During last year’s US presidential election, the influence of lobbyists in Washington DC was decried to cheers at rally after rally from South Dakota to Florida, Nevada to New York. Whilst not such a hot topic in the UK, are lobbyists just as influential, and is their role a positive one?
As well as the professional consultants, lobbying groups could be said to encompass unions, charities, animal welfare groups, climate change organisations, industry associations, medical advocacy groups, single issue political campaigns and hundreds more. Most people would be astonished at how obscure a cause or illness can be and still have a staffed, funded pressure group with a set of offices and the wherewithal to lobby all 646 MPs on a fairly regular basis.
The staff in any MP’s office will tell you that they can dread the morning postbag and inbox, with the campaign postcards and emails that lobbying groups put out on an increasingly frequent basis. Many emails end with the not-so veiled threat that “how you respond will determine my vote at the next election.” Of course pressures of time and the volume of responses required mean that most of these cards and emails are never seen by the MP, with staff sending out replies as standard and impersonal as the original message. Unless measured purely in terms of volume, this cannot be said to be an effective way of conducting political dialogue and communications between MPs and their constituents.
Huge numbers of people are now employed by the array of lobbying and advocacy groups to head up these campaigns, and most are worthwhile in pursuing the goals of those groups and their members. However if those campaigns are successful, the staff need to generate new campaigns to make sure they stay occupied and employed. Few organisations are likely to say, “great, the government has done what we asked, let’s pack up and go home”. Ultimately there is a fine line between a need for a campaign and a need to campaign in order to justify the existence of a group or post.
Each week dozens of lobby groups hold receptions in or near parliament for MPs and peers, to mark a campaign day, a themed week or a report launch. Many lobby groups will hold at least a winter and summer reception on the Terrace of the Palace of Westminster. In the current climate, it may not be long before there will be questions over whether these events help inform our legislators, or whether this too is an area which needs scrutiny and regulation to defend against undue influence.
One area where lobbyists have an increasing influence is with the media. 24 hour news channels have an enormous amount of time to fill, and reports from lobby groups can often form the basis for a lead story. How many news segments have we seen which begin “a report out today has highlighted the need for government to do more…”? The public will not differentiate between reports commissioned by an independent and impartial body such as the Audit Commission, and one commissioned by a lobbying organisation seeking to highlight an issue and perhaps enhance its profile and membership.
Unchecked and unregulated lobby groups can have a malign influence on national debate. How often do we seen an easy and alarmist headline in the Mail, Express or Standard generated by organisations like Migrationwatch, a body never likely to press release a fall in immigration or asylum applications? Government facts are checked and scrutinized, but in the fast moving media environment lobby groups seem to escape the same level of questioning that politicians do over the factual basis or level of spin in their claims.
The constant stream of campaigns and press releases generated by these lobby groups has grown exponentially over recent years. Government press officers and ministry staff are kept busy with comment and rebuttals on new campaigns and reports being produced by lobbyists every day. The message lobbyists send to their members and to the public is “the government might have done x, but they still haven’t done y and ought to be funding z.” To the general public, this can translate as the government hasn’t done enough, hasn’t met its promises, will never deliver. The fear must be that lobby groups are, by accident or design, helping to generate a culture of dissatisfaction not just with the government of the day, but with politics in general.