Lobbying in the United Kingdom
Formal procedures enable individual members of the public to lobby their Member of Parliament but most lobbying activity centres on corporate, charity and trade association lobbying, where organisations seek to amend government policy through advocacy. Companies and individuals who operate in this sector commonly use the terms "public relations", "public affairs", "political consultancy" or "corporate affairs" to describe their activities (though this was also a reaction to the negative publicity surrounding the word "lobbyists" following the 1994 Cash-for-questions affair). Professional public affairs agencies, representing multiple clients, undertake a significant proportion of lobbying activity in addition to individual organisations conducting lobbying on an in-house basis.
Refeudalization
"Publicity once meant the exposure of political domination before public reasoning; "publicity" [here Habermas uses the English word] sums up the reactions of a non-binding goodwill. The bourgeois public sphere readopts feudal qualities in proportion to its formation by "public relations" [in English]: the "offering agents" display representative expenditure in front of compliant customers. Publicity imitates that aura of personal prestige and preternatural authority which the representative public sphere had once imparted.