Political Parties and Elections Bill

It is not news to anyone that Bearwood is a company associated with Lord Ashcroft. The trail shows that clearly, and it is not a secret. The money comes from legitimate activities conducted in the United Kingdom, and therefore the donation is legitimate and permissible. I see no evidence to suggest that anything other than that is the case. If the hon. Gentleman believes that that is not the case, I suggest that he take it up with the Electoral Commission. The activities that have been described are already illegal, and the Electoral Commission has made it crystal clear that the Bill provides no better protection for the public interest in transparency than we have already. All the Bill would be is a massive hammer blow against exactly the sort of voluntarism and wider participation that we all genuinely want to see happening. I am delighted that the Secretary of State for Justice has accepted the need to go back to the drawing board on that provision. I now move on to the partisan heart of the Bill. It was a grave disappointment when over the summer the Secretary of State committed, in the White Paper, to the measure in clause 10: the reintroduction of ““triggering””, the archaic, confusing and discredited system under which many of us were elected and re-elected—indeed, some of us lost elections, too. It is the system in which election spending limits are triggered when a candidate first does something that is capable of being interpreted as campaigning to be elected to Parliament. The Secretary of State rightly makes much of the fact that when he took through the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill, he did so on a consensual basis. That is indeed to his credit. In his statement in the summer, he made a brave stab—and he tried to continue it this afternoon—at maintaining that this provision would also be consensual, on the slender ground that the then Conservative spokesman in the other place had tabled some probing amendments on the removal of triggering.