Noel I've been in the FSB. I joined some years ago because a rep came around. I had moved in to a unit in a multi-tenure mill. My insurance had gone up from £400 to £2K and I had to book through a Lloyds scheme as no one would touch multi-tenure at the time.
I asked the FSB rep what was in it for me. Well we do cheap insurance for members - my ears pricked up
I think my membership was just under £200 a year. I got my insurance back down to under £1k, so it was a no brainer.
Being a member of a trade body was never a case of me allowing them or asking them to advocate for me on my behalf.
I think I'm safe in saying that is the case for most members of trade groups. They are in it for the member benefits and not for the lobbying.
Then let's look at the CBI. At a Select Committee hearing Carolyn Fairburn was aksed how many members the CBI had.
She claimed to "speak for" 170,000 members.
The reality is that the CBI has 1500 direct members. They double count members of their members, and the best example is the NFU.
The National Farmers Union is a member of the CBI and the CBI count the 50,000 NFU members not the 1.
When I asked a couple of my local farmer friends, one who supplies me with lamb and beef, they were oblivious to their CBI membership and certainly as Brexiteers they were not aligned to the CBI position.
The image the CBI gives is of big business, but it also has lots of state sector organisations and quangos. Whilst the full list of members is secret, this was shown to be the case when the CBI came out against Scottish Independence a few years back and some Scottish organisations resigned.
Visit Scotland, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland and 8 Universities were among those who publicly declared their position.
So regardless of your position on Brexit, you should be aware of the web of lobby groups. Many of them are intertwined and it looks like there is a weight of many voices, voices we should pay high regard to, but in fact they are significantly over-egging their level of representation and the type of bodies that they represent.
Finally I'll just touch on the surveys they often cite.
My experience of these groups is that they fire out an email questionnaire using Survey Monkey type methods.
If they fired out one "Are you concerned about the effects of Brexit on your business? Please take 5 minutes to answer a few questions".
Those not concerned would not respond.
Those most likely to respond would be those who might be negatively affected.
So when they report their findings as "67% of 1350 companies surveyed" they should say "1350 companies responded from the 8700 invited to take part" but they never give you that.
I've had first hand experience of such surveys, used to set policy positions for an organisation and used in my opinion unethically.
In one instance a response rate of just over 1% resulted in the organisation taking that information and forming policy that they justified as a result of the survey.