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Follow the money – up to a point…

Sky News did well to investigate MPs’ links with a firm offering access to government insiders – for a fee. But it’s been less adept at unravelling the significance of their links to a host of health privateers, says SOLOMON HUGHES

SKY NEWS announced it was “following the money” with in-depth reporting of the finance flowing around our MPs. It was a good start, but for all the graphs and databases, it kept following the money half way, then stopping. 

To take one small example, Public Policy Projects calls itself “an independent policy institute committed to global public policy reform.” 

But it isn’t independent: Public Policy Projects is funded by corporations, using the money to hire Tory MPs to help them influence government policy and public procurement.

It looks like “influence operation” attracting privatisers, outsourcers and deregulators ready to spend cash to employ Tory ex-ministers, to buy their way into the policy conversation.

Theoretically this is what Sky News were looking for, but it just couldn’t seem to find it. Sky’s extensive tables on MPs’ money include an entry on Chris Skidmore MP, saying: “The largest single item Mr Skidmore has declared is £18,270 in secondary earnings from Public Policy Projects.”

It identifies Public Policy Projects as number two in Damian Green MP’s “top five sources” and the third highest on Stephen Hammond MP’s funder list.

Skidmore, Green and Hammond are both quite important MPs. All ex-ministers. They were the “coming men” once, though now rather fading.

Skidmore is from the right of the party. He co-wrote Britannia Unchained with Liz Truss and others, the bible of her supposedly free-enterprise wing of the party. Their book was very pro-privatisation, especially in the NHS, and deregulation.

Skidmore has variously been a health, business and education minister — but never quite made it as high as some of his Britannia Unchained colleagues and will step down at the next election.

Green was Theresa May’s deputy prime minister, until he had to resign over a scandal about porn on his work computer and a bad attitude to women who complained about his sexist behaviour.

He is chair of the One Nation Conservatives caucus, meaning he is a “moderate” Tory. They are also in favour of privatisation and deregulation.

Hammond was a health minister under both May and Boris Johnson. He was criticised by the advisory committee on business appointments because he took his post-ministerial job with Public Policy Projects without getting their clearance. 

The committee said this was “unacceptable” and “a breach of the government’s rules.”

Public Policy Projects has employed these three MPs and is also chaired by former Tory MP Stephen Dorrell, who was health secretary under John Major.

It is a firm offering “exclusive access” to government insiders — for a subscription. It invites corporate subscribers to meet civil servants, ministers, MPs and other “policy-makers” in what they call “our network.” 

A few years back the subscription was £5,000 a year. The current amount is presumably higher, but only available by request. In the past you could pay to get a breakfast invite with the health secretary or housing minister. 

More recently it seems to have relied on Skidmore, Green and Hammond themselves to press the flesh, alongside key NHS bosses and other civil servants.

Its funding “partners” include many NHS suppliers, including many drug firms like Novartis, Cerner, a major NHS IT outsourcer, and Community Health Partnerships, a company promoting PFI-sytle deals for the NHS. 

Public Policy Projects funders also include Amazon Web Services, an arm of the online retail firm running outsourced government databases, and The Trainline, a firm which profits from rail privatisation and the fragmentation of ticketing.

Somehow, Sky News’ investigation was able to identify the Public Policy Projects donations, but not understand or investigate their meaning — despite an avowed intention to look at “middlemen, brokers and clients” in political spending. 

I think it’s a problem of what you might call “centrist” media reporting: they can spend months drawing up the financial figures, but don’t always grasp what the money means — because the idea that corporations have outside influence on our politics is ultimately a difficult issue for corporate media to really grasp.  

Sky News stopped being a Rupert Murdoch-owned firm in 2018, and probably wouldn’t have done this investigation in his time. So they made a start, but I think they are still a bit too corporate to really finish the job.

Freudian urges 

THERE’S a psychological term, “the return of the repressed,” which also fits some of the weird tics in current politics. 

Freud argued that if you repressed your psychological urges, they would return in bizarre and unexpected ways. 

For Freud, lots of the urges being repressed were sexual, which might return by “slips of the tongue” — a Victorian husband might accidentally say “would you polish my cock” to his surprised wife. It isn’t really an accident: he thought he was asking her to clean his timepiece, but the repressed urge returned via this “verbal parapraxis.”

Corbynism was definitely repressed, with Tory, Labour and media leadership desperately trying to expel, suppress, malign and drive out what was a very popular and large movement.

But now the same urges keep bubbling up in weird ways. Bizarrely, while Corbynism has been reduced to a small number of MPs in Westminster, both parties are campaigning against Corbynism, so the repressed returns as a kind of negative image, an overcompensation. 

Starmer’s Labour spends half its time fighting Corbynism by regular announcements that positive social policy associated with the left has been dropped. 

The Tories fight Corbynism by pretending Starmer is still a left-wing leader in favour of taxing the rich and backing strikes.

Meanwhile the repressed is returning all over the media, as every outlet from the Financial Times to the Guardian is producing big, in-depth articles showing Britain is in crisis, the social fabric worn thin, decades of underinvestment, growing gaps between rich and poor. 

This outpouring of yearning for taxing wealth, investing in social care, increasing social housing, wages and so on comes from newspapers that spent the last five years demanding an actual reform movement which would have tried to do this — Corbynism — was truly evil and must be replaced by a beige centrist politics which will at best tinker at the edges. 

“Freudian slips” are often comic, and there is something laughable about these political equivalents.

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