Olympic sponsorship deals with Air France, Toyota and ArcelorMittal will produce more emissions than eight coal plants running for an entire year, a new Badvertising report shows.
At the end of this month, the French capital will host humanity’s biggest and brightest celebrations of sport: the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The hype ahead of these games — the 33rd — is palpable and the organisers have promised to deliver a Games like no other.
Sustainability has been central to this promise. As humanity begins to stare down one of the greatest upheavals of the 21st century — the planetary crises of global heating and ecological catastrophe — the Games are under pressure. Almost every Olympic host nation of the recent era has promised big on environmental action, and every one has fallen short, under-delivering. For all of London’s promises back in 2012, having BP as a sponsor augured badly all along.
The question for Paris is, can it buck the trend and give the world a glimpse of what a mega sports event must look like in the era of breaking planetary ecological boundaries?
Pressure is not just coming from fans and the public. Olympians and Paralympians are increasingly speaking out about the lethal competing conditions that climate breakdown is creating. And the pioneering environmental leadership of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo raises expectations on those organising the Games. A major programme of urban greening and traffic reduction is under way thanks to Hidalgo which, earlier this year, also saw Parisians vote to increase charges on SUVs in the city.
But there continues to be the prospect of Olympic smoke rings made from fossil fuels hanging over the organisers’ ambitions to deliver the ‘greenest ever games’: the pervasive presence of polluting sponsors that use the Games to raise their profile, normalise high carbon products and lifestyles with billions of people, while distracting from their complicity in the worsening climate and ecological crises. At the Paris Games, just three of the sponsorship deals, those with Air France, Toyota and steelmaker ArcelorMittal, will produce more pollution than eight coal plants running for an entire year, according to new research from the Badvertising campaign ‘Olympic Smoke Rings’.
Fossil Fuel Playbook
At a larger level the oil-dependent aviation and vehicle industries have used a similar playbook to the fossil fuel companies. They’ve lobbied against climate action, sought to evade responsibility for their own pollution, and when pushed produced plans that are wildly inadequate in the face of the climate action needed. In specific, large-scale examples, some vehicle makers have been caught illegally cheating on emissions, while the aviation industry globally ignores half of its climate impact and has no realistic plans to deal with the other half.
These sectors, and the major companies within them, are responsible for a large part of global heating — and the organisers of the Games make themselves complicit through allowing the Olympics to be used for their promotion.
Historically, the Olympics has taken sponsorship from multiple oil and gas companies, airlines and vehicle makers. Fast forward to the Paris Games and little has changed. Three major polluters at these Games are not only responsible for enough carbon emissions and air pollution to make the eyes water of all the athletes and fans attending, they have also actively lobbied against ambitious climate policy and hoovered up public subsidies on the premise of decarbonisation.
Air France (an entity merged with Dutch airline KLM) continues to lobby against higher taxes or decarbonisation initiatives within the aviation sector. CEO Ben Smith argued that an EU kerosene tax would “have a negative impact on Europe’s air transport sector”. And, Air France-KLM strongly fought the proposed flight cap at the Netherlands’ Schiphol airport and took legal action against the measure.
Toyota boasts annual CO2 emissions higher than most oil and gas companies, and has production plans that will see the company overshoot Paris-aligned emissions targets by as much as 184 percent. Badvertising’s previous report, Dangerous Driving, detailed how Toyota is also ranked amongst the worst car makers globally for action on climate change, has been energetically resisting the move to cleaner, fully electric cars, and been active in lobbying against climate policy in France, the host nation of the next Olympic Games.
The steel giant ArcelorMittal is front and centre at this year’s games. In 2023 ArcelorMittal was responsible for an estimated 114.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent — comparable to the annual emissions of the wealthy, industrialised nation of Belgium. ArcelorMittal is producing the iconic Olympic torches for the Paris Games using ‘steel with a reduced carbon footprint’. But despite this glitzy push, ArcelorMittal does not have scientifically-validated CO2 emissions reductions targets in alignment with a 1.5C climate scenario, and continues to rely on coal-based steel production. This, however, did not stop the company from accepting around €3.5 billion in public subsidies to stimulate decarbonisation.
When keeping company like this, it’s hard to believe the Olympics and Paralympics are truly serious about the threat posed by climate breakdown to sport and all those who love it. In fact, researchers from Carbon Market Watch auditing the Paris Games’ sustainability plans noted that the sponsors are a “reflection of the credibility, or otherwise, of the games’ climate commitment” and that “all future games must break from the status quo of associating with polluting companies.”
It is clear that climate and environmental breakdown threaten the very fabric of the Games, where they can be hosted, and how well the athletes can compete at them. The Games see themselves as among the greatest gatherings of the international community. When the Secretary-General of the United Nations, another great global coming together, António Guterres, recently called on governments to ban fossil fuel adverts and phase down demand for polluting products and lifestyles, his vision would certainly have encompassed the Olympic rings. He would not want them to be made from fossil fuel smoke.
The very least the Games can do now, to play their own part in averting climate breakdown, is to cut all ties with polluting sponsors that are undermining the future of the Games and the nations, fans, Olympians and Paralympians that make it the spectacle it is.
Senior Labour figures have met hundreds of times with lobbyists for big business, banks and arms firms in the last year | Tim Grist Photography/Dan Kitwood/Getty / Composition by James Battershill
An openDemocracy investigation reveals the secretive mass lobbying campaign that shaped Starmer’s policies
Twelve months before seizing power in last week’s historic election victory, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party welcomed with open arms an unprecedented lobbying campaign by the UK’s most powerful corporations.
Weapons manufacturers implicated in human rights abuses in Gaza bent the ears of would-be defence secretaries. Incoming climate change ministers met with oil companies. Labour ministers who will now be responsible for curbing the excesses of the City of London were wined and dined by financial services executives. Public affairs firms representing asset managers, the tobacco industry, gig economy firms and tax-avoiding mega corporations secured meeting after meeting after meeting with future ministers.
In a high-voltage campaign that was simultaneously secretive yet enacted in plain sight, lobbyists worked hard to ensure the policies of the UK’s first ostensibly progressive government in 14 years reflected the interests of their influential clients. And Labour was only too happy to engage.
Westminster’s lax transparency rules mean there is no official record of this mammoth public affairs offensive. The rulebook says the public has no right to know which companies lobby the opposition – a position shared by Starmer’s Labour. In every instance, the party has refused to disclose what was discussed, what promises were made, and even who was at its meetings, saying: “We should not be treated as the government.”
Now, an investigation by openDemocracy lays bare the astonishing access that Big Business had to Starmer and his frontbench team.
openDemocracy spent months gathering information about lobbying meetings from a variety of open sources, including parliamentary meeting rooms’ booking logs, social media posts and events publicised by lobbying firms. These meetings, spanning the past 18 months, have included private meetings, exclusive Q&A sessions, dinners, mixers, briefings, client roundtables, overseas visits and seminars.
We have identified hundreds of meetings that senior figures in the party held with corporate lobbyists, financial institutions and business groups. On average, they met with influential business leaders every single working day of the past year.
This is about more than private dinners and smoked salmon breakfasts. Starmer’s cabinet is about to begin implementing the programme for government laid out in Labour’s manifesto. As Rachel Reeves, his new chancellor, said last month, the “fingerprints” of business are all over Labour’s policies, shaped as they were through an unprecedented level of engagement with corporate lobbyists, financial institutions and business groups.
Experts warn the consequences of the party effectively outsourcing its policy-making to private corporations will be far-reaching for British society. Labour has pledged to build new towns, to increase green investment, to reform health and social care and to launch major infrastructure projects. Mick McAteer, a former director of the UK’s financial services regulator has warned that the much-vaunted partnership with private finance which lies at the heart of all these plans “will result in a massive transfer of wealth from local communities to the City of London and global financial institutions over the next decade”.
The corporate lobbyists
Lobbying is a huge business in the UK. Dozens of agencies make millions every year advising clients on how to influence policy to their benefit and get their messages heard by the politicians who write laws, set regulations and sign off on public sector contracts. The last decent estimate of the industry’s size is from 2007, when Gordon Brown was still the prime minister. A study by the Hansard Society then put it at around £1.9bn. Insiders suggest it has certainly grown in the nearly two decades since.
A big part of a lobbyist’s work is getting their clients access to the right people, which often relies on the lobbyist themself knowing the right people – or having contacts who do. Around 18 months ago, after the spectacular implosion of the Liz Truss regime meant the chances of Labour taking power started to look more likely, the public affairs industry began to reorient en masse.
To prepare for a Labour government, lobby firms began establishing dedicated ‘Labour Units’. They hired former Labour MPs and staffers to make use of their contact networks, with a few even snapping up prospective candidates or seconding staff members directly into the offices of senior party figures. Lobbying firms Global Counsel, Lowick Group, FGS Global and Weber Shandwick have all sent members of staff to work in the offices of senior Labour figures in the past two years – at a combined cost to the firms of more than £100,000.
Other lobbying companies have given donations in cash or in-kind to influential MPs, despite industry rules seeming to bar this practice. New deputy prime minister Angela Rayner alone has received donations from two lobbyists – Sovereign Strategy and Pentland Communications – in the past year.
openDemocracy reached out to each of the firms mentioned above to ask whether they expect to receive anything in exchange for seconding members of staff at their own cost or donating to MPs, but received no response.
The lobbyists’ efforts bore fruit: in the twelve months leading up to the election, not a week went by without a member of Labour’s frontbench team attending a private client roundtable organised by a lobbying firm. These meetings, industry insiders say, represent only a fraction of the work a firm does in connecting its clients with politicians. They often serve merely as an introduction, with clients then able to follow up on issues discussed at the meetings or raise more sensitive matters, either through the agency or in some cases directly with politicians.
One firm, Arden Strategies, was able to secure more private client roundtables with Labour than any other, as far as openDemocracy can establish. The lobby shop, run by former Labour minister Jim Murphy, put its clients in a room with senior Labour figures on at least nine occasions – with politicians lobbied including Reeves, business and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds and Starmer’s head of business engagement.
Unlike many firms, Arden doesn’t publish a general client list on the Public Relations and Communications Association register. But openDemocracy can reveal that the firm’s major clients include leading arms manufacturer Northrop Grumman and two of the UK’s largest power distribution companies, UK Power Networks and SGN.
Labour needs to take on the vested interests of big corporations, not give them the pen to write policy
Unlike in many other democracies, such as Canada, Germany and Scotland, voters have no right to know who is lobbying opposition politicians in Westminster. Only government ministers are required to regularly publish a list of any meetings they have with businesses, charities, think tanks and corporate lobbyists, along with a brief description of what was discussed. Details of government politicians’ meetings are not disclosed unless a specific Freedom of Information request is made asking about them, and the government may well decide to refuse to answer such requests.
This heavily flawed system is a major issue in a year such as this one, when the opposition’s election victory was almost a foregone conclusion and interest groups have been queuing up to influence its plans for government.
While firms do not need to declare which opposition politicians they’ve lobbied, many advertise their ability to secure access to the shadow frontbench. openDemocracy monitored the leading lobbying firms and found dozens of public references to meetings involving senior Labour politicians. In every instance where openDemocracy asked the lobbying firms and Labour which clients were present at these meetings, neither would provide any details.
Tim Bierley, campaigner at Global Justice Now, warned that Labour may be treating lobbyists as “independent experts” rather than people “responsible primarily for boosting their shareholders’ income”.
Bierley added: “On climate, trade and the economy, the interests of giant corporations are extremely different from the public’s – their outsized influence would blur any visions of progress under Labour.
“To provide a remotely adequate response to crises on multiple fronts, Labour needs to take on the vested interests of big corporations, not give them the pen to write policy.”
The City
Few interest groups carry as much sway with Labour as the representatives of the City of London – and the wider financial services sector that the City rests at the heart of. In recent years, no other industry has more effectively forged ties with the party.
In the weeks before polling day, Labour’s shadow City minister Tulip Siddiq – who is expected to keep the post in government – took to LinkedIn to share manifesto documents on three occasions. Tellingly, it wasn’t her party’s manifesto she was sharing, but those of three major financial services industry representative bodies, UK Finance, TheCityUK and the Association of British Insurers.
“I have worked closely with TheCityUK and its members in recent years,” wrote Siddiq in one of the posts, “to formulate the Labour Party’s policies for the financial and professional services sector.”
Her other two posts are seemingly copy-and-paste jobs, with near-identical wording. In both, Siddiq told of how “delighted” she had been to “work closely” with the Association of British Insurers and UK Finance “to inform Labour’s plans for the sector”.
All three posts suggest that the lobbyists for the City of London and the financial institutions were directly involved in shaping the policies and regulatory approach that will apply to their own industry.
When Labour published a policy document earlier this year laying out its plans for the financial services sector, the party held a no-press-allowed soiree in the City of London’s Guildhall, sponsored by the City of London Corporation, to thank the industry for its contributions. The plans were criticised for committing the party to the same lax regulatory approach taken by the Conservatives, with campaigners describing the document as “a love letter to the city”.
Labour’s frontbench team, including Siddiq, has met with City lobbyists on more than 20 occasions in the past year – not counting its significant engagement with the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, which openDemocracy revealed last month. BlackRock, Macquarie, HSBC, Bloomberg, Lloyds, Brookfield Asset Management and Blackstone are among firms to have secured access to leading members of the new government, including Starmer, Reeves, Reynolds and the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden.
Mick McAteer, a former board member at the Financial Conduct Authority and a campaigner for economic social justice at the Financial Inclusion Centre, told openDemocracy that the close relationship between incoming ministers and the Labour Party can essentially be seen as a kind of quid-pro-quo.
Lobbyists for financial institutions push Labour to commit to a favourable regulatory environment while dangling the promise of vast amounts of private capital. McAteer is increasingly concerned this relationship will amount to a rehashed form of the Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) favoured by New Labour, in which private firms provide all or most of the investment to build infrastructure such as hospitals and schools, and generate profits from lucrative contracts to maintain the infrastructure long after it has been built.
These public-private partnerships, McAteer warns, will shape almost every aspect of Labour’s agenda in government – from its plans for house-building to energy generation and distribution – and will represent a bad deal for the public.
“Private investment is by definition more expensive than public investment, because of the high returns that financial institutions expect to make for their shareholders,” MacAteer said. “These returns have to be paid for in some way, so ultimately, the costs get passed on to households through higher bills.”
The financial services sector has consolidated its relationship with Labour in different ways. HSBC has had a staffer in Reynolds’ office for almost a year, for example, and NatWest had a similar arrangement with the new business secretary for a few months prior to that. Staffers seconded from the firms have been involved in policy development and business engagement – but because they are still paid by their employers while working for Labour, the Electoral Commission classes the arrangements as political donations.
Then there are two advisory panels made up of executives from major financial institutions, which Labour set up while in opposition but that will continue to advise it on where and how to deploy billions worth of private sector investment in government. One board, the National Wealth Fund Taskforce, is headed by Mark Carney, the former Bank of England director general who now works for Brookfield Asset Management. The other, the British Infrastructure Council, includes senior figures from investment firms such as M&G and BlackRock.
McAteer warns these advisory panels constitute a major conflict of interest. “The British Infrastructure Council is full of representatives from firms that stand to financially benefit, who will not just be determining where the money goes, but in what form does the money go, what are the terms of the deals, and that the capital is de-risked before they’ll commit the finance.
“There’s a reason why they want to be on this infrastructure council, they’re not charities. This is not a criticism, it’s just how finance institutions work, and how markets work. They exist to get the best deal for their shareholders and their owners.
“This thing has been sold as a win-win for the economy and for the investors, but somebody pays for that. Ordinary households pay for it, and more importantly, because they don’t have a say in this, it will be future generations who will pay for this.”
He added: “Because these firms will have ownership of the economy and they’ll be able to extract value for as long as that infrastructure lasts. Ordinary people are really going to end up on the wrong side of some very, very badly designed transactions here, shaped by the financial institutions in the City of London.
“They’ve been lobbying for this for a couple of years – and they’ve got what they wanted.”
openDemocracy reached out to each of the firms mentioned above, but only HSBC provided a response. A spokesperson said: “HSBC regularly engages with the major political parties in the UK on issues facing our customers and the wider financial services industry.”
The consultants
If the City of London’s financial institutions stand to win big from Labour’s PFI 2.0, then so, too, do the City management consultancies and accountancies that work so closely with them.
Firms such as the ‘Big Four’ consultancies – Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – and the industry lobbying body, the Management Consultants Association, have met with senior Labour figures at least 13 times since March last year.
Lord Sikka, a Labour peer and Emeritus professor of accounting at the University of Essex, said his party should not be working so closely with management consultancies.
“I think this new form of PFI would be disastrous, it would be a continuation of what we’ve seen in the UK since the late 1970s, a kind of right-wing coup which has seen a restructuring of the state so that it has become a guarantor of corporate profits, rather than an entrepreneurial state which invests,” Sikka said.
“PFI, privatisation and outsourcing – the very things these companies advise on and profit from – are all examples of that.”
Though Starmer doesn’t appear to have attended many of the meetings openDemocracy has uncovered, he was present at a day of business roundtable events at EY’s London offices in March 2023. There, the Labour leader, along with Reeves and Reynolds, heard from business leaders about “the potential value of public and private sector collaboration”, according to a LinkedIn post by EY’s managing partner. The trio returned to EY in November, along with the now chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, for similar discussions with a few dozen business leaders.
Jones has also attended secretive meetings with elusive consultant Hakluyt, which was founded by former MI6 operatives in 1995 and claims to work with “at least one of the world’s top five corporations in every major sector globally” and “three-quarters of the top 20 private equity firms in the world”. The firm also organised a dinner with Labour MP Peter Kyle, then the shadow secretary for science, innovation and technology, while he was in the US earlier this year.
Hakluyt counts among its advisory board former executives from Rolls Royce and Coca-Cola, as well as former senior civil servants and politicians. It has previously been linked with large oil and gas interests, having been accused by The Sunday Times in 2001 of deploying an agent to spy on Greenpeace campaigners on behalf of oil companies. In recent years Hakluyt has sought to “demystify” and says it now has “no relationship with the spooky world”. A spokesperson said Hakluyt is not a lobbying organisation and does not advise political parties.
Speaking at last year’s Labour Party Conference, Reeves pledged to slash public spending on consultants if elected. This promise also made it into the party’s manifesto. But as economists and authors Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington highlight in their book, The Big Con, the industry has been known to offer its services pro-bono during times of austerity, in hopes of securing lucrative paid contracts in future. In 2011, the then head of public sector at KPMG described the strategy to the Guardian, in the context of working with David Cameron’s coalition government: “We can’t afford to [work pro bono] indefinitely, but we can in the short-term. We’re hoping to position ourselves well when the government decides it is willing to pay.”
In a similar vein, when Labour’s shadow Treasury team was working on its aforementioned plan for financial services, City consultancy Oliver Wyman donated a staff member to help out – at a cost of more than £58,000 for the past year, according to Electoral Commission data. Senior staffers at leading consultancies Grant Thornton and EY have held parliamentary passes as members of Starmer’s team for the past year or so, according to the register of MPs’ staff interests. Since 2021, firms including PwC and Baringa have provided combined pro-bono services to the party worth more than £650,000.
“There are huge questions about why these firms have been providing free staff,” Lord Sikka said, “because obviously that has a cost to them and they would expect a return because they’ve made an investment.”
None of the firms mentioned above responded to openDemocracy’s request for comment.
Labour is sending a clear message to arms dealers – that it will be business as usual
The arms dealers
In March last year, Labour’s then shadow defence secretary, John Healey, and minister for defence procurement, Chris Evans, filed into a function room in the Churchill War Rooms along with executives from 20 of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers, including BAE Systems, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Rheinmetall and Rolls Royce.
The private event at the historical attraction in Westminster was arranged by public affairs firm Rud Pedersen. The firm’s head of defence and security is a former Labour staffer who worked in the party’s shadow defence team between December 2018 and September 2020.
Since last March, party figures have met with representatives from defence firms on at least 13 occasions, including two visits to sites run by BAE Systems and German defence contractor Rheinmetall. Labour’s then shadow science minister Chi Onwurah and armed forces minister Luke Pollard attended a private meeting – hosted by the industry lobbying body, ADS Group – with BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Thales at the Labour Party Conference.
A BAE Systems spokesperson said: “As the UK’s largest defence company, employing more than 45,000 people in the UK with thousands more in the supply chain, we regularly engage with political representatives to increase awareness and understanding of the significant contribution our industry makes to the UK’s security and prosperity.”
Most recently, Reeves attended a private client roundtable event hosted by lobbying firm Headland in March this year. The CEO of German AI defence startup Helsing was also present, as was Headland staffer and new Labour MP, Gregor Poynton.
While Labour has consistently ruled out progressive policies such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap or boosting local government funding, it has committed to increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, up from 2.3% last year. Despite a YouGov poll from April indicating that the majority of the public backs a ban on exporting arms to Israel, the party has declined to call for an end to arms sales to the country.
Emily Apple from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade described arms trade lobbyists’ access to the upper echelons of the Labour Party as “hugely alarming”.
She said: “These meetings give [some of] the companies profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza a huge amount of influence over Labour’s future defence and foreign policy. This rings alarm bells over whether a future Labour government will uphold international law and impose an arms embargo on Israel or any other human rights-abusing regime.
“These companies profit from death and destruction. Labour should be taking a stand and reducing the influence of these death merchants on political policy. Instead, these meetings mean Labour is sending a clear message to arms dealers – that it will be business as usual for them to continue boosting their share prices through perpetuating conflict and misery across the world.”
openDemocracy reached out to each of the firms mentioned above, but only BAE Systems responded. A spokesperson said: “As the UK’s largest defence company, employing more than 45,000 people in the UK with thousands more in the supply chain, we regularly engage with political representatives to increase awareness and understanding of the significant contribution our industry makes to the UK’s security and prosperity.”
If business wins, who loses?
On Friday morning, during his first address to the nation as prime minister, Starmer said voters had given him a mandate “to do politics differently”. But the representatives of big business, finance and the arms trade, which have worked hard to influence his party, will hope it plans to continue the status quo: prioritising their interests over those of working people.
One week earlier, as now-chancellor Rachel Reeves prepared for a Monday morning sit-down with the heads of financial firms, the couriers’ branch of the IWGB trade union held its annual group meeting in a sunny courtyard in east London. There, some of the most marginalised workers in the UK reflected on the struggles and victories of the past year and looked ahead to the future.
The IWGB, one of many smaller independent trade unions with no affiliation to the Labour Party, works across a number of sectors where the power gap between workers and employers is most acute. From Hartlepool to Hackney, its members are outsourced security guards and cleaners, foster carers, receptionists and couriers.
Many of the corporations that have spent the past 18 months wooing Labour are the same firms severely exploiting these workers, the IWGB’s general secretary, Henry Chango Lopez, told openDemocracy.
“These huge corporations,” Chango Lopez said, “have access to vast sums of money to lobby governments – a method of policy influence that is simply not available to working people. That many senior members of the Labour Party have allowed those employers to get anywhere near influencing policy is indicative of where the government’s priorities lie.”
We need to build a firewall between politicians and the oil and gas firms driving the climate crisis.
Richard Burgon is the Labour MP for Leeds East
The same oil and gas giants behind the record energy bills that have forced so many into poverty have also brought us to the cliff edge of climate catastrophe.
If we are to have a fighting chance of preventing the worst of the climate crisis, then we need to rapidly cut fossil fuel use. Key to that is breaking the vast power that oil and gas companies have over our politics.
That’s why this week I will present a Bill in the House of Commons to ban MPs from receiving funding or any other benefit from oil and gas companies.
My Private Members Bill would stop MPs from taking any second jobs with, or receiving any donations, gifts, hospitality or benefits-in-kind from, any company that makes more than 50% of its annual revenue from oil or gas.
It would also force the Government to end investments by the Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund in any oil and gas companies.
The aim of my Bill is simple: to build a firewall between our political decision-makers and the oil and gas corporations that have knowingly caused the climate crisis.
For decades, oil and gas giants used their vast financial power to confuse and undermine the science about the role of fossil fuels in driving climate change. More recently, their focus has moved on throwing huge sums at delaying, blocking and weakening global climate action.
Fossil fuel money also pollutes British politics. The Tory Party received £3.5m from donors with fossil fuel, polluter and climate denial links in 2022 according to an analysis of Electoral Commission records by DeSmog, an investigative website focused on global warming misinformation campaigns.
dizzy: Despite this article having been written by a Labour MP it should not be assumed that the UK Labour Party will be any different from the Conservatives on the climate crisis or fossil fuel industry.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have engaged heavily with the financial services industry | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Labour top brass including Keir Starmer gave Bloomberg ‘exclusive’ look at party’s financial plan at private meeting
Labour leader Keir Starmer, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, and four other senior party figures met with a major media and financial information conglomerate weeks after it donated £150,000 to the party – sparking concerns of “cash for access” from transparency campaigners.
The meeting between Labour and the Bloomberg group, which took place in Edinburgh on 8 December last year, was described as “suspicious” and “highly unusual” by two Labour sources.
The private roundtable event came shortly after the US business conglomerate, majority owned by American businessman and politician Michael Bloomberg, made its first donation to Labour in seven years. The donation was made by a Bloomberg subsidiary called Bloomberg Trading Facility Limited.
The party used the meeting to offer Bloomberg and others in attendance “an exclusive dive” into its flagship financial services policy document, which was published the following month, according to a social media post by a person involved in coordinating the event.
Labour did not deny that the meeting was connected to the donation, with a spokesperson telling openDemocracy: “It is standard practice for the Labour Party to meet with the private sector.” The party did not reply to openDemocracy’s query about whether Bloomberg was given exclusive access to the flagship financial services policy document. Bloomberg declined to comment for this story.
The Edinburgh event was facilitated by Sovereign Strategy, a lobbying firm that has represented Bloomberg for almost two decades, which promises to get its clients’ “messages heard at the highest levels of government”, according to the firm’s website.
Lobbyists often hold such events to introduce their clients to Labour frontbenchers so they can try to shape the party’s policy on issues relevant to their businesses.
But two Labour sources, who spoke to openDemocracy on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation for appearing critical of the party’s leadership, said the Edinburgh meeting was “highly unusual” and “suspicious” due to the sheer number of senior politicians present.
Starmer and Reeves were joined at the event by shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, shadow City minister Tulip Siddiq, as well as Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and Daniel Johnson MSP, the party’s business spokesperson in Holyrood.
Other comparable meetings are typically attended by only one or two shadow ministers. openDemocracy has analysed more than 200 meetings attended by Labour frontbenchers in the past year based on publicly available data and triangulation through multiple sources, and found the Edinburgh meeting involved far more senior figures than any other.
The meeting took place less than two weeks after Bloomberg Trading Facility Ltd, a subsidiary of Bloomberg LP, donated £150,000 to Labour – with the conglomerate becoming one of the party’s top corporate donors for all of 2023 in a single day, according to Electoral Commission records.
A Bloomberg company last made a cash donation to the Labour Party in late 2016, when it gave the party £60,000. The firm has since handed the Conservatives £260,000, most recently donating £100,000 in June 2022.
Simon Youel, the head of policy and advocacy at not-for-profit advocacy group Positive Money, told openDemocracy that voters should be worried by the timing of the meeting – which took place as Labour finalised a key document to set out its policy on the financial services sector.
“What is most concerning is that weeks after this meeting, Labour published a plan for financial services that reads like a love letter to Big Finance, with much in there that could have been written by the industry itself,” Youel said.
Labour spent months drafting its financial services report, bringing in a staffer from City consultancy Oliver Wyman to put it together. After its publication in January, Reeves and Siddiq threw a lavish, no-press-allowed reception in the City of London’s famed Guildhall to thank the industry for its contributions.
In a since-deleted LinkedIn post, a Sovereign Strategy staffer said the roundtable discussion had a focus on the “outlook for the financial services industry and an exclusive dive into Labour’s launch of the financial services review”.
Youel added: “Rachel Reeves herself has acknowledged New Labour’s errors in relying on an under-regulated financial sector to generate wealth, yet the party seems set on repeating the mistake of letting the City of London dictate policy-making, which inevitably the public will again be left paying the price for.”
In a video from the event, Starmer can be heard telling the attendees: “What you now see is a Labour Party that is fundamentally different to the Labour Party that fought the last general election. Unrecognisably different. And very obviously pro-business.”
The video, which Labour released on the day of the meeting, made no reference to who was at the event or what was discussed.
Bloomberg holds a unique position within the financial sector, providing hardware, software, data and advisory services to all manner of financial services institutions.
Its computer systems, Bloomberg Terminals, are used by banks, institutional investors and financial analysts all over the world to access high-level investment data and place financial transactions. The company also has a news division and TV channel that employ over 2700 journalists in 120 countries, according to its website. Its eponymous billionaire founder and majority owner, Michael Bloomberg, is a fixture in US politics and one of the richest people in the world. He was mayor of New York City for 12 years, before running for President as recently as 2020.
Youel said that access to frontbench politicians could give Bloomberg a “value-add” for its clients, raising “serious concerns around cash for access in our democracy”.
The roundtable was also attended by investment manager Baillie Gifford, Aegon Asset Management and NatWest Group. For several months in 2022, NatWest provided a member of staff to Jonathan Reynolds’ office, valued at £13,800.
A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Donations from corporate entities are declared in line with Electoral Commission rules. Labour is proud to engage with the financial services sector as we develop policies to grow our economy after 14 years of Tory chaos and decline.”
Scottish Labour refused to provide any additional details about the meeting, with a spokesperson saying only that the party “meets with a range of stakeholders to discuss a range of issues”.
They added: “Boosting economic growth is at the heart of our plans to deliver a fairer and more prosperous Scotland, and we are working in partnership with both businesses and trade unions to deliver that.”
Partnership with business Lobbyist Sovereign Strategy has in recent months strengthened its links to the Labour Party, which is widely expected to win this year’s general election.
Keir Starmer is featured in a brochure published by the lobbying firm in September 2022. The Labour leader is pictured posing for a photo alongside Sovereign chairman Alan Donnelly, a former Labour MEP, in front of a display bearing Bloomberg’s branding.
The brochure goes on to quote a senior Bloomberg executive as saying that the firm has “expanded our influence with key decision-makers”.
Sovereign Strategy also donated £5,000 to deputy leader Angela Rayner “for campaigning activities” last month, according to the register of members’ financial interests. Just over a week after the donation from Sovereign to Rayner, Starmer met with Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire co-founder of Bloomberg, to discuss “Labour’s partnership with business”, .
This donation appears to be a breach of the Public Affairs Code set out by the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA), a trade body representing UK lobbyists including Sovereign Strategy. A breach of the code could result in a member being reprimanded or their membership of the organisation being suspended.
Section 8 of the code – a set of rules on the proper lobbying of governments – states that PRCA members must not “make any award of payment in money or in kind… to any MP”. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on Rayner’s part.
A spokesperson for Sovereign told openDemocracy the donation was made by the company’s chairman in a personal capacity, but was unwilling to provide any further details. A Labour source, however, confirmed the donation was from the company and made by its company bank account.
The PRCA said it was reviewing the information openDemocracy provided.
In January this year, a senior account manager at Sovereign who was involved in organising the Edinburgh roundtable joined the executive committee of Labour Business, an affiliate of the party that focuses on fostering links between Labour and the business community, in January.
The Sovereign staffer in question previously worked for the Labour Party for a number of years in the business relations and endorsements team.
They are one of a large number of former Labour staffers to have left their positions at the party to join Westminster consultancies and lobbying firms the past 18 months, as firms look to beef-up their Labour bona fides in anticipation of a Conservative wipeout at the next election.
Steve Goodrich, the head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, told openDemocracy: “Parties should scrupulously avoid the perception that they’re offering privileged political access in return for cash.
“The next general election looks set to be the most expensive in modern times so it’s crucial that politicians of all stripes avoid stumbling into quid pro quos in the rush for funds.
“Until we reduce the cost of politics, cases like these will continue to undermine public trust in our democracy, which is already perilously low.”
Opaquely funded right-wing think tanks have claimed responsibility for parts of today’s budget, celebrating its announcement as a victory for its lobbying.
Jeremy Hunt unveiled his autumn statement this afternoon, including policies such as a 2% cut to National Insurance, punitive enforcement action for those on disability benefits who do not find work in 18 months, and raising Local Housing Allowance before freezing it again in two years.
A key part of the chancellor’s budget, a policy called ‘full expensing’, means businesses can claim 100% of investment costs such as digital equipment against revenue in the same year, allowing businesses to pay less tax. It was first introduced in spring as a temporary measure but will now be made permanent.
“Amazing news that the full expensing has been made permanent,” the think tank wrote on its X (formerly Twitter) page. “Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to make this a reality.”
It added: “We at the ASI have been campaigning for full expensing over many years.”
Former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, a patron of the Adam Smith Institute, has lobbied for full expensing to Hunt in the House of Commons. Zahawi was fired from his role as chair of the Conservative Party and minister without portfolio after breaching the ministerial code by failing to declare he was being investigated by HMRC while chancellor under Boris Johnson.
In the past, companies like Amazon have taken advantage of expensing schemes – in particular, a ‘super-expensing’ short-term policy that allowed companies to write off 130% of investment in infrastructure. The company’s UK division paid no corporation tax for a second year in a row thanks to the scheme.
The Adam Smith Institute, named after the 18th-century Scottish thinker on capitalism, lobbies on issues such as deregulation and lower taxes. It was given the lowest possible transparency rating in openDemocracy’s ‘Who Funds You?’ project earlier this year, but is reported to be partly funded by the tobacco industry as well as American climate denial groups.
Other right-wing think tanks have also lauded the move. In a “wish list” written by free-market think tank the TaxPayers Alliance, it asked the chancellor to “Make full expensing for corporation tax permanent… to reduce the tax penalty on long-term investment.”
The TaxPayers Alliance does not publicise its funders, and was also given the lowest possible rating by Who Funds You?
Allowing businesses to invest more can be positive, so long as public spending isn’t cut in the process, Pranesh Narayanan, a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) told openDemocracy.
“In this autumn statement, the Conservatives are able to ‘afford’ it because they’ve frozen public investment spending from 2025 onwards,” Narayanan said, referring to the billions of pounds of spending cuts forecast after the next general election. “You need both kinds of investment to have a proper economic recovery. You can’t do one at the expense of the other, especially when you have crumbling schools and crumbling hospitals.”
Narayanan added: “This policy is mainly for the benefit of big corporations. We believe we need more public investment.”
Economist Ann Pettifor argues in openDemocracy today that Hunt’s autumn statement “extinguished… any faint hope of the beginnings of an economic revival”.
