My Lords, I rise very briefly to support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. It takes me back 40 years to the Houghton committee on state aid for political parties. Both political parties ran away from the idea at the time—and there were only two major parties at that time, it has to be said. The campaign itself for the Houghton committee was under the slogan of “A penny from the workers to support our politics”.
It was said that we had our politics on the cheap. The amount of money that is now required to mount a political campaign or to support a political party in a constituency is eye-watering compared with what was considered to be normal in 1974. Now, we are all more and more dependent on very large donations from a very small pool of people. Whether or not those people seek personal advantage from it, the public think that that is what will happen.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is entirely right about the attitude of young people towards politics. We find a great deal of apathy and disgust, as well as a decline in participation in politics and certainly a decline in turnout in local and general elections. It is never the right time to introduce a measure such as this. I have been active as an organiser and a parliamentarian for well over 40 years and I have never, ever heard anybody from a Front Bench say, “Perhaps this is the time”; it is always, “Well, this is a really good idea, but not yet”.
The person whom I think of as my noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, has just referred to President Obama. He was wise enough and smart enough to see that this issue was poisoning politics in the United States. What did he do? He had a deliberate strategy of asking for $20 from millions of people. Can any of us remember—I certainly can—what Washington looked like on the day of his inauguration? Washington had never seen so many people turning up for an inauguration, and I do not think that that was an accident.