LONDON: British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg vowed yesterday to bring in long-delayed laws to clean up politics, after four lawmakers were filmed by undercover reporters offering to push lobbyists’ agendas in Parliament in exchange for cash.
One member of the elected House of Commons has resigned from Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party over the scandal, while on Sunday a member of the unelected House of Lords quit his party and two others were suspended. Conservative MP Patrick Mercer had been secretly filmed by reporters from the Daily Telegraph posing as lobbyists representing business interests in Fiji, agreeing to ask favourable questions in Parliament if they paid him thousands of pounds (dollars).
In a separate investigation by The Sunday Times, the three peers — suspended Labour peers Jack Cunningham and Brian Mackenzie, and John Laird of the Ulster Unionist Party — were filmed offering to do parliamentary work for a fake solar energy company.
The four lawmakers deny any wrongdoing. Clegg, who leads Cameron’s junior coalition partners, the centrist Liberal Democrats, said the government was determined to address “the murkier side of politics,” starting with a statutory register for lobbyists.
“Let me be clear: It will happen,” he wrote in the Telegraph.
Cameron came to power in 2010 warning that lobbying was “the next big scandal waiting to happen” in British politics. The coalition government promised that it would create a register of lobbyists to make the system more transparent, but three years later they have yet to do so. And to the dismay of anti-lobbying campaigners, the register was not included in last month’s Queen’s Speech, the government’s legislative agenda for the year ahead. “Our political system has long been crying out for head-to-toe reform,” Clegg wrote. “In the remaining two years of this Parliament there are still a number of worthwhile changes we can make.”
British govt pledges reforms after lobbying scandal
