It’s emerged that businesses including BP, Shell and Apple have been forking out up to £1800 a time for cosy chats with ministers, MPs and government advisors.

Operating out of a fancy restaurant in Mayfair, a ‘networking business’ called Chemistry Club organises ‘invite only’ events attended by the likes of Danny Alexander, policing minister Nick Herbert and Climate change minister, Lord Taylor.

Senior MPs from backbench committees, senior civil servants and advisors from the Treasury, Home Office, Ministry of Defence, Department of Energy and Climate Change and other key departments have also been implicated in this scandal.

The club charges executives from selected energy companies and technology businesses between £1,300 and £1,800 a head to attend such events.

Although it invites some members of the public to attend, these are carefully selected including none other than Ben Moxham, Cameron’s special advisor on energy and environment… and former BP employee.

This ‘cash for access’ scandal exposes what we all knew anyway: government is in the pocket of big business.

The fees are small change for these individuals, compared with the goldmine of pro-business subsidies, tax-breaks and legislation which are the outcomes of this corrupt arrangement.

What’s in it for the ministers and MPs though? It’s true they don’t get paid (although they do claim expenses) but access to the leading figures of industry is priceless for MPs planning a post-parliamentary career built on companies returning favours granted while in government.

The Cabinet Office obviously got worried about how it looked so issued ‘guidance’ in August 2010 telling civil servants not to attend such events and claimed it wasn’t aware of how much people were paying for the privilege.

Still you can never get the Tory sleaze out of the carpet, and this ‘guidance’ didn’t stop bastions of transparency and accountability like the Met and GCHQ (secret service) from continuing to attend these events.

The cabinet has since overturned its ruling against civil servants attending, following ‘discussions’ with the club.

The Chemistry Club runs two main series of networking events: one, called the Climate Change Forum, focuses on energy and climate change, the other on IT and technology.

The club stresses its evenings “are not social gatherings but ‘work events’” that “represent an exceptionally good use of attendees’ time”.

Evidently it’s a good use of attendees time; they wouldn’t be paying this money if it didn’t benefit them. They fork out to buy influence on the decisions our government is making – and companies like Shell aren’t interested in reducing oil dependence, or banning arms sales to militias in Nigeria.

Although attendees details can now be viewed at the bottom of the Chemistry Club’s website, this simply gives politicians the ability to say that the backroom deals are all legit and above board.

While nobody should be able to buy access to power, the strength of a class system is that it allows those who monopolise wealth in society to also monopolise the power structures in a society.

The great con of capitalist ‘democracy’ is that it provides the illusion of free choice, while ensuring that the real decisions about the economy, security, foreign policy are kept under the control of an unelected, unrepresentative elite.

We are fighting for an alternative to a world based on the exploitation of one class by another. Our alternative is socialism, the rule of the working class, who alone have the ability to organise society for the benefit of the many, rather than the privilege of the few.

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