Labour risks trouble with lobbying by the business party

IIn Transparency International's latest Corruption Perceptions Index, published in January, the UK fell to 20th place, its lowest ranking ever. The reasons are not hard to see: a Conservative government mired in corruption allegations; billions of pounds worth of Covid contracts for politically connected VIPs; peerages given to Tory donors; public bodies packed with party loyalists.

Only four percent of lobbying is recorded on Westminster's official register. Sir Keir Starmer has promised to overhaul Parliament's standard operating procedures, but in his first speech to the Royal Family there was little mention of the revolving door between government and the private sector, donors buying access or foreign party funding.

The influence industry is deeply entangled in British politics. A fifth of the newly elected Conservative MPs in