The Lords on Lobbying

Back in 2005, the Government introduced a law that required people to ask for permission to protest outside Parliament. For many, this was an affront to our democratic right to make our opinions heard.

In response, the comedian Mark Thomas organised a series of “Mass Lone Demonstrations”. Hundreds of people applied for individual, simultaneous protests: some about environmental issues, like the need to reduce packaging waste; others protested about everything from “more modern art” to “ban modern art”! The point was that we should be allowed to make our point. It was fun and effective: the law was repealed in 2011.

Nearly ten years on, and with a different government in office, I’m reminded of the mass lone demonstrations by the Lobbying Bill.

This time, the threat is less tangible. There’s no outright ban on a physical expression of discontent. The problem with the Lobbying Bill, as I explained in previous blogs (here and here), is that in seeking to improve transparency and keep big money out of politics, it risks stifling legitimate campaigns in the run up to elections (for example our successful campaign for new marine laws in the run up to the 2005 election - see Nick Copping's image below).

The RSPB has been part of a brilliantly unified response from civil society, culminating in two reports of the Commission on Civil Society and Democratic Engagement (here). The Government has conceded on some of the most unworkable aspects of the proposals, like the definition of political spending and a tangle of bureaucratic requirements. And last week, it was defeated in the House of Lords on the question of whether staff costs should count towards the limits on spending.

So the bill has been substantially improved, but it’s far from fixed.

One of the biggest problems that remains relates to collaborating in a coalition. The bill would require every organisation that takes part in a coalition campaign (such as the marine bill campaign) to add the cost of the whole campaign to its own spending limit, if the campaign could affect an election.  The RSPB rarely campaigns on our own and so we would be caught by this.

Effectively, the wider the concern about an issue in the run up to an election, the less we will be able to collaborate. The strength of charities is often in our united voice: for example when the RSPB spoke out about the State of Nature with 25 other nature charities we reached far more people than we could have alone. These new rules risk reducing our common cause to a series of mass lone demonstrations.

The coalition rules are particularly risky in light of the other changes that the Government will make: cutting the overall spending allowed by 60%, creating a new limit for constituencies, and adding new activities to those that we have to account for.

Of course, the matter of election spending is extremely serious, as was the need to protect against terrorism in 2005. In 2010, the American Supreme Court lifted restrictions on financial contributions to federal campaigns. As Lady Williams pointed out in the Lobbying Bill debate, in 2012, $6 billion was spent in U.S. elections by non-party funders—an extraordinary sum. It seems sensible to me to set limits on the amount of cash that can be thrown around at election time and to have real openness about who is spending what.

But this bill goes too far in the other direction. The House of Lords has another chance to improve the bill at Third Reading this week. I hope the peers live up to their reputation as defenders of our constitution, so that at the RSPB we can build on our 125 years of political (but not party political) campaigning to help "stop the rot, protect the best and restore the rest".