Labour's lobbying problem
Conservative MP Scott Benton resigned earlier this year. He offered to reporters, posing as lobbyists, to leak a policy document before it was published.
The Labour Party is now in charge and would never do anything so amateurish. Rather than leaking policy, Labour is letting lobbyists shape it. This way, the lobbyists get what they want. Labour receives “donations.” And, everything is done by the rules. It’s a much cleaner solution. I’m glad that the grown-ups are back in charge.
The Revolving Door
The first thing to know is that the Labour Party and lobbyists are not two distinct groups. Lobbyists are Labour politicians, and Labour politicians are lobbyists. Some stats and examples:
At least 104 lobbyists ran in the 2024 general election. Of them, 49 were for the Labour Party.
Is your MP one of these lobbyists? You can check by typing your constituency into this form.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, there were ten private meetings where the chairperson was both a lobbyist and a Labour candidate. These meetings connected business leaders to Labour’s shadow ministers.
There are no standards for transparency. There is no regulator for lobbyists entering government.
Even CIPR, the lobbying industry's representative body, knows this is dodgy:
In our view any lobbyist, whether standing as a candidate or not, should be required to declare their activities. The present law does not allow them to register, and we believe that this has to change
Secondments
Private firms have gifted Labour £1.8m worth of pro-bono work since 2022. This means that, even if you're lucky enough not to have a lobbyist for an MP, their advisers and staff may be paid by private companies. The potential for conflicts of interest is clear. But, that didn't stop the offices of Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Jonathan Reynolds, Anneliese Dodds, Tulip Siddiq, and other high-ranking Labour MPs from taking on over twenty privately salaried individuals.
Why would a profit-seeking enterprise give away its staff’s time for free? What do they get in return? The benevolent businesses in question have refused to answer this question on multiple occasions. Tulip Siddiq’s behaviour in the run-up to the election offers us a clue. She promoted four manifesto documents, but only one of these was her party’s manifesto. The other three were the manifestos of lobbying organisations representing financial services companies. Siddiq is now the Economic Secretary to the Treasury and City Minister.
Appointments
Lobbyists aren’t just becoming Labour MPs and staffing MPs' offices; they’re also taking on key governmental roles. In July, Varun Chandra took on a government business and investment adviser role. Before this he served as the chairman of Hakluyt, a lobbying firm founded by former MI6 spooks. Hakluyt hosted and funded Labour politicians' travel before Chandra's appointment.
Labour has been keen to make integrity a dividing line between them and the scandal-plagued Conservative Party. Chandra attended Boris Johnson's infamous lockdown parties. His appointment risks blurring that line.
What makes Chandra worth all this reputational damage? A briefing note about Chandra’s former employer, prepared by civil servants and obtained by openDemocracy, offers some clues:
Operatives used by Hakluyt include embassy staff, former spies, reporters, and ‘well connected’ government and corporate people. A significant number of their employees are alleged to be recruited from the ranks of former agents of the British intelligence services.
Impact
In 2023, the party received £21.5m. Of this, £5.9m came from the trade union movement, and £14.5m from companies and individuals. Let’s examine how Labour’s policy is shifting in favor of these companies and individuals.
The financial sector
Weeks after it donated £150,000, the Bloomberg group met with Labour, who offered them “an exclusive dive” into its financial services policy, which they published the following month. Also present were NatWest, who seconded a member of staff to Jonathan Reynolds’ office. A lobbying firm facilitated the event. Simon Youel, head of policy at Positive Money, described the policy document that emerged from the meeting as:
A plan for financial services that reads like a love letter to Big Finance, with much in there that could have been written by the industry itself.
Tech firms
Tech companies have been heavily lobbying Labour.
Hakluyt spent thousands to chauffeur Labour MP Peter Kyle around Silicon Valley. There, he met with Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google, Apple, Oracle, and OpenAI.
Labour figures took £10,000 in gifts from Google.
Varun Chandra, the government's business adviser, holds AI investments while chairing top-level meetings about AI policy.
Labour, perhaps unsurprisingly, are now promoting these firms. They are ditching plans to raise their taxes. They are pursuing a law that lets firms feed other people’s copyrighted work into their AI models.
Carbon Capture
The Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) is a lobby group funded by oil giants like BP. They promote carbon capture. It’s an expensive, inefficient and unproven technology. The largest greenhouse gas emitters back it as an excuse to keep emitting. The CCSA’s connections to the Labour Party are extensive:
Their chairwoman is Baroness Liddell, a former Labour Secretary of State.
Their lobbyist, Joe Butler-Trewin, has held various Labour Party roles. These include being an organiser for Keir Starmer's leadership campaign.
They were prominent at Labour conferences in the Starmer era, meeting privately with shadow ministers.
CCSA member Baringa spent £34,356 to provide a staff member to the office of Darren Jones, now Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Starmer used to see inadequate tinkering around the edges of the climate issue for what it is: a delaying tactic. In 2021 he said:
The biggest threat we now face is not climate denial but climate delay
He has since changed his tune, pledging nearly £22bn for carbon capture projects backed by the CCSA. Carbon capture is a key pillar of BP’s foot-dragging “and, not or” campaign.
Conclusion
I could go on. Why is Labour trumpeting investment from firms fined over £300m and $2.8bn for regulatory breaches, as if these firms are not terrible at what they do? Why is Labour not closing the tax & transparency loopholes that they once vowed to fix? Why are Labour MPs’ accepting all expenses paid propaganda trips to Israel from Trump supporting billionaires? I think that by now you know the answer to these questions.
This party came to power promising a “transparency revolution”. It pledged to “protect our democracy from the flood of foreign money drowning our politics”. It committed to “reset our public life with a clean-up that ensures the highest standards of integrity and honesty”. They have no intention of keeping their word. Instead, they are now describing themselves as “the party of business” and, brazenly, “the first private sector government”.
This outcome was predictable. Starmerism contains little ideology. So, it’s a soft target for lobbyists. They believe, if anything, that the state should serve as a derisking machine. It should create conditions for private investors to profit from society's essential structures.
Up next
You have no right to know the extent of Westminster’s lobbying problem: The next article in this series examines the rules that shelter and enable lobbyists. It calls for reforms to curb unaccountable power.
Acknowledgements
This article would not be possible without the work of:
Vital and dangerously under-resourced, openDemocracy is more effective than Parliament's transparency regime. You can support their work here.
Ethan Shone, the best Kremlinologist currently working in Westminster.
Shone’s substack, The Dark Arts, is a must-read. But, you likely know this if you've clicked the citations in this piece.
