My Lords, I come back to the comment I made on the earlier group of amendments: what is broken? What is this clause trying to put right, and does it solve it? I think we have heard from the debate on it that it does not really address the issue. Whatever happened in Thanet—and there may be other instances that were not subject to court cases—it has certainly gone through a proper legal process. As we have heard, both the Supreme Court and the Electoral Commission have addressed that issue.
I regret that we have moved away from the requirement that fundamental changes be subject to consent across all parties. That has been an important element of maintaining our democracy. Of course, the Trade Union Act was the first part of that attack by the Conservative Party on one party, which broke that consensus on funding.
As I have said before, the Conservative Party likes a debate about spending limits— “We can have a limit here, and the national limit and so on”—but the real debate is not about spending but about income. When David Cameron was Prime Minister and we have had discussions about it, we have seen that it is the income side of our politics that brings it into disrepute. Very rarely is it the spending side. The income side is about who has given the money, how much they are giving and what they expect for it. Taking big money out of politics is the issue. I say to the Conservative Party that its time will come, because when it is in opposition there will be a strong focus on the income side of this debate, and it will not like the result. It will not be able to rely on a large number of very wealthy people; it will have to rely on a larger number of low-income people, because I strongly believe that caps on donations are far more important than limits on spending. That is a debate for another day, but it is important to set today’s debate in context.
5.45 pm
This is an important constitutional issue. We are talking about strong limits, which historically have always been there, on constituency spending versus national spend. Thanet comes into this because all political parties have become more sophisticated in their campaigning; all political parties target, and their ability to do so has become more sophisticated. I am sure the Minister knows full well the consequences of this, because the Liberal Democrats target very effectively his own borough in Richmond, where they have had huge successes. That is inevitable, but we have to balance that with how we preserve the fundamental constitutional position.
Like my noble friend, I am not a supporter of proportional representation, although I am prepared to examine it and debate it. What I like about our democratic system is the single-Member constituency, whereby the elected person represents the whole community and is connected with that community and that locality. That is something the big political parties, including the Lib Dems, cannot necessarily break down. There will be occasions when someone who is not in a big political party wins because of their connection with that local constituency. That is why those local spending limits are so important. They enable that person who is not part of a big machine to come through. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that there are occasions when the Green Party breaks through because it has somebody in a local constituency who is extremely well connected with it. That is the principle we are addressing here.
We might think of notional spend in terms of a rich person giving an office and so on—which all counts—but the reality is that the notional spend is when a political party uses its national expenditure to target in a way that impacts on the local spend. I am fully aware of those risks, but the existing statutory requirements are adequate to deal with any problem. That is why I come back to the point that many noble Lords have made: that this provision, far from offering clarity and closing a loophole, risks creating uncertainty, opening the loophole and diminishing our constitutional position in respect of constituencies.
Doing this is really dangerous. I know we will get into other debates on the codes and Electoral Commission guidance, and we will go on to some of the other issues, but we are in danger of undermining our good constitutional position of single-Member constituencies in favour of a more presidential-style election campaign. That is a big risk, and we should resist it. If it is not broken, do not fix it. Let us stick with what we have.