Daily Archives: June 21, 2009

End the Lobby cartel

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One of the most pernicious conspiracies between Westminster politicians and journalists is the ‘lobby’ system. In an interesting article in the Independent, Tom Watson, the former Minister for Digital Engagement, thinks that abolishing the lobby system is one of the first things a new Speaker should do.

Driven by the decreasing space allocated to Parliament in their papers, lobby journalists report only a fraction of Westminster discussions. Where, for example, can you read of recent debates on extreme solar events or addiction to prescription medicines? These and others were not reported because they were not the big story of the day – and all because a cartel of political editors convened over afternoon tea to decide that this was so.

Last month, Sri Lanka was the big story. This month, alas for the Tamils, it wasn’t. So Siobhain McDonagh’s debate on 12 June over the plight of 300,000 Tamil refugees was barely noticed.

The 238 pass-holding lobby journalists do not have an outlet for lesser stories, so they end up, pack-like, having to chase the same one or two stories each day.

Yet it is a stark reality of life in the internet age that parliamentary reporting no longer has to be constrained by column inches. The new Speaker should log on to see what is possible. See, for example, Ispystrangers.org. There you will read of discussions as wide-ranging as NHS provision in Cornwall and job losses on a missile range in South Uist.

The problems for the lobby are also compounded by absurdly out-of-date “you must wear a tie in the gallery” rules.

David Miliband has called for an end to unattributable briefings. He’s right. In the internet age there is no such thing as a secret. Over the next few months I will argue for a technologically enabled democracy, from e-petitions to digitally encoding each clause and amendment to every Bill. This will further open up Parliament.

Crack open the lobby cartel. Let in a new generation of online commentators. Share access to lobby briefings with a more diverse group of reporters. Rip up the lobby rules and put all briefings on the record. Do this, and a new Speaker can genuinely be part of a new era of accountability.

Can’t see this idea appealing to the Lobby hacks. After all, it would mean that they would have to do some real reporting, and wear out some real shoe-leather.

Manchester United’s latest three-letter word

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In an earlier post, I contrasted Barcelona FC’s sponsorship of UNESCO with Manchester United’s sponsorship by AIG, the well-known imploding insurance giant (now bailed out by the US taxpayer). Now comes a fascinating account in The Atlantic of how Man U found some new letters to embroider on its shirts.

When two executives of Chicago’s Aon Corp. went through their mail one day last fall, they each found a large package with a leather-encased box, containing, of all things, a soccer shirt with the company’s own logo emblazoned across the chest. The shirts appeared to be bonafide red home jerseys of Manchester United, arguably the most famous sports team in the world—or at least in the world outside the soccer-suspicious United States.

They had the red and yellow team logo and the Nike swoosh, and were obviously high quality, but they were just mockups. Aon, which is Gaelic for “Oneness,” had no relationship with the team. It doesn’t even have anything to do with its own hometown teams, the Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls, or Bears.

That overture led, eight months later, to a sponsorship and marketing deal in which AON paid a reported $130 million in exchange for having its logo on the jersey. The story of how this deal came about, and the benefits each party derives from it, offers an instructive look at the world of international commerce, where in the quest for global success, companies sometimes find themselves venturing into unexpected but auspicious pairings.

Footnote: ‘aon’ is Irish for ‘one’, not oneness (whatever that is).

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for spotting the piece.

Parliament’s ‘transparency’ trick

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This morning’s Observer column.

Many years ago, the Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig coined the phrase “Code is Law” to express the view that, in a digital world, private fences erected via software can undermine public law in all kinds of unanticipated ways. The recent antics of our parliamentary authorities in relation to MPs’ expenses have provided us with an instructive case study of the Lessig principle in action.

Their chosen tool for controlling our access to information is the computer code embodied in the portable document format (PDF)…