Political Parties and Elections Bill

Follow that, really. In speaking to this group of amendments, I specifically support the amendments tabled by my noble friends on the Front Bench, although I do not want to speak to them specifically. Like the noble Baroness, I want to respond first to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. I am not as critical as she was of how the noble Lord raised these matters, not least because the questions and problems that he raised on individual registration are in many cases legitimate. For those of us who believe fervently in the concept and the practice of individual registration, we have to solve those problems if it is going to work. I welcome the fact that the noble Lord raised those issues, because it concentrates attention on them. I was not quite sure where the noble Lord was going when he referred to binge drinking. I thought that he was coming back to the practice of personation parties that I mentioned briefly at Second Reading, which fortunately I do not have direct experience of in Pendle but I have heard reports of it in other parts of Lancashire. In fact, they are not known as "parties", but I shall not use the word that people do use, which involves alcohol and is alliterative, but which it would be unparliamentary to put into Hansard.