Not a backhander: in fact, Lord Shrewsbury seems to have been open in his dealings with the government and the firm for which he was lobbying. But the activity was not permitted and he should have known.
Crossbench peer Lord Shrewsbury may be suspended from the House of Lords for nine months after he was paid £57,000 after lobbying for the government to buy a firm’s products during the Covid-19 crisis.
What about the Tory peer who (allegedly) took £29 million under similar circumstances, then?
According to the BBC,
The Earl of Shrewsbury was found by the Lords Conduct Committee to have approached ministers on behalf of a company marketing Covid-19 sanitiser products, which he worked for.
The committee recommended he should be suspended for nine months, which is subject to a vote by the upper house.
He was paid £57,000 by healthcare company SpectrumX for his work as a consultant over a period of 19 months between 2020 and 2022.
In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, the firm was seeking regulatory approval for products including hand sanitisers and a walk-in disinfectant tunnel.
The peer approached ministers, including then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock to promote the company’s tunnel in return for a £3,000 monthly retainer, the committee’s report found.
He referred himself to the commissioner following allegations about his conduct in relation to the company in the Sunday Times.
Dare we hope that this recommendation indicates the direction of travel for members of either House of Parliament who are found to have broken lobbying rules in such a way – with an increasingly-severe scale of penalties for those found to have broken the rules, depending on the amount of money they took and the effectiveness (or lack of the same) of the product they were touting?
That would be useful with regard to that other case, mentioned above.
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It seems there’s a bit more to Robert Llewellyn than playing Kryten on Red Dwarf.
He also hosts a show on YouTube called Fully Charged, in which he has just delivered an excellent summary of why the UK should shift to cheap, renewable energy and away from expensive gas.
Yes, that’s right. Gas is hugely expensive in comparison with renewables. The only reason Liz Truss is pushing it is that she has surrounded herself with fossil fuel promoters who are (presumably) giving her reasons to support them.
And watch out for the sideswipe at Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new energy minister.
Here’s the clip:
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Targeted: Extinction Rebellion members – here protesting at a Murdoch print works – were briefly defined as an extremist group. Although they have now been removed from the list, Home Secretary Priti Patel has continued to refer to climate protesters as “criminals”.
A Tory crackdown on legal political protest was devised by a right-wing think tank that is funded by the US fossil fuel corporation ExxonMobil, it has been alleged.
And it is easy to see the reason: it removes the right of ordinary citizens to protest against the climate-wrecking policies followed by the oil industry.
According to Open Democracy,
Policy Exchange explicitly said the government should pass legislation to target Extinction Rebellion (XR) in a 2019 report that got the attention of Tory MPs and peers.
The report called for protest laws to be “urgently reformed in order to strengthen the ability of police to place restrictions on planned protest and deal more effectively with mass law-breaking tactics”.
Sections of Priti Patel’s controversial policing bill, which became the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, appear directly inspired by the Policy Exchange report.
The Policy Exchange report that appears to have contained the seeds of the policing bill was later cited in the House of Commons by Tory MP Steve Baker, who urged ministers to read it, and in the Lords by Tory peer Matt Ridley. Baker is a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate sceptic group that has received money from groups with oil interests in the US. Ridley is a member of the group’s academic advisory council.
Patel said openly that the legislation was intended to stop tactics used by Extinction Rebellion. The home secretary first pledged to introduce the bill just over a year after the Policy Exchange report was published.
Policy Exchange does not disclose its donors, but openDemocracy has uncovered that ExxonMobil Corporation donated $30,000 to its American fundraising arm in 2017.
There is much more information on the Open Democracy site (link below).
Circumstantial evidence?
Maybe – but then it isn’t likely that the Conservative Party, Policy Exchange and ExxonMobil are ever going to admit conspiring to silence legitimate political protest.
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Boris Johnson and Owen Paterson: if the prime minister was prepared to twist Parliamentary rules for this corporate shill, then he certainly can’t be trusted to clean up Downing Street.
If you needed proof that Boris Johnson won’t fix the culture of rule-breaking in Downing Street – because he is the problem – it’s in the way he protected Owen Paterson’s persistent lobbying.
Paterson – now the former MP for North Shropshire – was being paid £8,333 per month for 16 hours’ work as a consultant for health firm Randox when he started pestering then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock on the company’s behalf.
His lobbing started in January 2020 – two months before Boris Johnson accepted the seriousness of Covid-19 and locked the UK down.
And he wouldn’t wait for a decision. Here’s the timeline according to Sky News:
WhatsApp messages show Mr Paterson gave Mr Hancock Randox boss Dr Peter Fitzgerald’s contact details on 26 January 2020.
Mr Paterson said he told Mr Fitzgerald to “expect an email” from the health secretary, who contacted the Randox boss that night.
Mr Hancock then told Mr Paterson on 5 February 2020 that Public Health England (PHE) would be in touch with Mr Fitzgerald “directly”.
On 25 February, Mr Paterson again contacted Mr Hancock, saying Randox had not been contacted by the government for 19 days, while its test kits had been shipped to “China, Mexico, Ukraine, Oman, Tunisia and Guatemala”.
He added: “PHE’s attitude looks incomprehensible given current developments” and said there was “absolutely no sense of urgency”.
Forwarding Mr Paterson’s messages on to officials, Mr Hancock [said] he was “very worried about this… If we are treating other companies like this we are failing.”
Randox was awarded its £133 million contract in March 2020. It was a closed process – unadvertised and with no other companies being asked to bid.
In later messages, before a meeting, a senior official in then-health minister Lord Bethell’s office said on 11 May 2020: “Lord Bethell has indicated that he would like a 1:1 with Owen Patterson [sic] beforehand as well (who I understand is a consultant employed by Randox).”
This may correspond with the information we had that, a month after the contract was awarded, Paterson was a party to a call between Randox and James Bethell, then the Tory minister responsible for Covid-19 testing supplies.
We know that there was concern in July 2020 about Randox testing kits.
Randox was hired to supply 2.7 million testing kits – but 750,000 of them were withdrawn after spot checks in July 2020 found that some of the kits, supplied by a Chinese manufacturer but sent out by Randox, were not sterile and could therefore be contaminated.
The failure delayed plans to provide regular testing for English care home residents and staff. We later discovered that Tory government failures to protect care homes resulted in around 30,000 unnecessary deaths.
But in September 2020, Mr Paterson sent a WhatsApp message asking Mr Hancock to “revisit even briefly and privately” the long-term future of Randox’s involvement in testing, as he had visited the firm in Northern Ireland for the first time and was impressed.
He added there was “widespread exasperation that Randox’s achievements have not been promoted”.
Randox’s contract was extended for a further six months in October 2020. Again, the process was closed – unadvertised, with no other companies permitted to bid.
In October 2020, Mr Paterson complained that a story in The Guardian said the government “only gave Randox the testing contract because I’m a paid consultant”.
He asked Mr Hancock: “If it comes up, can you kill this once and for all as I know absolutely nothing about the contact?”
Mr Hancock replied: “Of course.”
Well, hang on a second, there. Paterson contacted Hancock to secure a contract for Randox to supply test kits in January 2020, then followed this up the following month; Randox got its contract in March.
He was involved in some way in at least one meeting between the government and Randox.
And after Randox’s kits were found to be potentially contaminated, Paterson went back to demand that its contract should be “revisited”, and it was renewed very soon afterwards.
And then, in the very month the Randox contract was renewed – at his urging – Paterson secured Hancock’s collusion in misleading the public that he had nothing to do with it!
Here’s the topper, though:
Also revealed was the fact Lord Agnew, who suddenly resigned last month as the minister in charge of tackling COVID fraud, warned Mr Hancock the government was “paying dramatically over the odds” for Randox’s tests.
So not only was Paterson instrumental in securing and renewing the Randox contract but the company received more than the going rate – in public money – for its services.
This Writer doesn’t blame Randox for any of this wrongdoing; it is a commercial firm and was acting in its interests.
But Paterson was clearly breaking Parliamentary rules on lobbying by MPs – which is what the Standards Commissioner found after an investigation.
Now, here’s why Boris Johnson can’t be trusted to end the kind of corruption that led to members of the government in Downing Street holding lockdown-busting parties while the rest of us suffered:
Instead of accepting a ruling against his MP, he tried to change the rules to get rid of the person who made it, and to ensure that corporate sponsorship of Tory MPs would be legalised.
Perhaps Johnson hadn’t seen the WhatsApp messages mentioned above, but he had seen the evidence that had gone before Kathryn Stone, and his first instinct was to use his own powers to make changes that override it.
His reason? We think it’s that Paterson’s penalty was 30 days’ suspension from Parliament, which would have exposed him to a possible recall petition from his constituents, who could then vote him out in a by-election.
Johnson couldn’t bear that – even though he had an 80-seat Parliamentary majority.
So he decided to change the rules – in all our faces – instead.
And now another inquiry has shown that the Downing Street parties were symptomatic of a failure of standards in the government.
Johnson’s first instinct has been to make changes.
Logic – and the precedent created by Paterson – tells us those changes would be to ensure nobody ever again finds out what goes on in Downing Street, or to put that address above the law that affects every other location in the UK.
That is why Johnson is the problem. And that’s why he has to go.
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Is this another example of jobs for the Tory boys?
And why was a lobbyist being given access to All-Party Parliamentary Groups?
There needs to be an investigation into this – and the other allegations against Karl McCartney (but there probably won’t be, in Boris Johnson’s unaccountable fascist dictatorship).
A Tory MP handed thousands of pounds worth of paid roles to a lobbyist, prompting calls for tighter rules on cash and influence in Parliamentary groups.
Karl McCartney, the Conservative MP for Lincoln, was until last month, chair or vice chair of seven sport-related All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPG) – bodies set up to allow MPs to discuss a particular subject or interest.
And on each group chaired by Mr McCartney, Three Lines Sport – a firm run by lobbyist Mark Ramsdale – is listed as Secretary.
According to records held by Parliament, Mr Ramsdale’s firm is paid through sponsorship by at least five of the seven groups, earning him or his firm at least £90,000.
Meanwhile, a Business Insider investigation alleged Mr McCartney had used public money to pay a donor, and had allegedly “concealed” his position as a shareholder of his brother’s firm, Moonlighting Systems.
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Patel: if Alan Duncan’s claims are true, it’s no wonder she had that filthy smirk all over her face when she was told to resign from Theresa May’s cabinet.
“Compromised,” “deceitful,” “morally corrupt,” “contemptible” and “quite despicable” are the ways Priti Patel has been characterised – by her Tory colleague Alan Duncan in his new book.
Duncan takes Patel to task in the pages of In The Thick Of It, over her relationship with Israel – and her attempts to hide her ties to that country.
The former Foreign Office minister has suffered a radically different relationship with representatives of that country, as This Site (and TV news channel Al Jazeera) has recorded in the past.
He was targeted for removal from his post in a conspiracy run by former Israel Embassy official Shai Masot that was filmed by the Middle East news channel and broadcast in a series called The Lobby. Masot was later ordered to return to Israel in disgrace.
Indeed, it seems the Conservative Friends of Israel had tried to block his appointment to the Foreign Office post. How much influence did the Israeli government have in that?
Patel was subsequently involved in a scandal when she visited Israel under the pretence of taking a holiday there, when in fact she was trying to carry out her own foreign policy, independent of that of the government (run by Theresa May at the time).
She did not declare the meetings she held there in advance, so the discussions were not recorded, meaning we do not know whether she made any promises to a foreign government or what such promises could be.
Questioned, Patel tried to claim she had informed the Foreign Office about the meetings – by telling the then-Foreign Secretary. That would be Boris Johnson.
And she said there were only “a couple” of meetings.
Duncan wrote: “It is now clear that she lied. She had not told Boris, and in fact had a whole series of meetings.” They included one with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
He also wrote that she “spent a week there … without telling the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] or even her own department.”
As part of the meetings in Israel, Patel discussed handing UK aid money to the Israeli army to support operations in the Golan Heights – a part of Syria that has been occupied by Israel since 1967.
Or, as Duncan wrote, she “engaged offline with a foreign government over issues of policy. It is contemptible. She is quite despicable.”
When the scandal broke, Duncan wrote, Patel was “such a brassy monster” that she threatened to publicly challenge the prime minister’s version of events if she was not allowed to resign, rather than be sacked.
“It reeks; it stinks; it festers; it molders – all rotten to the core,” he wrote, calling it “exceptional pro-Israel infiltration into the very center of our public life” and “wickedness.”
And the woman of whom he wrote all of this is currently Home Secretary. Who knows what discussions she’s having now – and with whom?
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Snout in the trough (all right – bucket): perhaps the Conservatives should rename themselves the Corruption Party?
A lobbyist is running the Tory government’s inquiry into the Greensill scandal.
A lobbyist is running Parliament’s watchdog on lobbying.
And more people in public life are being identified as employees of the collapsed finance firm Greensill Capital, meaning their loyalties were divided between working for the public good and making profits for this private company. And this is just one firm. How many other MPs, former MPs and people in charge of other public organisations are also enmired in this corruption?
Consider this:
For those who can’t read images well, it says the government review of lobbying is being headed by Nigel Boardman, a consultant with law firm Slaughter & May – which lobbied against tightening lobbying laws.
It seems clear that the ‘fix’ is in – anyone who works for a firm that wants more freedom to lobby the government won’t find any corruption in David Cameron’s activities for Greensill, right?
Now let’s look at how Parliament got into a position where a former prime minister was able to insinuate himself into the corridors of power on behalf of his new employer and influence current ministers to provide Greensill with huge amounts of public money. Why didn’t the lobbying watchdog spot it and put a stop to it?
Hogan-Howe – now a Lord, and therefore well-placed to put in a good word for his employers – has only been discovered because of the focus on Greensill.
But how many other firms have their fingers in government pies via members of Parliament they just happen to have in their pockets?
And how much are our MPs and former MPs earning from second (or third, or fourth, or however many) jobs with these organisations?
Yes, there’s a Parliamentary inquiry happening, independently of Boris Johnson’s Slaughter & May-led whitewash, but that won’t go far enough either.
We need a full investigation into the current employment situations of all former MPs. Do they work for firms that have government contracts and, if so, how were those contracts secured?
Let’s find out how deep the rot has set in.
Because if we don’t – and if we don’t then clear it all out – then we may as well accept that Tory corruption is here to stay; it isn’t only part of the fabric of political life – it is the heart of the UK’s politics.
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Cameron: we used to joke about him often having spit dribbling down his chin – maybe he was salivating at the thought of all the money he was (allegedly) lining up for himself post-premiership.
Remember the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act that David Cameron forced on us, back in 2014?
Some of us called it the “Gagging Act” because we knew it was about preventing some organisations and individuals from having a voice in Westminster.
You see, the remit of the lobbying and non-party campaigning part of the act was extremely narrow.
Of course, this meant it also allowed others to carry on bending the ears of government ministers, and I seem to recall that concerns were raised about high-level MPs receiving payoffs from these people in return for privileged access…
…Or indeed, taking jobs for these people – as seems to be the case with former Prime Minister David Cameron.
We need to get our ducks in the right row here, though: Lex Greensill, of financial services firm Greensill Capital, is alleged to have been afforded privileged access to government departments in 2012, two years before the Lobbying Act became law. That would not have been illegal at the time – would it?
Apparently Greensill had been promoting a financial product for pharmacists – The Pharmacy Early Payment Scheme, announced in 2012, that saw banks swiftly reimburse pharmacists for providing NHS prescriptions, for a fee, before recovering the money from the government.
Greensill Capital went on to provide funds for the scheme.
It was later accredited to supply lending under the government’s Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS), before Greensill went bust.
The dodgy part is Cameron’s role. He would have been responsible for giving Greensill privileged access in 2012.
He would have been able to ensure that the 2014 law did not affect that privileged position – by narrowing criteria to make sure that Greensill didn’t have to appear on the register of lobbyists, perhaps.
He definitely joined Greensill – as a lobbyist – in 2018 and lobbied on behalf of that firm. The Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, investigating, has ruled that Cameron’s activities did not fall within the criteria that required him to be registered as one – according to rules laid out in Cameron’s 2014 Lobbying law.
It looks very much like Cameron rigged the law to make it possible for him to feather his own nest. That would be a serious case of corruption, of course.
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Following the revelation that the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank is a lobbyist for British American Tobacco and for companies producing food that harms health – and also a major donor to the Conservative Party – does anybody remember this?
Priti Patel, the former International Development Secretary who was forced to resign after apparently conducting her own foreign policy in Israel, also lobbied for BAT, albeit in her former employment for a PR firm:
The employment minister, Priti Patel, was part of a team of spin doctors paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to help a tobacco giant counter negative publicity, including that surrounding its joint venture with one of the world’s most brutal military regimes.
Documents unearthed by the Observer shine new light on Patel’s work for Shandwick, a lobbying and PR firm that worked for British American Tobacco (BAT) in the early years of this century.
The documents, released by BAT following a legal action, show that Patel was one of seven employees used by Shandwick on the account. One of her jobs was to lobby MEPs against the introduction of the EU tobacco control directive, which was introduced shortly after the new millennium.
In 2001, Shandwick drew up plans to invoice BAT for 279 hours of its work a month, of which Patel’s contribution amounted to 100 hours. BAT was charged £165 an hour for Patel’s services. The entire team was on a monthly retainer of nearly £40,000 – a total of almost £500,000 a year.
Firms like BAT are major donors to the Conservative Party, while people like the IEA and Ms Patel were instrumental in pushing their agendas onto politicians – and onto the public through political discussion shows like the BBC’s Question Time.
These people betray the public trust because they present the desires of corporate bosses as the needs of the nation. And then you wonder why the environment is going to ruin…
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Activists are to lobby Parliament next month in a bid to persuade MPs to impose stricter rules on the assessors hired by private firms to judge whether people claiming sickness and/or disability benefits are faking it.
The First Do No Harm lobby on February 13 aims to expose the continued harm caused to disabled people by the Tory government’s work capability assessments (WCAs), concentrating on the repeated failure of assessors hired by the Department for Work and Pensions to collect and pay proper regard to further medical evidence, as needed to judge a claimant’s eligibility for sickness and disability benefits.
It has been organised by Labour’s Treasury and work and pensions teams, through shadow chancellor John McDonnell and shadow work and pensions secretary Margaret Greenwood, after campaigning by the disabled people’s grassroots group Black Triangle and other disabled activists.
The aim is to push for the principle of “First Do No Harm” – a concept that should be at the heart of any true medical professional’s moral code – to be included in the benefits assessment process, through a framework that “treats disabled people with dignity and respect”.
This would introduce new “safety protocols” to ensure that the health and lives of disabled people are not put at risk by unfair decisions on eligibility following a WCA.
The lobby also aims to push the Conservative government to bow to years of pressure to carry out a cumulative assessment of the impact of its social security cuts and reforms on disabled people.
And it will call for an end to the government’s sanctions and conditionality regime.
The lobby is due to take place on Wednesday 13 February between 1pm and 6pm, with the briefing from 2-3.30pm, in the Palace of Westminster’s committee room 15. The committee room can be used for one-to-one meetings with MPs or further discussions on the issue from 1-2pm and then from 3.30-6pm
While the lobby has been organised by Labour, it is hoped that MPs from all parties will attend – especially Conservatives. And they’re only likely to do so if their constituents demand it.
It doesn’t matter if you are sick, disabled or able-bodied – if you want your MP to attend the lobby, get in touch – for example, by using the website WriteToThem, saying you wish to seek an appointment on the day of the lobby.
One more thing: Spread the word via Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network you use.
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