Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Hywel Francis and Paul Flynn

Tuesday 10th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Francis]

I apologise for not being here at the beginning of the debate. I have just come from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I chair. I congratulate the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee on the great work that it has done; my hon. Friend is a member and its Chair is in his place. My Committee was seriously critical of the Government’s refusal to allow any pre-legislative scrutiny. One of the points made was that this has been a terrible waste of human resources—Members and staff alike.

[Paul Flynn]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

We are engaged in a comedy, a Machiavellian game where the Government are saying, “We are going to put this right. We are taking things out of the Bill, but not until October.” In the meantime, we can ventilate here and grind the air with our words, but it is all to no avail because the Government have deliberately put the charities provision in part 2 in order to withdraw it at a later stage. They know about all the e-mails that are coming through. They know that all that indignation and anger will be ventilated here and we will ignore the main lacuna in the Bill regarding the big scandal identified by the Prime Minister that he said was certain to come. We remember his words: “Everyone knows what I’m talking about.”

This is about lobbying. We know how it works—the lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in the ear, the ex-Ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business to find the right way to get its way in the Conservative party. The Conservatives say, “We believe in competition, not crony capitalism.” Oh no they don’t. The crony capitalism endemic in the soul of the party is shown in the fact that those who have the deepest pockets can get the access and the influence. That is what is in the party and that is what it has failed to address. We have been taken in. All the attention on this Bill is focused on the attacks on lobbying by charities. Who has said that the main scandal in future will be the dreadful activities of the Royal British Legion, Save the Children and Oxfam? It is a non-issue that the Government have inserted in an attempt to distract us from the main problem with the Bill.

In the previous Parliament, I had the advantage of serving on the Committee that dealt with lobbying. Sadly, the report that we put out in 2005 was not acted on. In all the time since then, we have had terrible examples of the abuse of our Parliament and our system by lobbyists. When are we going to have a look at what happened with the previous Defence Secretary, who acquired absolution when he resigned from his job? We did not have an inquiry into the ministerial adviser who also resigned. We did not have any exposure of what Mr Adam Werritty was doing. What was he up to? Who employed him?