The other 'occupy' movement - how corporate lobbyists have hijacked British politics

A Guardian analysis of links between government and corporations as well as a FT report on attendance at this year's conferences of the 3 main political parties shows beyond doubt that politics in Britain no longer serves citizens and party members but is a domain dominated by the vested interests of big business and its hireling politicians:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/
datablog/2011/oct/16/links-government-
data-business-data?CMP=twt_gu

The Guardian reports that 'since May 2010, government minsters have met with corporate representatives on 1,537 occasions – excluding several hundred round table meetings where numerous companies were present at once. Trade bodies, think-tanks and other interest groups had 1,409 meetings. By contrast, charities were met on just 833 occasions, and union reps just 130 times; 10 times less than their corporate counterparts.'

The FT analyses attendance at the 2011 party conferences and finds that 'less than a quarter of the 30,000 delegates who attended the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat conferences were card-carrying party members' - in Labour's case only 3,000 of the 12,000 present in Liverpoool. This demonstrates the degeneration of a once great democratic forum of the labour movement into a transactional junket symptomatic of a wider political malaise in the UK: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/33e1114c-ef75-11e0-941e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1b4AkoEQj