Report comment

John D,
There is an even more famous lawyer than Coke, who proposed the only solution that would stop politicians colluding with business people to make their business more profitable, writing:
“'Any consultations regarding the public interest outside Parliament shall be punishable as treason.' This statute was made so that the ruler and the elected representatives might not easily conspire together to oppress the people, and to change the state of the body politic.
Can it be justice that a rich trader or a financier or, to be short, anyone who either does nothing at all or nothing very necessary to the common good, should have a comfortable living, while ordinary workers, without whose labours no State could long survive, have to toil long and hard for wages that do not leave a sufficient surplus to provide for their old age? When I consider all the polities in existence, I can perceive nothing but a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own ease in the name of the common good. They devise all manner of stratagems by which to retain what they have unjustly acquired and to obtain the labour of the poor for as little pay as they can. These devices, which they have decreed to be for the common good, that is to say for the good also of the poor, they then make law."
Although he was Lord Chancellor, no government in the subsequent 500 years has even contemplated making what we now call 'lobbying' a criminal offence, reducing the penalty to no More than imprisonment and a scalding fine for participants on both sides.