This morning’s Sunday Times contains a report of a “sting” operation carried out by the paper and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, in which a number of MPs were filmed offering their services to a fictitious lobbying company.
The report contains specific allegations against three retiring Labour Members, Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt. The charges against Byers, a former cabinet minister under Tony Blair, are the most serious and startling.
According to the Times, Byers, who said that he was “a bit like a sort of cab for hire”, made two specific claims.
First, he said that, after he had intervened on behalf of Tesco, Peter Mandelson (whose friendship Byers considered to be a “trump card”) arranged for a burdensome proposed food labelling regulation to be changed.
Second, he claimed that he had acted on behalf of rail company, National Express, when it was trying to negotiate its way out of the loss-making East coast line franchise:
“So between you and I, I then spoke to Andrew Adonis, the transport secretary, and said, ‘Andrew, look, they’ve got a huge problem. Is there a way out of this?’ And then we, we sort of worked together — basically, the way he was comfortable doing it and you have to keep this very confidential yourself.
“He [Adonis] said we shouldn’t be involved in the detailed negotiation between his civil servants and National Express but we can give them a broad steer. So we basically got to a situation where we agreed with Andrew he would publicly be very critical of National Express and talk about, ‘I’m going to strip you of the franchise’ and be very gung-ho.
“And we said we will live with that and we won’t challenge you in the court, provided you then let us out by December, by the end of the year, and we can keep the other two franchises for a little longer. So, and that’s what we managed to do.”
Both these claims, if true, go to the very heart of the way this Government does business.
They may, of course, be wholly untrue and a complete fantasy on the part of Stephen Byers. However, there can be no doubt that both Lords Mandelson and Adonis should clarify their positions as a matter of absolute priority.
The issue is, do I believe that they could do it? The answer is that I believe that they could and would.
If true it is a final nail in the coffin of what we call democracy, especially with what we read about Tony Blair’s wheeling and dealing to keep his Iraq business interests quiet.
Is the World going mad?
Well the dispatches thing was the funniest thing I’ve seen on TV for ages…
Can anyone doubt that government of ANY colour is ruled by business?
We will never have a democratic people’s government until we are able to divorce business and lobbying from Westminster and local government. How can this be achieved I wonder?
One of the biggest and most profitable businesses, next to oil, is the mass production of weapons of mass destruction of which the U.K. is a major player. Could the wars now being waged at the cost of the British public have been avoided if these two industries had no say in the business of parliament I wonder?
I wish I had the answer.