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Articles by Tamasin Cave
European Super League: Doomed from the start
A former Conservative spin doctor was hired to handle the European Super League’s PR hours before the much-criticised initiative was launched, openDemocracy has learned. The breakaway European Super League (ESL) was announced at 11.30pm last Sunday night, in a press statement issued by iNHouse communications, a firm run by Theresa May’s director of communications Katie Perrior. It has now emerged that iNHouse only started work on the now doomed competition earlier that day.
Pandemic proves opportunity for industry power grab
The decision to allow pubs and restaurants to reopen on July 4, before schools, and to relax social distancing, are the latest concessions to the alcohol industry during the Covid-19 crisis, after the government classified off-licences as “essential” and pubs were allowed to operate as takeaways during the lockdown.
Public Health England paid group linked to Big Tobacco
Doctors have criticised the organisation responsible for protecting the nation’s health over its work with a vaping pressure group that is itself linked to the world’s largest multinational tobacco company. Public Health England paid £40,000 for a series of YouTube videos co-produced by the New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) and held numerous meetings with the group, despite its ties to Philip Morris International, an investigation by the Bureau has revealed.
Web of cash and contacts ties Public Health England to Big Tobacco
Doctors have criticised the organisation responsible for protecting the nation’s health over its work with a vaping pressure group that is itself linked to the world’s largest multinational tobacco company. Public Health England paid £40,000 for a series of YouTube videos co-produced by the New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) and held numerous meetings with the group, despite its ties to Philip Morris International, an investigation by the Bureau has revealed.
PMI sidesteps global health treaty to lobby councils
One of the world’s biggest tobacco companies is using its pledge to “unsmoke” Britain as a cover to seek to regain influence in Westminster and with councils across the UK, experts have warned following an investigation by the Bureau. A covert lobbying offensive by Philip Morris International to create a market for Iqos, a product which claims to “heat not burn” tobacco, has involved the company ignoring ministerial warnings and rules designed to limit tobacco industry influence.
The ‘Unsmoke’ screen: The truth behind Philip Morris' cigarette-free future
UNITED KINGDOM – The crowd screamed as Calvin Harris began his set at 2019’s Djakarta Warehouse Project, one of Asia’s biggest dance music festivals. The floor pulsed. As each song built, fans jumped up and down, climbed on each other’s shoulders or swayed as they filmed the DJ on their phones. Opposite the main stage was a sleek building made of solid glass and red lights, with everything a festivalgoer needed to relax: sofas, televisions, Playstations – and cigarettes for sale.
KyivPost - Ukraine's Global Voice
Investigation: IQOS uses Instagram influencers to target youth in Ukraine
The ‘Unsmoke’ screen: the truth behind PMI’s cigarette-free future
The crowd screamed as Calvin Harris began his set at 2019’s Djakarta Warehouse Project, one of Asia’s biggest dance music festivals. The floor pulsed. As each song built, fans jumped up and down, climbed on each other’s shoulders or swayed as they filmed the DJ on their phones. Opposite the main stage was a sleek building made of solid glass and red lights, with everything a festivalgoer needed to relax: sofas, televisions, Playstations – and cigarettes for sale.
Donald Trump, the US Private Health Giant, and Top NHS Officials-Special Relationships?
In the UK, we have a simple take on the US healthcare system as a for-profit, private system that fleeces its customers and fails the poor. But here’s the secret: the US has its own ‘mini NHS’. Smaller than the UK’s system, but still a government funded, (mostly) publicly-run system that serves people according to their need. It’s called the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). And Donald Trump wants to privatise it.
Vaping giant Juul pushes for more addictive e‑cigarettes
UKVIA – which also represents major tobacco companies, including Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco – says EU laws “severely curtail the ability of the industry to communicate the public health potential of vaping to smokers”. Some restrictions have already been lifted.
Ban councillors from working as property lobbyists
Councillors are valuable to developers for who and what they know. Many have extensive networks in local government and understand the ins and outs of local decision-making. Which is why property developers hire lobbying consultancies that employ local councillors. They can give insight into the planning process, help them win over communities and other local councillors.
Reveal who is lobbying councils
We should be able to see who is influencing our politicians. In the UK, however, it is all but impossible. There is very little transparency, particularly at local government level. First, some councillors are less than upfront about their jobs in property lobbying. Looking at their register of interests, which makes public any outside employment, you wouldn’t have a clue what it is they do.
Stop with the wining and dining
The timeless practice of “gastronomic pimping”, as Nye Bevan put it, is a tool long used by commercial lobbyists to curry favour with elected officials. This includes local councillors who have the power to wave through, or shoot down, developers’ plans. A strong contender for the title of ‘most wined and dined politician in Britain’ is Conservative councillor and, until recently, deputy leader of Westminster council, Robert Davis.
Is your council working for you?
Local councils play a crucial role in deciding what gets built where. But, some elected councillors are too close to the property industry. Which means things get built that suit the financial interests of developers and not necessarily the needs of communities. We can change this. An inquiry has been launched into ‘local government ethical standards’.
The Inquiry
We have an opportunity to let the government know that the system isn’t working. An inquiry has been launched into ‘local government ethical standards’. The Committee for Standards in Public Life is asking for views on whether the current rules governing councillors’ behaviour, and the system for dealing with complaints about councillors, are fit-for-purpose, or need strengthening. Councillors currently have to abide by a code of conduct.
What needs to change
There are lots of things that need to change to make local councils more accountable and responsive to the needs of the people they serve. A few changes, though, are long overdue that would help to break the bonds between councillors and property lobbyists. Here are the changes we are recommending to the current inquiry into local government ethical standards: Ban councillors from working as property lobbyists. This seems like it should be prohibited already, but it is not.
Former health secretary Andrew Lansley’s diaries finally released in (nearly) full
Insurers and private US healthcare giants are revealed to be amongst those on the inside track of creating huge NHS changes. The journalist, Simon Lewis – who submitted the original freedom of information request to see the Health Secretary’s diaries from the period leading up to his NHS reforms – has kindly just sent them to me. They were released following a court ruling which the government lost after spending tens of thousands of pounds over years trying to block their release.
Revolving doors at the NHS’s bully-in-chief
As the NHS’s financial regulator hires a new chair, the destination of its outgoing chair is if anything more noteworthy. Ex-TalkTalk CEO, Dido (Diana) Harding is to take the reins at the NHS’ financial regulator. NHS Improvement (formed of a merger of Monitor and another NHS regulator) is the body that, while imposing punishing cuts on the NHS (with NHS England), makes senior hospital chiefs, who barely have their heads above water, chant affirmations – 'we can do this' – over A&E targets.
Latest policy to gag charities, including public health charities, recommended by tobacco-funded think tank
The government’s press release begins by citing research by the free market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) into ‘so-called sock puppets’. The 2012 report by the IEA’s Christopher Snowdon, Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why argues that, when government finances the lobbying of itself, it is subverting democracy.
Holyrood Exposed: A Guide to Lobbying in Scotland
To coincide with the SNP conference this week, Spinwatch, Unlock Democracy and Electoral Reform Society Scotland have published Holyrood Exposed: A Guide to Lobbying in Scotland. Holyrood Exposed takes you on a walking tour of Edinburgh’s influence industry: the commercial lobbying agencies; corporate in-house lobbying teams; industry bodies, think tanks, and management consultants.
Holyrood Exposed: A guide to lobbying in Scotland
To coincide with the SNP conference this week, Spinwatch, Unlock Democracy and Electoral Reform Society Scotland have published Holyrood Exposed: A Guide to Lobbying in Scotland. Holyrood Exposed takes you on a walking tour of Edinburgh’s influence industry: the commercial lobbying agencies; corporate in-house lobbying teams; industry bodies, think tanks, and management consultants.
Nepal’s political impasse
Deepak Adhikari is a journalist based in Kathmandu. In 2008, he worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow. He blogs here When almost a million Nepalese thronged the Kathmandu streets on 24 April 2006 in a historic demonstration, the event seized the world's imagination as a further display of democratic "people power" in Asia.
Who's really benefiting from visions of a ‘digital NHS’? Of care.data, Kelsey, and telecoms giants
Tim Kelsey’s legacy to the NHS isn’t just another botched IT project. He’s also been pushing a vision of digital salvation, that his new firm is already starting to benefit from. Tim Kelsey, the NHS’s man for all things data and digital, has had it in the neck a lot recently. Could this be why he is off to Australia to work for telecommunications giant, Telstra (more on them below)?
Why are GPs being told to hand billions-worth of NHS decisions to private health firms and their lobbyists?
Whilst all eyes have been on the election, the government has quietly shifted into stage two of NHS privatisation, generating huge potential conflicts of interest. ‘The whole point of our NHS reforms,’ David Cameron said, is ‘to put the power in the hands of local doctors, so that they make decisions based on what is good for their local area.’ But now new information has emerged in the run-up to the election, showing just how far from the truth this claim is.
A Quiet Word
Q. What’s worth £2,000,000,000, answers to no-one and operates out of public sight? A. Britain’s influence industry The corporate takeover of democracy is no conspiracy theory – it’s happening, and it affects every aspect of our lives: the food we eat, the places we live, the temperature of our planet, how we spend our money and how our money is spent for us. And much more.
The privatising cabal at the heart of our NHS
This isn't a National Health Service - or even a healthcare market. It's a cabal - and it looks something like this. The battle is on for the future of the NHS. Apparently. Ed Miliband came out hard, declaring he will ‘put patients before profits and stop the privatisation’. David Cameron’s camp countered with a commitment to fully fund the next wave of NHS reforms. How can you tell? Just look at the players sitting round the table.
A Quiet Word
Q. What’s worth £2,000,000,000, answers to no-one and operates out of public sight? A. Britain’s influence industry The corporate takeover of democracy is no conspiracy theory – it’s happening, and it affects every aspect of our lives: the food we eat, the places we live, the temperature of our planet, how we spend our money and how our money is spent for us. And much more.
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