Political Parties and Elections Bill

I apologise; 1880 was the year of the general election. I was thinking of the by-election. In the 1895 election in Southampton—my city—the Conservative candidate, Sir Tankerville Chamberlayne, arranged for a horse and cart to be deposited outside the Cowherds public house, which is at the top of the city. The cart was unhorsed and six strong men pulled it down Above Bar to the party headquarters, with Sir Tankerville standing in the back throwing out sovereigns as they went. Quite reasonably, that behaviour was reported to an election commission and he was unseated. The point of the story is that what appears, by suggestion, to be tolerated now is that the metaphorical throwing out of sovereigns in a modern context is okay until the day the election is called, but then it is not okay. Even the argument that candidates should spend money they have legitimately raised for themselves would stand objective examination only if one did not agree that there should be restraints on electoral expenditure during elections anyway. As I understand it, we all agree that there should be constraints on election expenditure locally during elections. In terms of the real electoral arms race, we all know that, increasingly, certain people will try to squeeze in as much expenditure as possible in the three, four or five months before the period in which election expenditure is capped, to get around the rule. In the absence of a wholesale consensus on how we cap electoral expenditure between elections, we might consider a trigger mechanism. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Gosport (Sir Peter Viggers) said, we should provide the best possible definition of that trigger, so that some of the vagaries that beset the legislation that was in place before 2000 are done away with. Nevertheless, we should have a mechanism that provides a much more straightforward and logical approach to electoral expenditure. As for the Electoral Commission's powers to invade one's bedroom, suggested in proposed new schedule 19 to the 2000 Act, which follows clause 12, I hope that that issue will be considered carefully in Committee. There is indeed a logical disjunction between the Electoral Commission's power to deliver a rap on the knuckles and its power to refer someone to the police. It is logical and clear that there should be a staging point in between. It is up to the House, in Committee, to make sure that the staging point is reasonable, not unreasonable, and that it does not take us beyond the reality, which is that political parties are voluntary organisations that overwhelmingly have the best interests of the public at heart in their activities. I now come to the regulation of unincorporated bodies and the reporting of donations over a certain size from those bodies. I find the opposition to that proposal rather comical. It is plain that in a properly transparent system, the idea that money could be funnelled into a local campaign through certain unincorporated bodies, whether outside or inside the country, offends against the argument on giving money in the period immediately outside the restricted period of an election. It also offends against the principle to which, as I understand it, we all signed up when we talked about the fact that campaign money should be transparent and its origins fairly straightforward. Obviously, there is the issue of what the unincorporated body in question is doing. With an unincorporated body such as the Berkshire Supper Club, for example, one might think, ““It's in Berkshire, and people have suppers there and donate money as a result; that seems fairly straightforward.”” If an organisation is called the East Surrey Business Club, I guess it would involve business people in Surrey making donations to bodies in Surrey. Similarly, a person might think that the Midlands Industrial Council was a body dealing with industrialists who work in the midlands. Well, they would be wrong. They would find that associations up and down the country, nowhere near the midlands, have benefited from donations from that organisation, and we do not know what the arrangements are. As to whether the body is industrial, we are not sure. If we are to deal with transparency, it is important that it should be proper transparency; there should not be transparency only for some. Counter-arguments against some measures in the Bill were put forward: it was said that the communications allowance meant that incumbents effectively got a great addition to their campaigning power, whereas their opponents did not. A great deal of effort has been made by the House authorities—the House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee among them—to ensure that the communications allowance is used for communications purposes and not party political purposes. Indeed, a corpus of case law, as we might call it, is being developed that, say, sets out the acceptable ways in which a Member of Parliament can deliver a newsletter, or what one can and cannot address one's constituents about and so on. That ensures that the communications allowance is not used for political campaigning.