Political Parties and Elections Bill

This has been a very interesting debate. The proceedings of the Neill committee have been set out in some detail, so I shall not repeat them. The intentions of new clause 1 go to the heart of what we are trying to achieve in any reform of party funding, which is to restore trust in the source of donations. I would like to support new clause 1 in principle, as my Front-Bench team probably would, but not without qualification, as the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) agreed when he referred to a number of other clauses that he had tabled and other points that were not in those clauses. That is why he wanted to speak about trade union affiliation fees, state funding and other issues. This is an area that we must clean up. The means by which parties fund themselves have contributed substantially to the loss of trust in them on the part of the electorate. The plain fact is that people believe that parties can be bought, and they may be right. Access, influence and even changes to legislation all appear to have been tradable over the past decade, not to mention the honours system. Those seem to have been traded for party cash by many parties for a long time, Lloyd George being the most salient example. Allegations about my own party's activities and the relationship between the award of honours and senior corporate directorships at times in the 1980s did not always look 16 annas to the rupee to me. Then we have had Labour's recent crop of life peers, with a fair sprinkling of big donors among them. The big donor culture has created a perception of corruption and we must do something about it. No debate on the subject should fail to mention Michael Brown's millions donated to the Liberal party—he is now in jail—and the trade unions' donations, with which they appear to have bought considerable influence, in the Warwick agreement and in other ways. The clause would end the big donor culture at a stroke. Some may argue for a cap of less than £50,000. I notice that the Liberal Democrats started to do that today. That, as the Lord Chancellor pointed out, is a flat contradiction of the Liberal party policy that has been around for several years.