Strengthening Standards in Public Life — House of Commons, 2021-11-17
Topic: Mixed Topics
Robert William Henry Seely (Conservative, Centre-right): I am sure that I will not take up all six minutes, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) and especially my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mark Fletcher). Last week, my hon. Friend gave one of the best speeches that I have heard in this House in recent years; he said that "two years here is more than enough to know the difference between right and wrong."—[Official Report, 8 November 2021; Vol. 703, c. 67.] I completely agree. I think that this House has a new beast of Bolsover, and he is a rather improved version of what came before I will make just three brief points, if I may. First, the Government have apologised. I am delighted that the Leader of the House is here and there has been a certain amount of eating humble pie. I did not support the Government motion two weeks ago; I do support banning MPs from being political consultants, because there is so much of a grey area. Even with the best will in the world, it is too easy to blur the line into paid advocacy and the ethical problems that come from it. The only political consultant I want to be is for the folks on the Isle of the Wight, and frankly the only lobbying I want to be doing is on their behalf. That is what I will do in this House, rather than taking on paid consultancies, which are ethically just so concerning I understand the political dimension, but when we have a main Opposition party spending £2 million a year on lawyers because of a disastrous and illegal anti-semitism scandal, and when, sadly, some Opposition Members have ended up with jail sentences, we cannot approach the issue from a partisan point of view. We get a sewer over all of us, and actually, at the end of the day, it does not really work. It is a much better reflection on Opposition Members if they try to come up with suggestions that do not imply that everyone here is corrupt and on the take, because really that does not quite work The critical point is about foreign lobbying. I am delighted that the Leader of the House is here, because I want to talk to the House about that important subject. We need a FOLO—a foreign lobbying Act—in this country. With our foreign lobbying laws, the reason there are not more scandals is that it is actually quite difficult to break the law. A consultant lobbyist has to register, but what about a company, an upmarket law firm, a reputation launderer or an upmarket PR firm There is an astonishing, vast amount of frankly very sleazy lobbying, not only of parliamentarians, but of civil servants, former civil servants, former special advisers, former policy advisers to both sides of the House—it was happening under new Labour, and it happens here as well—and universities. We have seen how much damage Cambridge University has experienced as a result not only of a vacuous approach to critical theory and critical gender and race theory, but of a morally vacuous approach to taking money from China None of this is being registered anywhere, because we simply do not have a foreign lobbying Act. The Americans have had a foreign lobbying Act since 1938; in those days, it was to guard against covert Nazi influence, and clearly it has evolved from there. The only reason—I am going to criticise my own side now—that we found out about the good Lord Barker’s work for the Putin oligarch Oleg Deripaska was that he had to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the United States. Australia has gone down a similar route with its Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act, because of the threat of covert Chinese money We should be setting an example here. As Members of Parliament, ultimately the buck stops with us. As well as the political drama that we have seen from Opposition Members, we need to think about corruption in an advanced society, in which officials and special advisers have a great deal of power and think-tanks can influence things and have a great deal of power. That all matters. I wrote a report on it with the Henry Jackson Society—I declare, just out of interest, that I did not take any payment from the society, in case folks are asking. The Government must not only look at the issues that they are confronting now and the points raised eloquently on both sides of the House, but look wider I was going to touch on other issues, but I do not have time. Privilege, the use of artificial reality and the problems that that may cause in a democracy in the coming years, politically motivated bankruptcy—there are lots of interesting issues in the field. Either as part of an espionage Bill or separately, we must get to grips with foreign lobbying and its power in this country. We must understand that it does not involve just Members of Parliament.