Let's all go to the Lobby

On presents, perks, and persuasian Westminster needs to get the public's point of view

The current scandal engulfing the Labour Party around gifts and donations is a failure of their own political foresight and Westminster’s systems. The former is because Sir Keir Starmer should have anticipated the risks associated with these exchanges, and the latter is because politics as a whole failed to deal with and assuage the general suspicion around lobbying and more general distrust of politicians. Though most of the lobbying that happens in Westminster is reasonably defensible, the lack of probity around it only encourages the worst assumptions from the public.

The Labour government’s problem is less that they broke the rules but more that they made themselves a target. Through the last two years, the now Prime Minister rightly attacked the Tory record of wrong-doing, but in doing so, set himself up for a fall should anything slightly iffy emerge. He also failed to anticipate that the right, wounded from the election and with little to say in its aftermath, would come gunning for him and that this sort of thing would be an easy vector of attack. The lacklustre attempts to make “Sir Beer Korma” and the Rayner housing issue stick should have been forewarning of this.

More than that, however, Westminster has set the whole thing up over the years through a lack of transparency and rigour around lobbying and interests. As Stephen Bush notes, politics has largely excluded itself from the hysterical over-policing of gifts in the private sector whilst at the same time having a reporting system which inflates the actual cost of many donations in kind. It has also failed to understand the public scepticism around lobbying and general distrust of politicians, which exacerbates feelings around this, even when no rules have been broken. For both Labour and politics more generally, there needs to be a proactive approach to deflating this cynicism.