Futures Forum: Concerns for campaigning
Futures Forum: Concerns about transparency and lobbying continue in East Devon: pt 3
Yesterday, the Bill passed its first reading in parliament:
BBC Democracy Live - MP calls for more scrutiny of lobbying bill
Lobbying bill passes first hurdle amid widespread derision
, prweek.com, Wednesday, 04 September 2013, 11:31am,
The Government's controversial lobbying bill has been slammed by the PR industry, opposition MPs and the third sector after making it through the second reading.
Parliament: Set to scrutinise the bill next week
The bill passed its second reading by 62 votes yesterday evening, overcoming its first parliamentary hurdle.
However proposals to both create a register for lobbyists and limit the money charities and trade unions can spend on funding election candidates have come under fire.
The fact that the proposed register will only include consultants and not in-house lobbyists has prompted
Francis Ingham, director general of the PRCA, called it ‘a bastard of a bill – it has no family supporting it.’
Ingham said: ‘This is a bad bill. We will be proposing amendments to make it workable so any register covers everyone who lobbies regardless of who they work for.’
Lobbying bill passes first hurdle amid widespread derision | PR & public relations news | PRWeek
And the disquiet continues to grow, as the latest reports nationally show, again, from all quarters:
Does anyone support the coalition's lobbying bill?
Most interesting, however, is a comment on Independent District Councillor Claire Wright's blog:
Why gagging charities is consistent with the Big Society
Claire | Tuesday, 03 September 2013
comments (1)
This was sent to me by an Ottery resident, prompted by this afternoon’s debate in parliament on the farcical lobbying bill.
Minsters have been at great pains to reassure charities and campaigners that most of their campaigning activities won’t be affected. How is that for an admission of a serious and underhand chilling attempt to control of free speech. Even more sinister when one considers that lawyers had to examine the document with a fine tooth comb to discover the implications - and that it was released at the start of the summer recess.
The lawyers who have examined the small print, have a very different interpretation of the facts.
What other controversial document was released at the start of the summer recess before? Oh yes, of course, that was how the government released the draft NPPF in 2011!
They also pretended that the countryside continued to be protected, including the Greenbelt, hurling random insults at those who were telling the truth about the NPPF.
And look what has happened.
Here’s the thought-provoking article, also pasted below -
Tomorrow, the The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill is due to receive its second reading as part of a rushed progress through Parliament. Most of the charitable sector is in uproar over the possible consequences for charity campaigns – for example the Guardian today carries a view from a leading human rights lawyer that the Cabinet Office’s assurance that the Bill will not affect charities does not stand up.
The concern is that the wording of the Bill will drastically curtail charities’ ability to campaign within a year of a General Election – in other words at precisely the time when they are most likely to be able to influence democratic debate – by limiting their spending.
It comes at a time when charities have been under the cosh of a highly politicized campaign about the salary levels of senior charity officers; charities could be forgiven for believing that they are under a sustained attack.
At first sight, this seems to sit oddly with David Cameron’s much-touted remarks about a Big Society, in which voluntarism plays a central role in supporting the quality of life of the vulnerable. But in fact it is completely consistent with it, because of the view of charity work that underpins the Big Society rhetoric.
It’s a view that sees charities as ameliorating the collective failures of society, rather than challenging them – of dealing with symptoms rather than causes and. And discussions about poverty in particular are inevitably political – it is impossible to understand the causes of, for example, the extreme child poverty that exists in Britain without asking questions about why this should happen in one of the richest countries on the planet.
The point is that advocacy has no place in the Big Society view of charity, based as it is on an essentially Victorian view of philanthropy – in which support is doled out against a background of easy moral judgement about lifestyle choices and hard-working families, with its recipients expected to know their place and be silently grateful.
It is a model of charity that emphasises the moral and economic superiority of the giver. Advocacy challenges prevailing power relations and undermines the idea that getting on in life is a matter of individual effort and character; the language of the political class in Britain in 2013 is profoundly opposed to what advocacy means. The Big Society, deep down, is a reformulation of There Is No Such Thing as Society.
Or, to quote Clement Attlee, writing in 1920:
Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim. In a civilised community, although it may be composed of self-reliant individuals, there will be some persons who will be unable at some period of their lives to look after themselves, and the question of what is to happen to them may be solved in three ways – they may be neglected, they may be cared for by the organised community as of right, or they may be left to the goodwill of individuals in the community.
The first way is intolerable, and as for the third: Charity is only possible without loss of dignity between equals. A right established by law, such as that to an old age pension, is less galling than an allowance made by a rich man to a poor one, dependent on his view of the recipient’s character, and terminable at his caprice.
The consequences of this bill may be unintended: but they are profoundly congenial to Tories and Liberal Democrats and, shamefully, more than a few in the Labour Party. We have become a society in which advocacy for the poor and vulnerable is becoming a subversive act – something we need to think long and hard about.
Comments
1. At 11:38 pm on 03th Sep Conrad Black wrote:
Of course any organization would like to be both above reproach and criticism. Lately, bankers chose to defy ordinary mortals (sometimes called the electorate) and consider what they sacrosanct and above criticism. Some aspects of the behaviour of the EDDC, particularly with respect to planning, could lead you to believe they consider themselves above both scrutiny and criticism by only listening to their own (some say increasingly flawed) view of the world even when it is evidently absurd (apparently minor textual changes are actually major alterations, but not as they would know them?).
It seems that all governments feel (rather like Kings of old) that they rule by divine right, and that they, and they alone, have the right to ‘inform’ the electorate as to the proper understanding of all right thinking people.
Well it took Parliament quite a while to rest power from Kings. So should we be so surprised that they demand the very power they took from Kings?
But they are as flawed as Kings, rather than being above this sceptered sway. They cannot understand that a society that cannot question is a society that is doomed. Unless the electorate can freely and openly hold the elected and unelected servants of the electorate then there can be no democracy (either of the left or of the right). The idea that the presence of an election should inhibit the right to call into question is the most unbelievable arrogance of all. That is the very time when we must call political parties to account. They are not the guardians of the state, but merely temporary custodians who have to be held to account for their performance (or lack of) on the one hand, and undertakings (promises) going forwards.
So, by any judgement, you have to find this bill a proposition of state sponsored tyranny that exposes all parliamentarians who vote for it as those who support tyranny in preference to democracy.
I don’t suppose such a minor point will stop even one from supporting it?
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