I didn’t realise the extent of lobbying of MPs by the super-rich and big business (Picture: Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s happened to us all, hasn’t it? You get a billionaire mate to pay for your luxury holiday, but then you get mixed-up about which billionaire it was.

No? Well, me neither. But that seems to be what happened to the prime minister.

Boris Johnson claims that David Ross, a billionaire and Conservative Party donor, paid for his winter holiday in the Caribbean, but Mr Ross denies it. It’s not yet clear what really happened.

I was elected as an MP in December and to be honest, I didn’t realise the extent of lobbying of MPs by the super-rich and big business.




When Google sent new MPs tea and a mug, I was pretty surprised – so I took to Twitter and asked that they pay their fair share of tax instead. The web giant was accused of avoiding £1.5billion in tax in 2018.





Thanks for the gifts, @GoogleUK, but Iâd rather you paid your fair share of tax ð pic.twitter.com/vDkCacdBUp — Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) February 5, 2020

Then, a few days later, Heathrow sent me a food hamper. It wasn’t much, but of course it came with a letter that urged me to support a third runway at the airport.

Again, I called them out on social media – it was nice of them to send it to me, but I’d really rather they just cancelled the third runway, which scientists warn will accelerate the climate emergency.

These gifts of course don’t mean much by themselves, but they’re part of a much broader effort by the richest one per cent to influence lawmakers.





It was nice of you to send me this, @HeathrowAirport, but I still think building a third runway will accelerate the climate emergency and should be cancelled ð pic.twitter.com/VjySu3Xljg — Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) February 11, 2020

I see it in Parliament every day. There are countless receptions organised by big business, where senior public affairs managers get the ears of MPs and try to persuade them that changing this law or that – maybe cutting workers’ rights or reducing some tax on multi-billion pound companies – is a good idea.

And there’s even a corridor of dining rooms in the House of Commons, where big businesses host private dinners for MPs. Over a glass of fine wine and an expensive meal, they cajole and plot.

And then there are free trips abroad. Big businesses and the super-rich frequently pay for MPs to travel the globe, often with little pretext except to have a jolly.

As the legendary former Labour MP Dennis Skinner joked, ‘they never do any fact-finding tours to Greenland in the winter, but they do find ways and means of getting to Australia’.

There’s a more sinister side to it too. For example, the former Conservative party chair recently had a trip to Saudi Arabia paid for by the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This was at the same time as his government was selling weapons to the Saudi government during its war in Yemen – a war that has led to a humanitarian disaster according to charities and widespread allegations of war crimes committed by the Saudi-led war-coalition.



And lobbying by the rich and powerful goes well beyond gifts and trips abroad.

According to research carried out by Labour, approximately one third of all UK billionaires have funded the Conservative party, filling its coffers with more than £50million for their election campaigns. These people didn’t get rich by being generous. They expect something in return.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Conservatives have slashed corporation tax to just 19 per cent, one of the lowest rates in the world.

This is what lobbying by the one per cent is all about.

They have the wealth to buy influence over our lawmakers. But the rest of us, the 99 per cent, can’t afford that. And so of course government policy is rigged in their interests.

The 99 per cent have faced years of falling wages, rising rents and devastating cuts to our public services.

And after a decade of this, poverty is on the increase and now foodbanks in the UK are reporting record numbers of hand-outs. You know what? The number of billionaires in the UK almost doubled from 2009 to 2019 too, according to research.

That’s no surprise – the one per cent have lobbied hard for a government that works for them, not for the rest of us.

We need to end the ability of the rich to buy influence, and the only way to truly do that is stop wealth from being concentrated in the hands of the tiny few, and start standing up for those who truly need it.


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