Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Meet the A Team - bosses Lord Browne, ex-BP, Arun Sarin, Vodaphone, Sir John Bond, HSBC, Sir Christopher Hogg, ex-GlaxoSmithKline, and their friends. Heavily censored documents, just released to the Guardian on the orders of the Information Commissioner, show how an elite group of multinational chairmen meet the Prime Minister for regular breakfast gatherings to discuss how government policies affect international corporations. Lord Browne et al were members of this group in 2003 when the documents released show that they lobbied Tony Blair to stop Brown, then Chancellor, from going ahead with proposals to tax the pensions of the super-rich "more punitively". As ever, their case was that such move would make it increasingly difficult to attract "the best and the brightest" to work in the UK.
A Democratic Audit literature review on power and participation in the UK, which will be published next week on the Audit's website, shows how both main parties are increasingly deferential to corporate business and, as a result, go easy on the earnings of the super rich and "non-doms". Robert Peston's new book, Who Runs Britain? The Super-rich and How They're Changing Our Lives, has just revealed that gross inequalities are growing unchecked, with pernicious effects; Doreen Massey's new book on London demonstrates the huge role that the City of London has played in the neo-liberal globalisation that swells their rewards and seeks to destroy the public realm. And here we have it, this secretive group, no doubt pompously categorised as "stake-holders", have a regular and influential influence on policies at the very heart of government. It is about time that government ministers declare all their meetings, and the subjects discussed, as a matter of routine. But there is a much bigger question than this. As Andrew Blick and I wrote yesterday about the stakeholders that the Cabinet Office recognises for government departments, democratic principles demand that we are all equal in our influence on government. OK, that's a principle we are never likely to achieve; but it is getting far more remote under governments that kowtow to big business as a governing imperative. And yet, as we are seeing at this very moment, business interests are ready to act ruthlessly to de-stabilise government when their tax policies are no longer seen as "business-friendly".
