no obvious scientific expertise but excellent City connections – ended up fronting the case against global warming.
But where the book comes unstuck is with its grand charge that lobbying represents everything wrong with politics today. There are ultimately too many questions here for which it doesn't have answers.
Clearly, it is devilishly difficult to find out exactly what was said or done in private by people whose commercial interest is in not telling. But if that is the task you set yourself, readers expect you to try. So it is curious that in almost 300 pages of dense text, nowhere will you find a lobbyist interviewed at length on the record; not a minister past or present, civil servant, or even a frustrated backbencher talking frankly about the pressures exerted.
Instead, the authors rely too often on tracing connections between obscure lobbying firms and big decisions in exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) detail, leaving the rest to the imagination. We are told that sinister-sounding firm X lobbied Y, and then Z happened – but the authors can't quite join these dots. Even when they are discussing the management of the Occupy London protests at St Paul's, which is surely central to any account of a battle between the elite and the 99% for control of politics, they describe how the reputation management specialists Quiller were brought in to advise the City on containing the fallout, but conclude: "We have no information on what they actually did." The press was mainly hostile to the protesters, they write, but "what role was played by Quiller in achieving this is not known". That thud is the sound of the exasperated reader chucking the book at the wall.
Similarly, there is a genuinely shocking account of the abuse and intimidation levelled at climate-change scientists by global-warming deniers, which caused at least one researcher to contemplate suicide. It is a clear attempt to chill public debate, and the nudge-nudge suggestion is that the oil industry is lurking somewhere behind it. But the authors admit they have no proof of that, although they say it often seems to start near campaigners with financial links to the energy industry. What you are left with is a pile of apparently damning circumstantial evidence but no smoking gun.
The awkward question ducked, meanwhile, is whether blaming lobbyists for political failure might occasionally be going too easy on the voters. Clearly, the oil, tobacco and sugar industries don't want their products restricted. But many consumers instinctively don't want to drive less, fly less, eat less junk food or pay more for alcohol, regardless of the public, or indeed their own long-term, good. It is not always easy to disentangle the vested interests of big business from the millions of little guys who are their customers but also voters. And, unfortunately, the book doesn't touch on the one inordinately successful below-the-radar lobbying campaign that might shed light on who is really to blame for government not doing the unpopular thing.
The FairFuelUK campaign to freeze petrol duty, co-founded by the political lobbyist Howard Cox, brags of saving motorists a staggering £30bn by persuading successive chancellors to put off threatened fuel tax hikes. Even allowing for hyperbole, that is a fortune diverted from public coffers, only some of it redistributed to struggling motorists (by keeping freight costs low, the freeze has hugely benefited business, and presumably hasn't hurt petroleum companies either). So is that a victory for the little guy, for big corporates, or a convenient win-win for everyone – except those too poor to run a car and reliant on a public transport system that could certainly have used another £30bn? I finished this book with a nagging suspicion that sometimes lobbyists don't so much silence the little guy, as hand him a megaphone. But perhaps that wouldn't have made for a book anyone wants to read.
