Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am trying to agree with the hon. Gentleman; if he can contain himself for a moment, he will get a measure of support. However, he does not fully realise the implications of his own point. If he thinks that local campaigning, which MPs do a good deal of, has little impact, presumably he must conclude that local campaigning by candidates challenging incumbents also has relatively little impact. There is a huge amount of evidence to suggest that, too. In other words, we may all, Don Quixote-like, be tilting at the wrong issue in worrying so much about the effects of local campaigning. Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that in the UK there is virtually a blanket prohibition on a key use to which money can be put in this context: access to television. Television has driven the huge increases in expenditure in the United States. On grounds of freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has ruled that there can be no limits to the amount spent on television. The prohibition in this country is the key protection against the alleged huge arms race that has been mentioned, which can never be found in the figures—not in aggregate, at least, and certainly not on the scale alleged by a number of Members this evening. I should like to address two general, big issues. Both have been referred to and one was discussed at length by the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) in his excellent speech about trust. As politicians, we have two big challenges. First, we need to restore the electorate's confidence in how we finance our parties, and there is agreement across the House that that is necessary. Secondly, we need to restore their faith in how elections are conducted. Despite its title, the Bill does little or nothing to address either of those issues. As a number of Members know, I have argued for a decade that there should be fundamental reform of party finances. To his considerable credit, within weeks of becoming Leader of the Opposition in 2005, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) came out in strong support of a radical set of proposals, very similar to those put forward by the Liberal Democrats in 2003 and to those put forward by Matt Taylor, then chief strategist for Tony Blair. Equally to his credit, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, more or less agreed that that was the way in which we needed to take policy, and he did that in the teeth of yet another huge funding scandal afflicting his party at the time. It was certainly courageous. Cleaning up this area of politics would require bold and radical steps of that type by both the major parties and by the Liberals. For my party, it would mean completely bringing to an end reliance on big individual donations and ending any hope that big business donations could be restored. For the Labour party, it would require ending dependence on big union donations, either directly or indirectly through affiliation fees. Tony Blair and the leader of my party were both prepared to act boldly on those issues. In order to achieve it, they agreed to create the process that led to the Hayden Phillips process. He was asked specifically to make recommendations on donation caps, but his terms of reference make no mention of spending or spending controls. One of the many proposals that Hayden made during the course of lengthy discussions—I participated in all of them—would have achieved the key objectives set out by the leaders of the major parties. For the first time, each trade union member would have been given a genuine, individual choice on whether to donate to a political party, and if so, which one. Affiliation fees were the stumbling block. The Justice Secretary, who is now back in his seat, still blocks the publication of that proposal. It is as though admitting to the unions and to the rest of the labour movement that he even held discussions on such an idea might taint him in some way. I can think of no reason why that proposal of Hayden Phillips should not be published. The nub of it and the reason why those talks broke down is that the courage that was being exhibited by Tony Blair appeared to evaporate as the discussions went on, as his power waned, and when he was replaced by the current incumbent. That is why the Conservatives eventually concluded that the talks had become pointless. The Bill is also silent on the second major area where we must act if we are to restore trust in politics. We need to clean up the malpractices and electoral fraud that have come with the Government's misguided relaxation of postal voter registration, which gave us elections so tainted that a High Court judge was moved to conclude that they"““would disgrace a banana republic””." It should be a relatively straightforward matter to clean this up through individual registration and voter identifiers. The Electoral Commission supports that; as far as I know, all political parties support it. Even the Government have said, and said again today, that they do not disagree in principle. Why on earth are the Government dragging their feet? We have had a lot of discussion about consensus. Consensus on individual registration exists right now. The Justice Secretary hid behind the need—I virtually quote him—for the details to be sorted out, but the Electoral Commission has already done most of that work. I very much hope that the Government will help us by amending the Bill to include individual registration as quickly as possible. I can see no possible explanation for their current inaction other than partisanship. So much for what is missing from the Bill—what about what is in it? As I said, my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham did a pretty good job on that. The Government said that they want to go ahead on the basis of consensus. However, as regards triggering rules for the purpose of calculating a candidate's election expenses, they have proposed a major change without any consultation at all. Sir Hayden did not opine on this—he was not even asked to consider it. What is more, the Government have announced that they want it on the statute book so that it can be operative immediately—in other words, so that it can influence the outcome of the forthcoming general election. In fact, they have said that they even want it to come into force before the Electoral Commission's guidance is published. That would create an extraordinary state of affairs, whereby people would be required to obey a law, on the content and meat of which they would have no information to guide them. All that sits rather oddly with the high-minded talk about consensus that we have heard from the Justice Secretary. He backtracked a little on that today, but it should not be lost on any of us that he has tried to railroad this proposal through without any consultation. He even originally wanted to make implementation retrospective, to the date of Second Reading—in other words to today, before the Bill had even been in Committee. I have only a few brief remarks left to make, about one or two other issues that require our attention. Clause 2 sets out the Electoral Commission's investigatory powers. Of course I agree that the commission needs investigatory powers to perform its statutory duties, but the proposals look extremely heavy handed—hon. Members in all parts of the House have made that point in different ways this evening. We cannot possibly implement the proposals in the Bill as drafted, so we must look at them again. Clause 8 requires political parties to make a written declaration about the original source of any funds over £200. We have had a discussion about that. My right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham has already explained that for practical reasons the Electoral Commission does not support that measure in its current form, and neither do I. I am fully in favour of transparency, but the compliance burden would be huge if the declaration requirement and the verification process were to become meaningful. That is where the compliance impact assessment is so off beam. It says on page 4 that"““it would take a political party approximately 5 minutes per donation…to process donations…over £200””." Five minutes to verify a donation is no more than a brief phone call or even the time that it would take to find out what number to ring. However, the reputational risk to a political party would be huge if that were not done more thoroughly. That is because—this point has not been explained thoroughly enough this evening—the Bill fundamentally changes the relationship between the Electoral Commission and political parties, by providing civil sanctions and by the increase in investigatory powers. The real compliance burden on political parties from that £200 trigger would therefore be large. The provisions are not acceptable in their current form. There are a number of solutions, one of which may be to raise the £200 limit. However, we cannot leave any political party as exposed as the Bill currently recommends. I completely agree with the point made earlier that nor can we allow vehicles to be created especially for the purpose of concealment. However, clause 8 is not designed to prevent that. With respect to the issue of consensus, let me add in passing that neither the Electoral Commission's proposed investigatory powers nor the verification changes were subject to Green Paper consultation. There has been no serious consultation on those issues, still less the establishment of a consensus. This is a tiny Bill that is designed to deal with major problems, but it does not address them. Even the relatively small measures in the Bill can be described as partisan and ill conceived. I am confident that it will not survive scrutiny in the other place. I hope very much that the Government will have the good sense to withdraw the most controversial measures and to amend the rough edges of a number of the others before they allow it to get there.