The power of group breathing

Government policy sometimes prioritises the wishes of certain groups over the public interest. This is partly driven by unfair influence on decision-making. But what other factors are at play?

Jan 12, 2026

Conspire, /kənˈspʌɪə/, late Middle English: from Old French conspirer, from Latin conspirare ‘agree, plot’, from con- ‘together with’ + spirare ‘breathe’.

Most people would agree that conspiracies are bad. However, the core meaning of the word ‘conspire’ is simply to ‘breathe together’, and at various points in history this word has been understood in this more neutral sense rather than its usual negative sense.

Some people believe that our political and economic elites are actively engaged in a shadowy conspiracy to rule the country (or the whole world) in their own interests. I don’t subscribe to this theory, but you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to acknowledge the clear evidence that there is at the very least some ‘group breathing’ going on. If there wasn’t some level of alignment between these two groups, it would be hard to explain why our elected politicians regularly make policy decisions that seem to privilege the interests of wealthy people and businesses over those of the public at large. A recent example is the failure to include reforms to capital gains taxation in November’s budget - reforms that were supported by experts from across the political spectrum.

To what extent is this alignment the product of a cosy groupthink, or is it to some degree dependent on proactive and sustained lobbying from ‘economic elites’ to overcome any dissenting voices from either within or outside the halls of power?

What is clear is that there is a lot of lobbying, and it is often opaque and poorly regulated, and it is overwhelmingly carried out by ‘economic elites’ as opposed to those who represent a different or broader set of interests. This can be quantified (see below). What cannot be quantified is how much this lobbying actually influences government policy decisions. But it is certainly the case that wealthy groups exercise undue influence on policymaking, especially when it comes to economic policy.

How economic policy decisions are made matters in terms of what decisions are made, but also because unfair processes based on unequal political influence undermine public faith in democracy.

And that faith is already low. Our polling last year found that 63% of Britons think that the very rich have too much influence on politics in the UK; in 2023 we discovered that 75% of people are concerned that people with net wealth of £10m or more have too much influence on the political system, and the ONS has shown that 69% of people feel that they do not have any say in what the government does.

Perception is not the same as reality, but reality drives perception, and the link between the two is particularly strong in this case, reinforced in the public mind by evidence both of the process (high-profile instances of ‘one rule for them, one for the rest of us’ in politics, such as partygate during Covid) and the end result (broken social contract, spiralling cost of living, crumbling public services, and so on).

We can debate whether a particular economic policy decision was the right one or not, but it is hard to defend a system where policy is not made openly, fairly and with due regard paid to the public interest.

And yet that is the system that we have. Last year, a report by Spotlight on Corruption examined who got access to ministers, senior officials and special advisers in six government departments responsible for economic decision-making, by reviewing data on meetings, hospitality and secondments between January 2019 and September 2024 (i.e. including the first three months of the new Labour government).

The report looked at who decision-makers are meeting most to see whether certain groups, such as charities and consumer groups, or academics – groups that provide a public interest perspective, and a counterweight to private commercial interests – were getting squeezed out. It also explored whether business groups are getting additional access and influence through other routes like hospitality and secondments and, if so, how. Given that the main route for the public to feed into policy is through public consultations, it looked at whether these are actually providing an effective route for participation, focusing on consultations held by the Treasury between 2019 and 2024. Finally, it looked at the other routes through which outside interests can exert influence over policy making, from employing former ministers or officials, to undeclared meetings with party donors.

The findings are pretty shocking. The ratio of business and commercial stakeholders getting meetings compared to civil society and consumer groups was 23 to one. Just 2.3% of stakeholders who met with ministers and senior officials in the Treasury were from civil society or consumer groups prior to the election – and this dropped even further after the election, to 1.5%. Some firms exercised even greater influence through hospitality and secondments. Barclays and HSBC provided the first and second most hospitality to senior Treasury officials, and had the third and first most meetings respectively with them. Firms including HSBC, Lloyds, UK Finance and Aviva, who get the most meetings and provide significant hospitality to Treasury senior officials and ministers, have also had secondees in the Treasury, suggesting that they may be getting “a third bite at the influence cherry”. Over 50% of respondents to Treasury consultations come from industry (where details of respondents are provided).

As Spotlight on Corruption points out, “given very limited information about what is discussed in meetings being published, it isn’t possible to tell whether they were able to influence the shape of government policy under consultation through these meetings.”

And these gaps in the data are a real problem. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations – the trade body for lobbyists! – says that apart from Australia, the UK’s lobbying regime is the only one in the Western world that fails to capture in-house lobbyists — creating an impression on the world stage of a “no rules Britannia”. The CIPR goes as far as to say that the continued failure to address the issue “simply adds fuel to the perception that our government is not only corrupt but is deliberately so”.

Spotlight on Corruption sets out why this is a problem: “More participatory and open decision-making wouldn’t just help rebuild public trust. It would also help ensure better decision-making, widening the evidence base for policy making and reducing risks of policy capture by vested interests. But much of decision-making in government is done in the dark. It is still far too hard to find out who is influencing decision-makers in the UK government and there are multiple loopholes and transparency deficits in the UK government’s lobbying regime. That is despite numerous expert recommendations to improve lobbying transparency. Meanwhile, recommendations made by ethics experts to level the playing field to ensure fairer access to decision-makers have gone unheeded.”

The report recommends “radically enhancing transparency across the board” to protect economic decision-making from ‘policy capture’, but it also recognises the need to go beyond this, by taking more proactive measures to enhance participation in government decision-making. This is certainly necessary; opening policy-making processes up, as already happens with consultations, will not level up political influence on its own in a society marked by high levels of economic inequality, any more than tackling the most obvious examples of group-based discrimination will be sufficient to provide everyone with genuinely equal opportunities to maximise their potential. Equity of access is needed; equality of access is not enough.

Spotlight on Corruption is planning to add to this evidence base over coming months, with some case studies of economic policymaking in two areas to examine who the government talking to and to what extent it is making policy in the public interest, as well as policy guidance for the government on how they can ensure equity of access for all stakeholders to government decision-makers on economic policy.

So there’s a clear problem with the excessive influence of economic elites on economic decisions by government. And there are some clear practical steps that government can take to address some of the most visible aspects of the problem. But is the undue influence exerted by lobbyists the entirety of the issue, or the tip of the iceberg? What if decision-makers in government already agree with what the lobbyists are saying?

The reality is messy, of course, and there’s a spectrum of possibilities here. At one end, there might be total alignment on policy thinking between government and lobbyists. At the other, there might be initial resistance from government that is overcome by persistent lobbying and by concern among politicians about the political risks of ignoring it. In between these two scenarios, politicians might think about the economy in ways that make them more amenable to the arguments of lobbyists, or might not have the convictions, vision or subject matter expertise to be willing or able to push back on them. Most of the time, more than one of these factors will be in play when it comes to debates within government (or even inside the heads of individual politicians).

Then there are a set of unhelpful incentives and limitations within government. Politicians tend to act in the interests of the wealthier 50% of the population who own property (in part because they are more likely to vote), as well as being unhelpfully incentivised by our ‘first past the post’ electoral system. They are heavily incentivised to think and act in the short term, and are constantly distracted by multiple crises at home and abroad. To make things worse, they often find that when they pull a lever, nothing happens; the policymaking capacity of the British state has been undermined by a combination of factors (Sam Freedman identifies excessive centralisation, inadequate parliamentary scrutiny and the triumph of comms over policy, while Liam Byrne points to a broader set of capacity constraints, and Martha Dacombe looks to a set of misaligned incentives affecting the choices of Ministers and civil servants). And there are other ways beyond lobbying in which the wealthy can exercise undue influence on politics, not least donating to political parties.

The issue is further muddied by the ways in which public and media conversations about the economy don’t always start from a neutral perspective. In 2023, the BBC’s review into its own impartiality in its coverage of fiscal policy found that BBC journalists often unintentionally presented political choices about fiscal policy issues as inevitable outcomes, or used misleading metaphors such as comparing the economy to a household budget. There’s an imbalance when it comes to experts too; many economists would argue that they are concerned with equity as well as efficiency, but this did not stop the Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton from making the following critique: “After economists on the left bought into the Chicago School’s deference to markets — ‘we are all Friedmanites now’ — social justice became subservient to markets, and a concern with distribution was overruled by attention to the average, often nonsensically described as the ‘national interest’.” And there’s a broader problem that, as a society, we succumb to a meritocratic narrative that overstates the importance of individual effort and underplays the role of luck.

In a sense, there’s a problem here of ideological capture, not just capture of the policy-making process. This isn’t a new phenomenon; if anything, the postwar decades in which governments broadly pursued policies in the public interest were an exception to the usual pattern of the policymaking in the interests of financial elites that has been documented by Peter Turchin, Luke Kemp and others (including Walter Scheidel, who has argued that rising inequality only goes into reverse after periods of violence and catastrophe). Thatcher’s project to unpick the postwar consensus was carried forward by New Labour, despite their efforts to soften the impacts of neoliberalism on the poorest. We still don’t really know what the current Labour government wants to achieve, which perhaps helps to explain why it has proven to be so vulnerable to lobbying.

All in all, it’s very hard to tease apart the most important reasons for the failure by successive governments to deliver economic polices that serve the interests of the majority of their citizens. Lobbying clearly plays a key role, alongside misaligned incentives and issues of state capacity. But the dominance of certain ways of thinking among many people in key policymaking and influencing positions also has a huge impact on what decisions are made, and how they are reached.

Addressing all of these issues is a very tall order. But, as Spotlight on Corruption has laid out, there are some very obvious practical steps that can be taken now to clean up our under-regulated lobbying industry, and thus to tackle the feedback loop by which economic inequality spills over into political inequality. A more transparent and inclusive policymaking process will deliver better policy, as well as helping to rebuild public faith in democratic politics.