An Article From Deidre Brock MP

The stakes were high going into this year’s UN COP27 climate conference, but the outcome has been met with widespread disappointment. Despite some welcome progress on loss and damage funding for developing countries, the final agreement included no strengthened commitments to “phase down” or reduce the use of fossil fuels. It's thought that might have something to do with the more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at this year’s event, a rise of 25% compared to Glasgow's COP26. Lobbyists outnumbered the delegations of any single country apart from the UAE, which is hosting next year’s event.

Powerful lobbying groups are exerting worrying influence on some of the most consequential issues of our time. In UK politics, a spate of opaquely funded right-wing think tanks have made challenging Net Zero one of their core objectives, and it’s well documented that the ideas of some of these groups, most notably the Institute of Economic Affairs, directly inspired much of the disastrous mini-budget introduced by the short-lived Liz Truss government. I recently challenged the latest Prime Minister on the funding of such bodies and that they continue to receive charitable tax status despite explicitly political aims.

My question was timely. Last month Who Funds You?, a project now run by openDemocracy, the online global magazine, published an audit of 28 of the UK’s most prominent think tanks. It found the ten least transparent bodies have raised over £14 million from mystery donors in the past two years. Some of these think tanks, including the likes of the IEA and the Adam Smith Institute, have had hundreds of meetings with UK ministers since 2012.

Our democracy is particularly vulnerable to shadowy funding from vested interests during elections. Bodies known as ‘unincorporated associations’ are increasingly being used to funnel money from unknown sources to parties and candidates. A spate of such campaigning groups sprang up in the days before last year’s Scottish Parliament vote, spending many thousands between them on digital adverts pushing tactical voting. openDemocracy uncovered that one of these was funded by the pro-Trump ‘Turning Point UK’ and reached an estimated 70,000 voters in the final days before the election. In Scotland, digital political adverts are supposed to carry an imprint detailing who paid for them, but none of these groups did.

I’m a member of the all-party group for Electoral Campaigning Transparency, which made a series of recommendations to the UK government for the Elections Bill, including putting the identity of these donors out in the open, strengthening the Electoral Commission’s powers and raising the maximum penalties. However, objections such as these were ignored, prompting the Commission itself to take the highly unusual step of writing a public letter to the Tory Government to protest plans to limit the body's independence.

Online political advertising is still a wild west and shouldn't be left to the whim of tech companies that profit from hateful fake news. Until the sector is properly regulated, it’s always worth questioning where these organisations whose ads you're seeing have sourced their funding and whose interests they are really serving.