Who will lobby for the poor old taxpayer?

My Times column here.

I have a confession to make. Last week I held a meeting with representatives of three organisations and offered to raise an issue for them in the House of Lords. They claimed they were charities seeking a smidgin of funding to push forward promising research on a squirrel-pox vaccine, which might help to save the red squirrel from extinction in this country.

Now I begin to wonder if these three charming people were actually disguised investigative reporters who were trying to add my name to that of my three fellow peers who were splashed over the front page of The Sunday Times. Or perhaps they were from a front for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. (Tony Blair apparently spoke at an event hosted by a front for the latter.) I never checked their credentials or frisked them for hidden cameras.

Come to think of it, I even solicited payment from them. That is to say, I told them I had given away my attractive green necktie with red squirrels on it, emblem of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust. Bold as brass, in broad daylight, they took the hint and handed over another. It’s in my wardrobe, still in its wrapping.

I am not mocking the seriousness of the recent scandal in the Lords. But alleged bribery of politicians is among the least of the problems of lobbying. To paraphrase Humbert Wolfe (“You cannot hope to bribe or twist,/ Thank God! The British journalist./ But, seeing what the man will do/ unbribed, there’s no occasion to”) it’s what politicians will do unbribed that’s the bigger scandal.

All the time, entirely legal distortion of legislation occurs to favour concentrated groups of producers at the expense of the wider community of consumers. Adam Smith’s dictum that “the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer” is rarely observed. This problem is something that an official register of lobbyists will probably entrench rather than dissolve.

One of representative democracy’s chief features is that it concentrates rewards and scatters costs. If I succeed in persuading the Government to divert a few tens of thousands of pounds into squirrel-pox vaccine research, the cost to any individual taxpayer will be tiny, while the reward to vaccine researchers, and with luck squirrels, will be significant; I may even be a minor hero in the squirrel world for a few days. But if we all do this, soon we’ve plucked the goose entirely. Almost by definition a lobbyist is in this game of concentrating the gain and spreading the pain.

Since joining the House of Lords I have been struck by how, among other things, many of our debates are about special interests, often very deserving ones. Mesothelioma patients (and their less deserving lawyers) got a lot of attention last month. My inbox fills with polite and well-meant pleas on behalf of excellent causes. But only very rarely does it contain a plea on behalf of those who have to pay.

A startling example appears in David Stockman’s angry new bookThe Great Deformation — a free-market, anti-crony-capitalist polemic of the kind we need over here. He describes how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises at the heart of the sub-prime housing debacle, spent a sickening $175 million between 1998 and 2008 lobbying to protect their privileged government guarantee, which enabled them to borrow cheaply.

Mandated by successive administrations to encourage lending to the poor, Fannie and Freddie created huge demand for sub-prime mortgages, of which they ended up holding $2 trillion worth. Potential reforms, including those by Mr Stockman himself when he was President Reagan’s budget director, were beaten back by a lobby of house builders, estate agents, lawyers and charities, all benefiting from the bubble. Nobody lobbied on behalf of the person who was guaranteeing the cheap lending: the taxpayer.

In Westminster the interests of spenders are represented by phalanxes of ministers, MPs, peers, lobbyists and journalists. The interest of the taxpayers is represented by a couple of lonely Treasury ministers and a few small voices such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance: it is an unequal battle.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the current Energy Bill. Look at some of lobbyists who were pressing the Government this week to put a 2030 carbon target in the Energy Bill. They wanted “certainty” — wouldn’t we all? — that their renewable trough will long be filled at the expense of the taxpayer and bill-payer: Renewable UK, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, the Solar Trade Association, the Renewable Energy Association (plus some charities, churches and unions that should know better). Crony capitalism in action.

A perfect example of concentrated gain and diffuse pain is the issue of “green jobs”. Raising the cost of energy by subsidising renewable energy kills far more non-green jobs than it creates green ones, but they go unremarked. It is no accident that the fake identity chosen by the journalists that enticed Lord Cunningham and Lord Mackenzie into conversations was that of a solar-energy firm. This is an industry that depends entirely on subsidies and is political to the roots of its hair.

Meanwhile, the European Commission in Brussels has taken legal lobbying to new depths. It subsidises the lobbyists it likes so they can lobby it. This is known as sock-puppetry. Friends of the Earth, for example, which is really just a big law firm these days, has received an astonishing £6 million since 1997 from Brussels.

So when Friends of the Earth took legal action against the British Government last year over cuts in subsidies to (you guessed it) solar power, you — the taxpayer — were paying the bills of lawyers on both sides of the case. Research by the Taxpayers’ Alliance last year found that the EU spent a grotesque £75 million subsidising environmentalist pressure groups between 1997 and 2012.

The continuing delay in Britain’s shale gas revolution is largely Friends of the Earth’s doing. It was they who persuaded the European Commission — which subsidises them, remember — to insist that water left a mile underground in rocks after fracking must be treated as waste. They did this deliberately so that Britain’s Environment Agency would have to delay issuing a permit or face judicial review. As a result, cheaper, home-grown energy is denied to ordinary Britons, while lawyers and bureaucrats get extra work.