A guide to effective campaigning

1 May 2026

A new book by Westminster lobbyist, energy campaigner and protester Ron Bailey highlights some of the deceit and incompetence within government and what more the public can do to overcome those who are only operating in their own interests. Andrew Warren recommends a read.

This book is about an opponent that is stronger than you. It is about an opponent that, in addition to its legitimate power to run the country, will use misrepresentation, misdirection and mendacity, bullying and even lies if necessary to defeat you.

“That opponent is the government…. this book is also about how that opponent can be beaten.”

These are the opening lines in a sensational new paperback from Cambridge Book Publishers, a division of that most respectable of publishers, Cambridge University Press. It is to be launched at a meeting in Parliament on 3rd June. It is a practical exposé of how Westminster government operates, written by somebody who has had a profound effect upon how energy efficiency has been perceived politically in the UK.

Even so, chances are many readers will never previously have heard of the book’s author. Ron Bailey was involved in supporting direct action by homeless families from 1965-68 against ‘workhouse rules’ set by Councils. He was the joint organiser of the occupation of Centre Point in January 1974 and of the ‘hijacking’ of a London bus in March 1982 by 74 people dressed as Law Lords, to protest against the Courts’ over-ruling the GLC’s ‘Fares Fair’ policy.

Making a mark

Subsequently, he has spent 40 years helping MPs to promote own-initiative Private Members’ Bills and amendments to government legislation. Of those PMBs, 16 became Acts (i.e. laws) and another 15 were successful because the government of the day did what the Bill said it should do. And the majority of these initiatives have been directly involved with sustainable energy.

Where a Bill is cited rather than an Act, this is because the legislative objective of the Bill (e.g. to require changes to the Building Regulations, or to reduce VAT on energy efficient products) was carried out by government as a direct result of the campaign around the Bill. So the Bill was withdrawn, because it had become otiose as the ‘Bill campaign’ had succeeded.

The Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 and the Energy Conservation Act 1996 placed (still existing) duties on local councils regarding targets for improving the energy performance of all housing in their areas. The Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000 mandates the abolition of fuel poverty by a set date. The Sustainable Energy Act 2003 requires binding targets for energy saving.

Tellingly, analysis of the political party of the backbench MP sponsoring the successful legislation is truly ecumenical. Of the 16 Acts, eight were led by Conservative MPs, five by Labour, two by Lib Dems and one by the first Green/PC MP.

Direct action

The book maintains that the opponent – the government of the day – oversees a system of governance based on ‘Institutionalised Deceit’ – the book’s title. It is divided into distinct chapters, each describing how and why the events described can only lead to that damning conclusion.

It is about organising and mobilising citizens, in such a way that they can make it politically very difficult or even impossible for that opponent to exploit that power.

An excellent easy read even for political novices, the book is full of some of the most remarkable ways in which campaigns are won. Take the chapter on the battle for a statutory energy efficiency target – running between 1992 and 2004 – included some hilarious events, in a couple of which I am named as being personally involved. We see :

●  an MP talking out his own Bill;

●  the Permanent Secretary at the Department of the Environment offering to amend Hansard, the official record of Parliament, because it did not accurately reflect our statements.

●  a civil servant deliberately overruling a Ministerial instruction because it wasn’t “Departmental policy”.

●  Ron Bailey physically intervening in the proceedings of the House of Commons – without being reprimanded.

●  an MP being literally dragged out of one committee to sit for two minutes in another.

●  a Minister denying in evidence to a select committee that any target existed despite it being stated 25 times in government documents.

Fuel poverty

Less happily, we learn what has occurred since Parliament passed the Warm Homes Act 2000, designed to eliminate fuel poverty. We see how the then Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister were also committed to achieving these targets, adopting two General Election Manifestos that endorsed the targets. 

However, when the legislative crunch came in 2008, the relevant government minister (then as now Ed Miliband) ignored all those promises and commitments and instead chose to go to court and successfully argue that there wasn’t a duty to end fuel poverty after all. The book relates how the government successfully resisted pressure to restore the targets, using specious arguments in Parliament to do so. And, most recently, how Labour’s new 2026 strategy deviously defined 6.2 million English households out of fuel poverty, thereby abandoning any long-term target to end fuel poverty.

Well-earned rest

Ron Bailey is now 83 and lives with his wife in Bristol. As the political magazine Total Politics concludes: ‘Ron Bailey is an unusual lobbyist. He came to the role from direct action politics and squatting. He has a record second to none when it comes to getting private members’ bills through parliament.’

Or as the Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP (Conservative), former Chief Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, puts it: “I can accurately say that Ron Bailey is the most effective and relentless lobbyist that it has been my misfortune to encounter during the last two decades. If it weren’t for his evident good will, his considerable fund of common sense, I and many others would have been driven to distraction by the extent and length of his campaigns.

“As it is, I have both a high regard for his professional skill and a degree of nostalgia at the thought that he is now retiring. It will be much safer to walk through the atrium of Portcullis House than it has been hitherto.”

Andrew Warren chairs the British Energy Efficiency Federation