- [Nicole] Hi, everyone. So this lesson, we're going to be looking at lobbyists and kind of general relationships with the state. The aims of this section are to gain a basic understanding of what lobbyists and think tanks are, and why understanding them can be useful for a campaign research. And I'm going to introduce you to some different websites and tools that can help you find lobbyists. And I'm going to teach you how to find donations to political parties, and the financial interests of politicians. 

So, yeah, before I start, I just want to emphasise, like this is again, we're trying to design this course to be as practical as possible so you know the kind of resources that we use, when we're doing research to kind of decentralise the skills, and I'm not going to go into detail about the kind of lobbying industry, or the PR industry, like all of these industries are absolutely huge, and they have multiple functions within kind of sustaining capitalism. But its most basics, lobbying is when an individual or group tries to persuade someone in parliament or influence the government to support a particular policy or campaign. Corporate lobbyists represent corporations or the economic interests of a particular group of capitalists. So there are lobbyists who lobby for charities, or for grassroots groups. Some people engage in movement work, that's lobbying politicians through protests, or petitions, or letters. 

But what we can see here with the kind of corporate lobbying industry is that their resources just completely outnumber us, it's an absolutely huge industry, which is largely invisible and kind of operates behind closed doors. Lobbyists will often be intimately connected to the media in terms of contacts and relationships and affinity, and they'll generally be able to kind of greatly influence certain narratives. Corporations will create an evidence base and lobby indirectly for their interests. So this, for example, it's by using things like think tanks, which I'll talk about a little bit more later, but let's you know, this is a really common tactic to any kind of capitalist industry, but maybe people are most familiar with the tobacco industry and kind of all the lobbying and the denial about the health impacts and the kind of erasure of certain science and of certain scientists, and like that was just to sustain this huge industry despite its adverse effects on people's bodies. 

So yeah, industry bodies will keep people with oppositional views under great surveillance, and strategically intervene with counter narratives. So, you know, I didn't really mention it that much in the security section, when we were looking at kind of digital security and Tor and Firefox and all that stuff, but a large part of kind of corporate surveillance is also by lobbyists, right? Like their goal is to kind of control narratives and counter certain narratives that could harm a company's profits. So lobbying is also highly digital, like we imagine it's just kind of face-to-face lunches with MPs, but there's lots of different aspects to it. But however, like relationships are power and who you know , which school you went to, the boys club that you're in, whatever, like all of that is really important and it's worth emphasising that there is this really like revolving door between politicians and kind of capitalist interests. And I've just put a little link in here to an article in the Guardian, like several years ago about how... look, it's just a bit more of an advanced overview of how lobbying works. 

Okay, so then we also have think tanks. So these tend to be like a body of experts providing advice and ideas on specific political or economic problems. Most think tanks are non-governmental organisations, but some are semi-autonomous agencies within the government or are associated with particular political parties or businesses. They're mostly funded by kind of capitalists themselves, so by millionaires, by donations, by industry bodies, by companies, and sometimes, they receive grants. 

So just to put this in context, this picture here, this is the front cover of a report called "Future Prisons". And this was by a group called Policy Exchange. So they were labelled David Cameron's favourite think tank. So they're were kind of right wing conservative think tank that were trying to influence the government's position on prisons, and their kind of proposal was to close down inner city prisons and build mega prisons, hub prisons, they called them, like regionally, and that would kind of enable greater technology and surveillance within the prisons, it would enable like workshops to employ prisoners, so, you know, prison labour basically, and it would be funded by the sale of inner city prisons and a few of us involved in different campaigns and projects like read this report, and it was really clear what the potential strategy could be of the state, especially because one of the people that founded this think tank was David Gov, who then became... Can't remember which minister he was, but he was basically responsible for, I think just in the ministry of justice. So he was responsible for bringing out this new prisoners function programme, called the Prisoner States Transformation Programme." 

So, yeah, so we had a little bit of a heads up, if that makes sense because we'd read this think tank report and I think whatever industry you're researching it's really useful to know, who the think tanks are what are they proposing? You know, I know there's different anti-fascists who will kind of quite attentively read reports from like far right. And kind of fascist think tanks, conservative think tanks to kind of see what the kind of you know, the potentials are of where people are going and what they're proposing. So, yeah. 

So why is it useful to research lobbyists and think tanks? Again, you know, this course is called know your enemy for a reason. Like, I think it's really important to understand what people are doing that we may be in conflict with and to understand the power relationships at play and how foresight about what is on the horizon like I've mentioned, and also to be prepared for like common narratives that need countering, you know you can see what ammunition is potentially going to be thrown at you in this kind of like war of ideas. You know, not that any of this stuff remains ideas, right? It all has like very real impacts on our lives, but by understanding the kind of narratives and the worldviews, I think it's really useful for understanding or just like informing kind of strategy in general around organising. 

Okay, so this is one little case study. So over here, a nice kind of indiscreet building. It's 55, Tufton Street in London and this is home to a small, but influential network of libertarian pro-Brexit think tanks and lobby groups and not the good kind of libertarian like the right wing libertarian, including the UK's principal climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. So it's quite common that people of a similar mindset will share the same sort of infrastructure. And, you know, again we're talking about relationships and networks here, and you can imagine if they're all in the same building how that's kind of enabling like collaborative working. So yeah. So I think that's really interesting. You can check out the link for more on that. 

So yeah, public relations in general. Corporate Watch published a report about "What's wrong with the public relations industry?", several years ago. So you can download on the website and it's just, again, it's worth in terms of knowing your enemy it's kind of worth understanding this stuff. So public relations companies can play a role in providing a desirable, acceptable exterior to damaging corporate projects. And they can play a role in obscuring corporate and government relationships and they can undermine protest and resistance and generally like spread misinformation. So yeah, these kind of groups operating on behalf of companies can be very, very powerful. And again, are going to have strong relationships with the media. 

So it's really worth kind of understanding who they are in relation to the campaign you're organising. And so how do we find lobbyists? So one really good useful website is called Powerbase, we're going to check out now. So yeah, Powerbase is free guide to networks of power lobbying, public relations. And yeah, it's a project of public interest investigations and Spinwatch. So they have like these little portals, which kind of give you an overview of different lobbyists. So this is one for example, about the Arms trade. So it will share with you like, these are some key Arms trade fairs. These are some of the All Parliamentary ... All-Party Parliamentary Groups, which are kind of... They're meant to be kind of like whole, we're consulting with experts in the field, but actually they're just kind of like lobbying groups, different government organisations, different companies. I don't know what's happened to their lobbying map, but you can see some of the lobbyists on the side here. So some people that used to work in the Arms trade... like that used to work in the government, who now work in Arms trade and yeah. They call them here military revolvers. So people that used to be in the army that are now working in the kind of private defence industry. Let's see if we can get another database of that works. Alcohol. Yeah. So anyway, so all of these portals like all have different kind of information communicated. So yeah, here we go. Brexit portal, So these were some of the lobbying groups, economists for free trade, lobbyists for hire, some of the biggest donors. So yeah. So again, really useful research that can give you a bit of a headstart in finding out who the lobbyists are. Okay. And then I know not everyone doing this course is from the UK. So there's a website here where you can find like similar information about lobbying the United States. Okay. So then we're going to look at the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists. They have a mouthful. All right. Okay. So yeah, you know, the government is saying it's all about transparency la la la, but what is going on here? If you click on it, is you get a little convenient list of lobbyists. Now you don't have to be registered on here. So, you know, lots of protest groups wouldn't be lobbied wouldn't be registered as a consultant lobbyist. However, they are trying to encourage people after this new legislation was brought in about transparency of lobbying, in 2014. So yeah, what you've got here, is you've got a little overview of companies. So I don't know any of these, but say... Oh yeah, I clicked on here before. Brunswick Group LLP, limited liability partnership. If you can remember that from company structures. So yeah. They'll often have a link to the website, so that's useful. So this crew have represented Dixons Carphone, so yeah. And you can see their previous clients if you click on here, you can also search via clients. So see if we recognise any of these. Okay, so Airbnb, let's see who they've paid to lobby for them. Fleetwood Strategy Limited. So there you go. If you are researching gentrification and Airbnb, you might want to look up this lobbyist. Okay. So again, come back to your research goals, have a play, see what is most relevant and most interesting to you. Okay, I've put some screenshots in there. All right. So the next thing is this register of members financial interests. So this provides information about any financial interests which a member of parliament has, which others might reasonably consider to influence his or her actions or words as a member of parliament, includes any benefit that they receive. So I've already got this up. So again, this is a government website and it's meant to kind of share the benefits that politicians receive. So I clicked on 2019 and I got to this one and then I clicked the HTML version, and you can see a little ATC guide of politicians. And I just clicked the top one. So Diane Abbott, and we can see here that she received hundred pounds from the guardian, 258 pounds from the guardian, 200 pounds from the BBC. And yeah, that's about it. It's not that much down, there is... Maybe there's other people, let's see. Yeah. Anyway, you get the idea. You can look at any politician you want and there we go. So Nigel Adams has actually received a donation of 10,000 pounds, a private one. And you can see, look compared to Diane Abbott, there's loads of bigger donations here. So yeah. So anyway, it's, you know... Again, come back to your research goals. It might not be relevant to you, so don't waste your time looking at it. But if it is then it's definitely a useful resource. Okay. So next thing I was going to introduce was the Electoral Commission. So this is looking at kind of donations and yeah gifts to political parties. So we'll just look at that one here. Okay. So you can look at campaign spending, You can look at donations and loans. You can look at how much political parties have spent, annual accounts. So let's have a look at some donations. Your donations or loans. Okay. So, yeah. So you'll have different donors that will be regulated. So Jeremy Hunt here, you can see has been given 15,000 pounds by AQUIND Limited. Who are AQUIND Limited? Let's have a little gander. Okay, lets have a look. Okay. Connecting the UK and French electric power grids. So, see what happened to my internet. This is what my life is like. Okay. So AQUIND Limited is... It looks like it's a kind of utility thing, but maybe you know, maybe he's going to be making some sort of decision about who's going to award a contract for developing the grid or something like, who knows, obviously you need to look into this a lot more detail. But it's really useful to see different MPs and the kind of donations they've received. You can also look at how much, like an actual political party... Oh my Internet's frozen, So I'm just going to close that. You can also see how much kind of political parties received in general and yeah. See how much they've spent when they're trying to get elected or whatever. And again, only use it if it's relevant to your research goals. So again, practical, practical, practical, take a look at your research goals, revisit some of these links. See if you can find anything interesting. Add them to your mind maps, add them to your documents and yeah, I'll see you in the next lesson.