Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am on the record as saying many times that I would have preferred a lower limit, but my party's position is £50,000, and the hon. Gentleman's party's position was £50,000 at the time of the talks, in published documents. It seems now that that has gone, and the Liberal party has another public position. It is a sad irony that while the issue has led to the public perception of corruption in politics to a higher level than I can remember, that has taken place at a time when politics has probably been less corrupt than in any previous era. One has only to cast one's mind back to Gladstone and the trading of consols in 1870s, his trading of Suez canal stock, and Lloyd George and the honours sales, which I have mentioned before. I am sorry that I keep going on about the Liberals. No doubt other parties were at it as well. If we agree to new clause 1, we are still left with a crucial question: can parties fund themselves on so much less? The hon. Member for Cambridge started to discuss that. Could Labour do without trade unions, the Liberal party without its Browns or the Conservatives without their big donors? I think so, provided that several conditions are fulfilled. One is that there should be an overall spending cap nationally at a lower level than we have at present for general elections. The general election cap is £20 million and should be reduced to £15 million. That is Conservative party policy. I do not know whether it is Labour party policy; I could not tell after what I heard today. That is a cut of a third in real terms, which is a reasonable step. Secondly, if we go ahead with the proposals, we must have some state funding, but I agree with those who said today that at a time of financial stringency, the public opposition to more state funding would be enormous, and my sympathies would be with the public on that. We would do well to recall that existing levels of state funding for political parties are already very high. Roughly half of our party politics is funded by the state directly or indirectly—a much higher figure than is commonly supposed. If there were more state funding along the lines set out in new clause 1, however, it would have to be based on a principle that the electorate could accept. It would have to be designed to encourage very local campaigning and a regeneration of grass-roots politics, and that would mean tax relief or match funding. It would also mean that cash-per-vote schemes, such as the Liberals have supported and the Conservatives considered in the 2005 proposals, and which were published at that time, would not be serious runners again for some time. I was never enthusiastic about those schemes, and I do not support them now. However, I do support match funding. Could the Conservative party cope without its big donors? It probably could; any campaigning benefits that parties pick up from the use of such money have to be offset against the negative publicity that comes with it. Something must also be made of the Lord Chancellor's point that a very high proportion of donations are honourably intended. It should be—and is, I think—a mark of a healthy democracy and polity that donors big and small should be prepared to donate money. It would be wrong to assume that all big donors are in it for access, honours and influence, although unfortunately a few of them are. Any answer to the question whether parties can cope with the donations cap must also address the special and unique needs of the Labour party. As it stands, new clause 1 would limit trade unions to £50,000, because affiliation fees—rightly, in my view; there are also many supporters of the same view on the Labour side of the House—are treated as collective donations in law. The consolidation of the trade union movement would make the new clause particularly punitive for the Labour party, because that consolidation would reduce even further the number of donations that the trade unions could make to it. The trade unions are, of course, the Labour party's paymasters, directly and indirectly, on a huge scale. As I mentioned, the unions make no secret of their desire to influence Government policy; they often boast about their successes in print and in public. We have to decide whether it is in the interests of British politics for us to carry on in that way. In my view, it cannot be right that in the 21st century a pressure group, or a collection of them, however steeped in tradition, should retain such an influential place in the life of a major political party. Parties, like democracy itself, must be aggregations of the decisions and will of individuals. The age of corporatism should be long gone. New clause 1 would end it, and that key ingredient of it attracts me.