Lobbying for Hope

I want to start with a quote from Geoff Hoon MP who was speaking on the Today Programme yesterday about being caught in a sting.

“I certainly got it wrong, I should have known better. I have paid a considerable price since then for the mistake that I made in agreeing to what I thought was a private conversation. I obviously didn’t know that that private conversation was being filmed and recorded for broadcast and I shouldn’t have said some of the things that I did say. I recognise that I was guilty of showing off, I think that is the best expression I could use. I was trying to impress, I was trying to demonstrate my knowledge and experience, background in a particular sector.
I certainly would unreservedly apologise to anyone who feels that I have let them down. I have made clear that I got it wrong”.

Well thank you very much Mr. Hoon. That makes it all better doesn’t it; admitting that it was a stupid thing to do, admitting that it was wrong.
No. It doesn’t.

In typical politician speak he apologises unreservedly to “anyone who feels that I have let them down”. Would he therefore not bother to apologise if people hadn’t felt let down by him? Is he apologising for being an egotistical, money-grabbing so and so or is he apologising for being found out?
I don’t suppose it really matters how pedantic you are about certain words. Maybe the man is apologetic but I suspect that had he not been caught out, he’d have continued doing this stuff which, to me, does not suggest the most sincerest of apologies.

Let’s face facts. For all the grammar school and the Jesus College education, Geoff Hoon isn’t particularly intelligent. He may have an abundance of qualifications that sets him clearly in the top 5% of academic brilliance in this country but what else has he got going for him?
Admittedly, I’ve never met the bloke but he is one of those people who have that soporific effect. As soon as his dreary face appears on the television, you just feel like dropping off. He has no spark, no enthusiasm, seemingly no ability to connect with people.
Apparently, I am not the only one who thinks in this way. Even his constituency members wanted him deselected.
He offers no empathy, no sparkle, no passion, no creativity. He is a grey man who has had his time.
The only remote sign of intelligence is that he realises this which is why he was eager to get involved in anything that would give him an income post-election, merely for being an ex-minister.

Look back at that statement – “ I’ve paid a price….. I was showing off……I didn’t know it was being filmed….. I was trying to demonstrate my knowledge”.
Me, me, me, me and a little bit more of, erm, me!
Even after all of this, he had to finish with a reference to the fact that he was an ex-minister who had a mass of experience and that this fact in itself should be enough to give him a healthy income by sitting in a boardroom and yawning his way through a tedious meeting, offering a nod of a head at the right moment or going off and having a cup of tea with an existing minister to say that he had ‘spoken’ to them.

The saddest thing about all of this is not that these idiots have been caught out but that it is a timely reminder of how our political system works. This so-called democracy is driven by lobbyists who have a specific agenda that they will pay considerable amounts of money to ensure is at the heart of new legislation. It is a sad indictment on our so-called democracy that it is still power and money that changes the law and not the elected, and indeed, unelected members of the House of Parliament.

The mistake that Hoon made was thinking that he had both the capacity and the capability to actually influence people in this way.
I have to say, I have many agendas that I would like to bash into some politicians ear. I would love to have my views on education, for instance, considered by those who hold the ultimate power but I’m not sure that Geoff Hoon would be the first or indeed the thirty first person I would call on for support. I’m also not sure that I would be targeting MPs and members of the cabinet for influence either. Is it they or the senior civil servants that carry the most political and powerful clout?

It’s interesting that at the start of this week, there was the fantastic news from across the Atlantic that Obama had managed to secure the changes to health legislation that he has been so determined to achieve.
How about that for a difference? Here is a man who has an abundance of passion, empathy, consideration, sparkle. Here is a man who creatively considered how to ensure that he got the required number of members to vote without giving too much away for their support.

But it cost a considerable amount of time and money.
All told, from both corners of this spar, a huge sum of $3 billion was used up in lobbying and campaigning.
Is that not totally abhorrent? Does no-one consider the irony of such vast sums of money that could have been used to buy a few million life insurance packages for people who are going to die before they should due to poverty and social exclusion?

Geoff Hoon may not have been asking for such huge sums of money but the quantity is not the issue. The fact that our political system is so guided by the depths of someone’s pockets is the real problem. We confidently sit here and mock the Americans with their ceaseless budgets for electing a president whilst we have a block on the amount that can be used for General Election campaigning but what goes on behind the party line? Isn’t it a joke to call what we have a real democracy?

Of course, it wasn’t just Geoff Hoon who was caught out on the Channel Four Dispatches programme. He was joined by the delightful Ms Hewitt and Mr. Byers in bragging about their power and the stipulation that they required £5K a day for their services.
Does anyone have a new definition for prostitution, by the way?

“Dispatches” is a brilliant programme, one that I frequently forget to watch and surpasses the alternative on the beeb, “Panorama”, once the flagship of investigative journalism on the box.
However, even Channel Four may have some ulterior motive for going for these politicians. I know that is a little cynical but I think one has to question the motives on many things and what is driving it – that is not to say that I don’t mind this one being driven.
But surely, it is no coincidence that it was Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt who were calling for Brown’s resignation at the beginning of this year, and the fact that it is they who were ‘called up’ for the ‘sting’ programme?
The fact that another Anti-Brown with an ego the size of his North Tyneside constituency and beyond got embroiled in this does make you wonder who exactly was behind it.

I’m not really questioning Channel Four’s independence on this but there must be someone behind the scenes, somewhere down the line who knows a friend of a friend of a friend who wanted to stitch these three up once and for all? Perhaps Gordy and his cronies have more contacts and friends than we once thought. Michael Dobbs wrote the House of Cards as fiction but he admits to it being far nearer the truth than the viewer really recognised.

Anyway, Hoon, Hewitt and Byers are idiots.
As I said at the beginning, they may have the qualifications that make them appear to look intellectual but that is all. They are each consumed by egotism that enflames a single passion which appears to be a desire to perpetuate self-aggrandisement.
They are actually very sad and pathetic people, who have had a taste of power that has inflated their ego to such an extent that they now believe that they have a right to earn money beyond their capabilities or indeed requirements.

Of course, they are not the first are they?

The other day, I was sitting down and working out what money I required in order for me to pursue the one thing that I want above and beyond anything else. I reckoned at the end, that it would actually take less than £20K if I wanted to maintain my current levels of spend and far less if I made even small cuts in my existing outgoings. That’s four days work to these people!
And we think that footballers are overpaid!

Hoon, Hewitt and Byers are not the first to be caught out. Remember Martin Bell and his white suit marching into Tatton with his enragement and fury over the stupidity and inflated ego of Neil Hamilton?
Hamilton was caught out too, and he paid his price with the removal of power, though he did rather nicely out of it too with his potty wife and the desire for maintenance of a public profile through cheap and un-cheerful television. Okay, the sexual scandals and allegations may not have been desirable but hey, if you put yourself up there……

But I’m not bothered by the Hamilton’s as much as I am bothered by members of parliament who I naively thought stood nearer to my own ideology. Not that I ever thought I had much in common with the likes of Stephen Byers but he, like the others, were in the party that I have voted for all of my life. In stating that very fact, I am saddened. And annoyed.
Naivety does bring this to a person – a real and genuine sadness in the lack of moral integrity.

But there is another point. Once a red, always a red.
I cannot condone or forgive these people for discrediting the name of the Labour Party. There’s a bloody great big list of others there too, like the current and former Prime Minister. New Labour only has one word similar to what I always held dear as political thought, and it isn’t “New”.

But once you have always followed one party, there is a tendency, by default, to diss or even dismiss the others.
What Byers, Hoon and Hewitt did was wrong. What they expected to do was wrong. What others do in taking this money is wrong. Let us not forget that there are hundreds of ex-ministers and ex-MPs who are making fat sums of money by being able to “show off” to sad little businessmen who fawn over such egotistical twats, thinking that they are going to be able to influence government and legislation.

And it is here where I, a person who has always liked to see the negatives in the Tory Party turn.

There is a fabulous website that is frequently quoted in the Guardian that anyone who is interested in politics should look. In fact, I would suggest that everyone who has an opportunity to vote should take a look at this website.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mps/

At first visit, I went to this site to look for the voting patterns of MPs. Once there, I discovered a wealth of information about their earning capacity too.
It is important to note that this refers to sitting MPs only, you know, the ones who earn a salary from attending parliamentary committees and voting in the House, the ones whose job it is to represent us, the people in this democratic place of governance.

Just as a snapshot, take a look at some of the money that these people earn above and beyond their salaries, above and beyond the additional expenses that they seek.
Make sure that you have a hearty breakfast before you do so to ensure that you do not wretch on an empty stomach. It is not pleasant reading.

Take Malcolm Rifkind http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/malcolm_rifkind/kensington_and_chelsea#register
I’m not very good with maths but by my reckoning he is earning £14K in monthly earnings as a director of certain businesses. On top of this, he has received one off payments this year of £10K plus a quarterly pay of £7K from another company. Then there are the vague payments for newspaper articles and the free first class flights to the USA – and these are just the ones declared so far.

I don’t mean to pick on Rifkind, another insipid ex-minister but please can someone tell me how this is right?

Take a look at Ann Widdecombe who is earning a small fortune from writing whilst she is a sitting MP. No wonder she wants to stand down at the next election. Why on earth bother to sit on the green leather seats when you could be sitting at a computer following your passion to write?
Oh dear, Ann Widdecombe and passion in one sentence is not a pretty sight.
She has the foresight to declare all of her interests, including bottles of whisky and garlands of pansies but does this therefore make these payments ok?
I don’t think so.

In fact, if you searched through all of these lists you might be able to find employment for about 10,000 people.
I could write what Miss Widdecombe writes weekly in the Express for half the price, even less if required.
But of course, I am not an ex-minister so I’m not worth £5K for half an hour each week to come up with less than 1000 word commentaries.

It’s not just the Tories, there’s plenty within the ranks of the other parties that are in receipt of all sorts of beneficiaries but there’s big money out there that is making a difference to the political direction of individuals and that cannot be right. And even if their additional work is not consciously directing them to vote in a certain way, it could be subliminally doing so and it is definitely taking them away from the work which they are salaried to do.

And then there’s good old Dennis
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/dennis_skinner/bolsover

Not standing down because his heart is still there in the centre of a fight for democracy, one of the lowest expenses for any sitting MP and not a single declaration of interest because he actually attends parliament and sees that as his day job.

Election time is looming. The official state of purdah starts on Monday with or without the announcement of the General Election.

Can we hope for something better? Can we be aspirational? Can we dream of having a true democracy where power is in the hands of the people and that there is a commitment from those elected to do what they are elected to do rather than lobby and earn huge commissions from elsewhere? Can we expect utmost professionalism and commitment? Can we hope for passion that is guided by the ‘we’ rather than the ‘me’?

Can we have some truly gifted and intelligent human beings in government next time round?

I’d like to say “Yes we can” but it’s Saturday morning and despite Spring and sunshine, I am feeling a little less confident than I did a week ago.

Here’s hoping.