I feel deeply privileged to belong to such a broad church as is suggested by this amendment. I little thought that I would have the privilege of standing in the same rank as the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, and the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, but I am utterly sincere in the support that I give to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. When he very respectably sought to accost me some days ago to support this matter, I had misconceived the situation. I thought he was seeking to place political parties on a charitable basis, which of course would have been utterly improper. The definition of charity, however impractical it may be in the modern period, is well laid down in the statute of Elizabeth I and in the authority of Re Pemsel, which I still remember from my student days.
That is not at all what the amendment is about. It is a question of what fuel there should be available in a democracy to any political movement. That fuel, I suggest, is the united will of millions of people, of government, opposition or a third force, or a fourth,
for that matter. That fuel is the desire and hopes of millions of individual people, possibly for tens of thousands of different reasons, but it is the amalgam of that united force that gives politics significance.
If you interfere with that system from above by the injection of vast amounts of money, you corrupt that system. It was Oliver Goldsmith, in the 18th century, who had these words:
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay”.
In this case, wealth will diminish completely the significance of democratic politics. Now, we will say, “That is highly idealistic and immensely impractical”. It may well be, but we are deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, who is a brave, iconoclastic, reforming character and to whom the House owes a great debt.
In America, in the two elections that President Obama has won, it may very well be that there were tactical and highly materialistic reasons why he chose to rely on millions of people rather than on the support of a few wealthy, almighty subjects. Be that as it may, it gave those campaigns impetus and significance. That is exactly what this amendment proposes. It may very well be that the amounts that are mentioned could be debated high and low. That does not matter at all. The significance is that we wish to see politics as an amalgam of millions of people with desires supported, we hope, by the substantial subvention of most of those people.