Political Parties and Elections Bill

It is both a pleasure and a problem to follow the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young). It is a pleasure because I substantially agree with many of the things he had to say and the thoughtful way in which he said them, and a problem because it is clear that I shall now have to exempt him from some of the remarks that I might make about the likeness to a certain mint sweet, sold in tins in the House of Commons shop, that appears to have pervaded certain parts of the debate this evening. The word ““consensus”” has been used quite freely in the debate. It is true that the efforts of Sir Hayden Phillips, who had to deal with a problematic initial brief in his inquiry, and of the Constitutional Affairs Committee produced an output that moved substantially towards the possibility of consensus on the wider issue of what we are doing here, as far as our political practice is concerned, and how that needs to be validated in the public eye in the long term. It seems to me that that is what most of the debate is about. People will have different versions of what is the most important part of that issue. One of the most important parts of validating what we are doing here starts with the Jeremy Bentham dictum that all should count for one and none should count for more than one. If someone is not registered to vote, for whatever reason, or has disappeared off the electoral register, they do not count for one. Alternatively, if large sums of money flood into a contest where everybody would otherwise count for one, distorting their ability to count for one, people will not count for one in the same way. Consensus would have to take account of the real world and what happened in elections. The consensus achieved by, among other things, the report of the Constitutional Affairs Committee took account of the differences in political parties' histories and how those differences come into the political system today. The recommendation on the subject of trade union affiliations and the relationship between trade unions and the Labour party, which we have already discussed this evening, stated:"““Any move to change the nature of party funding must not stray into prescriptive devices to require political parties to organise internally in ways that violate their democratic relationships with other institutions.””" I felt that that was a good formulation of where parties have come from, as far as their political backgrounds are concerned. Our political system has never been perfect. We have never had a moment in our history when we could write the entire political system anew and hope that it would work according to the ideal principles that we proposed. Any idea of how better to regulate the system has to come from where we are and where we are going, and any consensus must take that into account. I am concerned about the extent to which ““consensus”” has, in this evening's debate, begun to be interpreted as ““veto””. Those two words are very different. When engaging in a partisan debate, people will of course conclude that their position of expediency has more principle attached to it than an outside observer might accept was the case. It is generally accepted that the difference between the near consensus in the discussion on party funding several years ago and the recent position relates, to some extent, to the fact that the Conservative party, in particular, when it was worrying about its position on funding, had a warmer view of consensus on including donations and a whole-term cap on party expenditure. I personally think that that would be an important part of the process of allowing the public to see that what we are doing makes full sense, as far as their participation in elections is concerned. As the political funding atmosphere changed, a number of people in the Conservative party began to feel much more lukewarm about the idea that such a compromise might be a good thing in achieving consensus. This is where the mint sweets in the shop come in to it—that move towards a veto has been dressed up as high principle. The Conservative party withdrew from the talks because, in my view, in the end it felt that it was more to its advantage to be out of them than to be in them. In those circumstances, short-term consensus is very difficult to achieve. What does one do in such circumstances? Do we simply say that because there is no consensus we should do nothing? Do we say, ““Let's do what it is possible for us to do in circumstances where there is no full consensus, but we can reasonably argue for a number of things without its being in a spirit of over-partisanship, although obviously all contributions will be seen as to some extent partisan. Let's see what we can do to move towards a better version of how the system works””? What disappoints me about the Liberal Democrats' position is that they appear to be repudiating such an idea and saying that unless the full consensus and the ideal outcome can be achieved, nothing should be considered at the moment. I can understand how that position arises, but, bearing in mind the description I have given of how we have moved away from consensus in recent years, we are nowhere near reaching a perfect outcome. Should we therefore say that nothing will happen in the meantime, until such an outcome is achieved? I am afraid that that, for much less honourable reasons, appears to be the position of those on the Conservative Front Bench.