Political Parties and Elections Bill

The hon. Gentleman might have a point if no restrictions on the communications allowance existed. In the world of modern political communications there have been substantial differences in what the public expects from their MP and what they expect to receive from their MP. For example, a predecessor of mine many years ago in Southampton, Test remarked on one occasion that he received 29 or 30 letters a week and he could respond to all of them by hand. That is far from the case today, in a world of e-mails, letters and other forms of communication. It is important that we have them, but it is also important to delimit their content. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that if the communication showing the smiley face of the MP is an attempt to get party political matter over by means of the communications allowance, that is a problem. That is why there have been rulings about smiley faces of MPs, political logos and various other things that have been sent out in communications. In any event, part of the truth that dare not speak its name is the fact that we already have considerable state funding of political parties, although no one mentions it. We have state funding of the Conservative party to a considerable extent, in the form of Short money. I do not object to that. It is a good leaven for the workings of political parties in this place and elsewhere. As a rough calculation of the effect of the communications allowance, £10,500 per Member for the Labour party amounts to £3.66 million. For Conservative MPs the figure is £2.06 million, with a further £3.8 million a year in Short money for Conservative MPs. That equates to £19,600 per Conservative MP, rather more than the communications allowance, and of course Conservative MPs get the communications allowance anyway. So where is the inequality, I wonder? The total amounts of money are roughly the same per side. I say that to try to bring the debate down to a rather less mint sweet-based level. Partisan points can be made on both sides, of course. Instead, we should judge the Bill by what it will do to ensure that the public have a better view of how we conduct our business, how elections are conducted, how valid the results of those elections are, and what confidence people can have about going to vote in the first place. That is the test that we should apply to the Bill.