Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am grateful for this opportunity to say a few words in the debate. The speech by the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), which was an excellent statement of the Conservative party's position, clearly reflected the failure of the two main parties to reach some sort of agreement on the main elements of what could have been a comprehensive package. Having listened to the interventions that have been made, I think that it might be possible to cobble together a majority, with Liberal support. It is undoubtedly right that we should have the objective of securing consensus. Indeed, I was one of a handful of Members of Parliament who gave evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life inquiry on the Electoral Commission, and that was one of the points that I made then. There is probably no one in the House who disagrees with the proposition that it would have been much better if it had been possible to achieve an overall agreement on the next stage. I am proud of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Okay, there was an omission in relation to commercial loans, but I do not think that that was the result of collusion between the two major parties; people genuinely had not thought the matter through sufficiently. It is quite a remarkable omission, when one thinks of it, but no one from any of the Opposition parties raised the issue at the time, so a subsequent piece of legislation had to be introduced to deal with it. There is no doubt that we on the Labour Benches are entitled to be proud of the changes that have been made and the transparency that has been introduced. Obviously, my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary played a major role in that, and the 2000 Act is the centrepiece of those changes. The Committee on Standards in Public Life produced its report on the Electoral Commission in January 2007. I think that the proposed changes have broad support; that, as I understand it, is the Conservative party's position, too. It makes sense to appoint some commissioners—obviously a minority—who have some sort of political background, not least for the reason that the right hon. Member for Horsham gave: there is a big distinction between an advisory committee and having people on the commission, where the decisions are taken, who have experience of politics. He seemed to suggest that those commissioners would be politicians or ex-politicians, but I assume that they would be drawn from a wider group than that; they might be people who had stood for Parliament, or for local government, or who had a track record as an election agent, or had been local chairmen of a political party. Someone who had been a fairly senior party organiser might be considered. I have no strong view on that, but I support the principle of incorporating people with some political experience directly in the commission. The guts of the issue is the question of expenditure by political parties nationally and locally. I strongly support limits and controls. If we do not have them, we will go further and further towards the US system, in which colossal sums of money are involved. It so happens that this time around, perhaps unusually, the candidate one might expect me to support, Obama, will massively outspend the Republican candidate, but that is an aside. We should have effective limits and controls on expenditure; I think that that is accepted across the House. A lot of national expenditure is wasteful; one might consider some of the huge adverts deployed, usually by the major parties, in newspapers and billboards. Some of them—I include my party's adverts, as well as those of the Conservative party—have done the parties no good whatever in my constituency.