Our elected representatives and the Government itself open themselves up to intense scrutiny whenever they speak in Parliament or send out circular letters. However they must presume that few of us can be bothered to pay attention to what they say or write or else they would surely think a bit more carefully before opening their mouths or taking to their keyboards!During the progress of the lobbying Bill I wrote frequently about the response of the coalition MPs in Sussex and my correspondence with them. The Bill has now been passed and so that analysis is over, but inevitably there are some echoes still to reverberate, some of which have emerged in the last few days and so I have decided to reprise the issue just long enough to shine a bit of light onto the comments of three of these 15 legislators.

Two of those who I wrote to have never responded to a mix of emails, tweets and even facebook direct messages asking for them to consider speaking to local charities about their reasons for supporting the Lobbying Act and perhaps also to listen to these charities. Henry Smith (Crawley) did latterly engage in a public forum on facebook, but made it clear that his judgement was all that mattered. Norman Baker (Lewes) who is a Government Minister and was therefore supposed to be consulting for 6 weeks in November and December ignored my messages and those from at least one constituent. On Monday he responded to a written question from one of his Parliamentary colleagues about arson. It is reassuring that Norman can reply to some letters, this was from an MP in the North West who wanted to know how many cases of arson there had been in his constituency. Mr Baker responded “The Home Office holds data on crime for community safety partnerships, but not for parliamentary constituencies.” This may seem reasonable, if a bit frustrating for the MP. However the issue of accounting for actions on a constituency basis was at the heart of one of the amendments to the lobbying bill that Norman and colleagues vetoed. Unlike the Home Office, charities do not run Billion Pound budgets and do not have 1000’s of civil servants and large computer systems to do the calculations required. However as a result of the Act they will now need to do so, whilst Mr Bakers own department will remain unaccountable, on the same criteria. Also on Monday, Henry Smith was writing, albeit on his facebook page. Henry was boasting about the plans his Party has to give us a Referendum on Europe and he shared the poster above with his friends on the social media site. Sadly Henry did not seem to agree that we should have a voice when it came to the lobbying Bill, so it seems to be a very selective offer! I confess I have modified the Poster slightly Henry, I hope this is OK.

Another MP who I wrote to was Nicholas Soames. I wrote at the beginning of November and in mid December I got a response saying my email had arrived and Mr Soames would respond when he could do so (despite the fact that this 6 week period had been set aside by the Government for consultation!). I received a standard response from Mr Soames yesterday on the subject of the Lobbying Act and amongst other comments is the response “I must continue to stress that an organisation campaigning solely on policy issues will not be included in these changes. These new proposals are only for third party organisations which campaign for the electoral success of a particular political party or candidate.” There is presumably no point responded to Nicholas, as much as I would like to, as he clearly does not believe in entering into individual correspondence. However the point is that the line between supporting an individual candidate, and campaigning on policy issues is very fine if only one candidate is promoting a particular policy issue. The reality is that many charities will be gagged during the year before an election if their campaigning aligns itself with a candidates manifesto.

The Lobbying Act will continue to be a problem for our democratic discourse in this country, it is a stain on our reputation for allowing residents to challenge our legislators. Perhaps even worse it will have almost no impact on the toxic lobbying that will continue apace. An example is the continuing involvement by food manufacturers on many internal committees of the Government itself, whilst foodbanks and charities wanting to improve our diets are left gagged for a year before every election.