Political Parties and Elections Bill

As a former Labour leader used to say, I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman raised that point. We went into it exhaustively during our discussions, and considered very fully whether affiliation fees were to be disaggregated and treated as individual donations, thus necessarily falling below any cap that would be imposed. However, the idea that affiliation fees were in any sense voluntary individual donations was blown out of the water. We discovered during the discussions that a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament had been sent a ballot paper for Labour's deputy leadership election because, completely inadvertently, he or she—we do not know who it was—had become a member of the Labour party by not opting out of the political levy. We also know that some trade unions casually register not just that 100 per cent. of their members are making this ““voluntary individual donation””, but, in some cases, that more than 100 per cent. are doing so. Two are paying, I believe, 108 per cent. and 107 per cent respectively. The idea that this is an individual donation or subscription is ridiculous. I have no objection to trade union funding of the Labour party or, indeed, of any other party. Still less do I have any objection to individual trade union members voluntarily making a subscription to any political party. That is absolutely fine. I entirely understand the historic relationship between the trade unions and the Labour party.