Tamasin Cave, Director at Spinwatch & co-author of A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about lobbying.
She says that it is a huge £2bn industry and is a ‘tactical investment’ for companies and the returns for them can be phenomenal.
Think tanks are funded by lobbyists as a way to get the word out from a more independent-looking source, and they even have ‘astroturfing’ — faking grass roots support by paying an army to phone and direct mail the electorate to get them to lobby their MPs.
And the Lobbying Act approved in March 2015 doesn’t go nearly far enough in establishing transparency to give the electorate any trust in the government.
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