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| MPs should get their own house in order | MPs should get their own house in order |
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| The decision by Westminster’s lobbying registrar forcing Policy Connect, a not-for-profit company set up and run by the Labour MP Barry Sheerman, to register as a lobbying firm is a first (Sheerman becomes first serving MP to be registered as a lobbyist, 31 July). To his credit Sheerman declared on the register of members’ financial interests that he had stopped taking a monthly fee from Policy Connect as of May 2017. The problem here is that the House of Commons rules seem to have allowed the arrangement to continue for many years – it’s only the relatively new lobbying registrar whose recent inquiries have brought the conflict to light. | The decision by Westminster’s lobbying registrar forcing Policy Connect, a not-for-profit company set up and run by the Labour MP Barry Sheerman, to register as a lobbying firm is a first (Sheerman becomes first serving MP to be registered as a lobbyist, 31 July). To his credit Sheerman declared on the register of members’ financial interests that he had stopped taking a monthly fee from Policy Connect as of May 2017. The problem here is that the House of Commons rules seem to have allowed the arrangement to continue for many years – it’s only the relatively new lobbying registrar whose recent inquiries have brought the conflict to light. |
| It’s ironic that the statutory register – set up by MPs to hold third-party lobbyists to account – has forced an MP to register, something that was never its intention. The whole arrangement raises much wider questions about the paid roles MPs should be allowed to accept outside of their day jobs. Better, surely, for MPs to be banned from consultant lobbying completely. Parliament must now urgently review its members’ code. The Association of Professional Political Consultants was established in the mid-1990s at almost exactly the same time that Mr Sheerman established Policy Connect (or Networking for Industry as it was then known). Our raison d’être was to drive up standards and best practice among lobbyists. What a shame our own efforts to improve transparency and ethical standards over the last two decades have not always been matched by efforts to do the same within the institution we seek to lobby.Paul BristowChairman of the APPC and founder of PB Consulting | It’s ironic that the statutory register – set up by MPs to hold third-party lobbyists to account – has forced an MP to register, something that was never its intention. The whole arrangement raises much wider questions about the paid roles MPs should be allowed to accept outside of their day jobs. Better, surely, for MPs to be banned from consultant lobbying completely. Parliament must now urgently review its members’ code. The Association of Professional Political Consultants was established in the mid-1990s at almost exactly the same time that Mr Sheerman established Policy Connect (or Networking for Industry as it was then known). Our raison d’être was to drive up standards and best practice among lobbyists. What a shame our own efforts to improve transparency and ethical standards over the last two decades have not always been matched by efforts to do the same within the institution we seek to lobby.Paul BristowChairman of the APPC and founder of PB Consulting |
| • Anne Perkins makes an interesting case for similarities between Theresa May and Stanley Baldwin (May’s paralysis on the big issues has echoes in history, 2 August), but one point on which the two prime ministers are opposites is in their response to bullying by newspapers. Baldwin gained in public respect and popularity when in 1931 he stood up to the press barons, denouncing Beaverbrook and Rothermere for aiming at “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. May, in contrast, shamelessly and feebly appeases the Mail and the Sun, against the interests of the public, by seeking to scrap the Leveson reforms and ditch part two of the Leveson inquiry (into press criminality).Prof Brian CathcartKingston University London | • Anne Perkins makes an interesting case for similarities between Theresa May and Stanley Baldwin (May’s paralysis on the big issues has echoes in history, 2 August), but one point on which the two prime ministers are opposites is in their response to bullying by newspapers. Baldwin gained in public respect and popularity when in 1931 he stood up to the press barons, denouncing Beaverbrook and Rothermere for aiming at “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. May, in contrast, shamelessly and feebly appeases the Mail and the Sun, against the interests of the public, by seeking to scrap the Leveson reforms and ditch part two of the Leveson inquiry (into press criminality).Prof Brian CathcartKingston University London |
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