spiked93%
How the NGO-industrial complex corrupts UK politics 91%
By Andrew Tettenborn0%
7/20/2026, 4:55:23 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 36 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Straw Man, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 86.9% saturation with 707 hits. Analysis detected 3,152 faulty-reasoning hits from 814 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 84.4% and a BS Rank of 91% (2,003 of 20,517 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 90.20% of the article peer group.
There’s a lot for British government ministers not to like about the Ethics and Integrity Commission’s recent report about shaking up the lobbying industry.
The laws we have at present on professional sweet-talking are conveniently limited and easy to evade.
Even where there is machinery for recording contact between government and lobbyists, it is so confusing that making sense of what is recorded is a nightmare for any journalist.
All this would change if the commission had its way.
The report recommends that all lobbying of government ministers, aides and middle-ranking mandarins – from WhatsApp chats to meetings at party conferences – is publicly declared on an easy-to-read database.
Even those who don’t lobby the state for money would have to sign up to a register.
That also goes for charities and pressure groups seeking to influence policy.
The proposed new rules would hit Labour and progressive parties far more than the Conservatives, who have long been legally obliged to declare their contacts with advocates for the corporate world.
Labour ministers and their departments constantly have their ears bent by the kinds of NGOs, pressure groups and the big campaigning charities that aren’t currently caught in the net, but they would be under the commission’s recommendations.
If Amnesty International, the New Economics Foundation and the like want to continue setting up discreet workshops with Sir Humphrey’s top officials – or whispering in ministers’ ears about the beauty of open borders, wealth taxes or transgender activism – they would have to be open about it and have their meetings recorded for our benefit.
This would come as a shock to the current progressive establishment, whose members have long acted as if the lobbying threat comes solely from billionaires and shills for multinational conglomerates.
But this is both misleading and outdated.
Today’s super-rich are more likely to fund a think-tank, or an international institute campaigning for a particular worldview, than to nobble ministers over an expensive lunch.
When it comes to lever-pulling, these organisations excel most in covert influence.
It is the charity-industrial complex – comprising many NGOs that are now sophisticated multimillion-pound transnational operations – that lobbies hardest.
So this potential shake-up of the lobbying industry might actually help the public, drawing attention to the role played in our political system by charities and NGOs.
But the Ethics and Integrity Commission could go further still in its recommendations.
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The boundaries between government and private-sector activity are now more fluid than ever.
Many charities and non-profits are only nominally independent.
In reality, they receive a large proportion of their income from the government itself, officially to help deliver a particular policy, but often to direct and apply it, too.
Many such charities have a distinctly activist bias.
There is not much difference between such organisations and lobbyists as regards their potential for influence on ministerial policy – they push for the policies they want and get rewarded financially.
So ideally, we need a requirement for all campaigning organisations in receipt of any funds from government departments to register this fact.
More importantly, they should have to record all contacts between themselves and ministers or departmental officials.
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And what about public-sector bodies set up supposedly at arm’s length to advise ministers?
The Ethics and Integrity Commission has airily dismissed any suggestion that they should be caught in the lobbying net.
‘Providing impartial, expert advice to government in the public interest is an integral part of their role and their governance’, the commission states.
If only.
The idea that, say, Natural England or English Heritage are just groups of well-meaning boffins offering the government impartial advice is absurd.
Both organisations see it as their function to put pressure on the government to promote a particular interest, and have no hesitation in doing so.
And that’s before you get to bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission or the office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, which have no compunction in putting pressure on government in matters often at odds with voters’ wishes – such as in strengthening the power of the human-rights lobby or banning the smacking of children.
These may or may not be good policies, but we have just as much of a right to transparency from such bodies as we have from any other group set up to promote a particular point of view.
We don’t know what the Labour government will say to this report.
More likely than not, it will be buried in the upcoming parliamentary recess.
But the opposition, from the Tories to Reform UK, should use it to promote genuine democratic scrutiny of an increasingly inscrutable progressive establishment.
Daylight, as ever, remains the best disinfectant.
Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.
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