Ron Bailey: How One Man Gets New Laws Passed

Ron Bailey has spent four decades turning outrage into legislation, and he has the statute book to prove it.

Friends of the Earth once called him the UK's most successful parliamentary campaigner. Sir Oliver Letwin, a former minister who found himself on the receiving end of Bailey's tactics, described him as "the most effective and relentless lobbyist that it has been my misfortune to encounter during the last two decades.Lord Foster, a Liberal Democrat peer and friend, takes a more generous view: 'a bit of a pain in the arse at times.'''''""

Bailey estimates he's been involved in getting 16 bills into law, and he's also had a hand in a further 25 law changes, which adds up to a remarkable body of work for someone who once hung a poster that read "Don't vote, it only encourages them." That's a startling record. So consider the irony: his younger self couldn't have imagined this.

From squatting to statute books

Bailey's path to Westminster was anything but conventional. He cut his campaigning teeth in the 1960s, joining protests against harsh homelessness laws that split up families and diving into the squatting movement. He occupied hostels, moved homeless families into empty houses, and battled bailiffs. The campaigns captured the era's rebellious mood, but they were built on something more methodical: Bailey's thorough research into property law, some of it from the 14th century, carried out in the British Library so he always had facts ready when challenged.

His politics were awakened by his folk-singer brother. Being "asked to leave" grammar school for "messing about" deepened his dislike of authority. Direct action came first. The law came later.

The year was 1983. The Greater London Council Grants Committee awarded one of his projects enough money to rent an office and employ staff, a sum that promised stability and reach. Bailey bit the hand that fed him. He used the cash to launch a campaign demanding that the committee make its meetings public, and that single act of defiance set off a chain reaction. That led to a push for a Local Government (Access to Information) Bill, which expanded public access to council meetings and documents. So it's hard to call it ingratitude,it's more like a calculated spark.

Winning outside Parliament

Bailey and his team contacted hundreds of local groups, sending them the "secret files" that detailed exactly what councils were doing behind closed doors, and this outreach was the engine of their support-building campaign. But one favorite example stood out: a council that voted for a motion supporting freedom of information, in private. It's absurd. So they used that story everywhere.

He knew the campaign was working when he overheard MPs in a parliamentary bar complaining about the flood of letters they were receiving. That was the turning point. The then Conservative government had a big majority and opposed the bill, but public pressure forced a rethink, and so Bailey and his team were careful to let ministers "save face," altering the wording so the government didn't look like it had climbed down. It couldn't have gone better.

"I don't call myself a lobbyist. I call myself a community mobiliser. That's the key point. You don't win these campaigns in Parliament, you win them outside Parliament."

It's one of his golden rules. That approach, giving your opponent a way out, has served him well through countless political battles and backroom negotiations. But the full list appears in his new book, *Institutionalised Deceit: Taking the Lid off Westminster Governance*. So don't miss it.

Strange bedfellows and golden rules

Another rule: avoid party tribalism. It's a simple creed, really. But Bailey has rarely been picky about who he works with, despite voting Green, and that flexibility has defined his career more than any party label ever could. In the 1980s, he teamed up with the Association for the Conservation of Energy, a body run by directors and CEOs. He summed up the unlikely alliance in his goodbye speech. "Perhaps we have both learnt something. I have learnt that not all capitalist bastards are capitalist bastards and you have learnt that not all anarchist nutters are anarchist nutters." So there you have it.

His mantra is to always appear "ultra reasonable". He writes: "Make it as difficult as possible for people to oppose you."

His successes include the Home Energy Conservation Act, which put a duty on councils to set out how they were improving home energy efficiency; the Private Hire Vehicles Act, which regulated minicabs; and the Road Traffic Reduction Act, which required local councils to produce traffic reduction plans.

Master of the private members' bill

Bailey's key method is the private members' bill process. It starts with the deputy speaker. White gloves on, that official picks small numbered balls out of a goldfish bowl. But the real drama comes next. The lucky MPs whose names get pulled from that bowl receive precious, limited time in Parliament to present their own bill, and that's a chance they can't waste. So it's a game of chance, pure and simple.

The numbers were drawn, and Bailey didn't waste a second. He moved fast, immediately lobbying the seven MPs on the list and presenting them with oven-ready bills, a strategy that turned a simple list into a legislative roadmap he could control. So he became a master of the tricky process. That process, turning those bills into law, wasn't easy, but he'd learned every twist and turn, every favor owed, every quiet threat that made the gears grind his way. But he made it look simple.

That put him on a collision course with Conservative MP Eric Forth. Forth was a dedicated parliamentarian and one of the most vehement opponents of the private members' bill process. He regularly tried to block bills by talking them out. The Bromley and Chislehurst MP argued such bills represented the "dreams of this or that group and the proper aspirations of good-minded people" but were "not necessarily very well-thought through".

Forth filibustered so many backbench bills that Friday sessions earned a grim nickname. "Eric Forth's killing fields," they called them. And the man seemed uncrackable, a legislative fortress of procedural obstruction that Bailey himself acknowledged in his book, even as he claimed a few hard-won victories against him.

To save his Private Hire Vehicles Bill, Bailey organised an intense local campaign, sending leaflets to every one of Forth's 50,000 constituents. It worked.

Still at it

Bailey wasn't above returning to the direct action of his youth. He once locked the Liberal Democrat chief whip in his office. It was a bold, old-school maneuver, designed to stop rival campaigners from getting their lobbying in, a tactic that harked back to a more confrontational era of politics. So he held him there. And the move was simple, effective, and utterly without apology.

He's in his 80s now, and Bailey is recovering from his sixth stroke. It's brutal. Insomnia and restless leg syndrome keep him up at night, so rest doesn't come easy for a man who's already weathered so much. Yet his friend Lord Foster notes he's 'still at it.'''''" And that's the whole story, really.

"Still chasing, still writing parliamentary questions. Above everything, Ron Bailey has probably got more pieces of legislation through Parliament than the vast majority of cabinet ministers."

That's the measure of the man. He started out telling people not to vote, and he ended up shaping the laws they live under, the very statutes that govern their daily routines and quiet expectations. But the revolution, it turns out, had a filing system.