Political Parties and Elections Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow the previous speakers, especially the hon. Members for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) and for Battersea (Martin Linton), two notoriously narrowly held Labour seats. No one in the House or outside will be fooled by the passion with which Members in such marginal seats view the relatively small funding, as I said in my intervention, given to those trying to oppose the Government and putting themselves forward for election. The vision for Labour Members, it seems, is to ensure that the trade unions can continue to buy influence within the Labour party. In the last returns, 80 per cent. of the funding of the Labour party came from the trade unions, yet the Government find themselves in negotiation with those trade unions time and again. They want that to happen while barring those who are entirely eligible to vote from being able to back their preference by funding it in the way that others in this country do. While hon. Members are seeking to bar, through the amendment, people who live abroad from contributing as residents do, they are happy to see funding from Lord Paul, for instance, whose companies bought the Armstrong Group, with many of my constituents losing their pension fund because it was put into liquidation to escape the pension liabilities that the company owed.