Political Parties and Elections Bill

I have learned, over the years, to be extremely suspicious of the word ““consensus””. Whenever it is used by party politicians in this country, it usually means that they are about to disagree about something. We learn that it is nice to say that we believe in consensus, but I have never seen it endure when serious matters arise. We had an outburst of it recently over the financial crisis. It lasted for about 48 hours. Some countries do consensus; the Nordic countries do consensus, including on party funding. We do not do consensus, however. We know that we ought to do consensus, which is why we talk about it so often, but we also know that it will break down at the first touch of party advantage. Notwithstanding what the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) has just said, when the Conservatives thought that there might be some party advantage in triggering the trade union issue, they collapsed the Hayden Phillips talks. That was a great pity. We ought to pay tribute to Sir Hayden Phillips, who, with the Constitutional Affairs Committee, produced an excellent set of proposals that provided the basis for some progress on the issue. We do consensus only in the most exceptional circumstances. That was the context of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. We had a newly elected Government with a huge majority. The Opposition were disoriented, unbalanced and on the back foot. They were rather ashamed of themselves, and knew that they had to come on side. In those circumstances, it was relatively easy to get consensus around the 2000 legislation. In normal times, we think that consensus is a good idea, but we just do not do it. It is rather like an alcoholic who keeps saying that he is attached to the virtues of sobriety. Yes, he knows what he has to say, but somehow he can never quite do it. We need to take a step back before we take the step forwards. We need to take a step back and remind ourselves of where we have come from. I remember coming into the House in the early 1990s. There were party funding scandals, and they were all about where the Tories were getting their money from. Private organisations had to go to Companies House to try to find out where those great Tory funders came from. Then they did the matching up of the funders and the people getting peerages, and said, ““There you are, this shows that these big funders get their pay-off in the House of Lords.”” But it was a completely covert system. When the new Committee on Standards in Public Life was established, I remember saying, along with other people in the House at that time, that we should ask it to look into party funding, so that it could help us to sort out some of these issues. The Conservative Government of the day refused to give the issue of party funding to the committee. That shows where we have come from, and where we have now got to. Looking back at those days, it is worth remembering that party funding was entirely unregulated at that time. Parties were seen essentially as voluntary organisations that could do as they liked with their money. They could do as they liked in regard to how they got it and how they spent it. It was only when that seemed to be causing difficulties and embarrassment of the kind that I have just described that the Committee on Standards in Public Life produced the comprehensive report on party funding that led to the 2000 Act. The watchword of that Act—which we thought, at the time, would be the piece of legislation that would deal with this issue once and for all—was ““transparency””. The problem was identified as one of secrecy, because we did not know where donations came from. We thought that, if we had proper transparency and people could see where they came from, that would solve the problem. The parties would have to be accountable for what happened after that. As it turned out, however, that did not solve the problem. There were a number of reasons for that. One was that, when people saw what was happening, they did not like it. Also, the pattern of party funding was changing. Let us look back at what seemed offensive at the time. We had a situation in which the Labour party was, on the whole, funded by the trade unions, and the Conservative party was funded by business donations. That looks like an age of lost innocence compared with what we have now, because it was all open and regulated—albeit on its own terms, and if one could find out the information. Now, of course, it is clear that those sources of donations fell away and we saw the rise of the big individual donor. We reached a position in which parties were increasingly funded by those rich individuals and party effort had to be devoted to going out and finding them. That, of course, raised questions in turn about what those rich individuals were going to get for their money. What would they receive in the way of changes in party or Government policy? What would they get in the way of honours, peerages and rewards? We moved from a position in which it was thought to be enough simply to have transparency to one in which it was thought necessary to address the new funding environment. As we deal with present circumstances, we should remember at least some of the logic of those former days. The logic was, I believe, this. Let us be sure, it ran, that we identify the problems before we invent the solutions. That may sound trivial, but I hope not. It is possible to get so intricately involved in the nuances of funding regimes that we lose sight of why we are looking into them in the first place. I presume that we are doing it to stop money ruling in politics, to stop politics from being driven by financial considerations and to stop certain people from being able to buy influence through privileged access and privileged benefits.