Political Party Finance and the Electoral Commission

Lord Johnson of Lainston Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate into this important matter, but more to help put the record straight than to add further fuel to the misconception about how mainstream political parties raise funds. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, raised some extremely important points, but the situations he illustrated were criminal acts in my view. The law is clear; it is the enforcement that is the problem.

With the exception of my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley, I think I have been involved in party fundraising for probably longer than anyone in this House. I see it as my duty to encourage people to support my party. Indeed, when asked by people from other persuasions if they should donate to their cause, I always encourage that too. I do not have an interest to register. I have stopped raising money for the Conservative Party for the time being—I am afraid I found I had run out of friends and people were crossing the road to avoid me.

In all my time as a treasurer, as chairman and as vice-chairman for finance for the last 15 or so years, I was never—not once—asked to influence something in exchange for a donation. All our donors wanted, and sadly seldom got, were basic conservative principles put to work in government. I see some union Barons opposite; they probably feel the same way about their own contributions. It is a totally incorrect idea that there is a nefarious influence, either from home or abroad. In fact, everyone involved in funding whom I dealt with in the Conservative Party was absolutely petrified that they might break the rules in some way.

What these debates and sentiments end up doing is building further on the myth that giving to a political party is somehow a bad act. We in this House should actually be making it easier to donate, with less friction, and, frankly, it should be more applauded. Noble Lords worry about the potential for Elon Musk to make huge donations, but that is illegal for him as a foreign citizen from a foreign entity. In fact, it would be worse for us if mainstream parties cannot raise enough money to take their messages out to the electorates and are superseded by fringe parties instead.

The proposals for enhancing the powers of the Electoral Commission have some merit, though. The reducing of certain classes of offence, as has been mentioned, to a civil matter is eminently sensible. The fear of good people acting as election agents or some village tombola raising a few hundred pounds should not be a matter for the police where genuine mistakes are made. This is a good move for our politics. I applaud the current leadership of the Electoral Commission for its very sensible approach to proportionality, which we should always bear in mind.

What I would recommend is probably a bit contentious on my own side, but it is quite simple: we should impose a cap—I have said this consistently—on donations from any individual. It could be £100,000, £50,000 or £75,000—whatever it is can be discussed. We should, at the same time, raise the threshold of reporting to a higher level, maybe £20,000, under which only a record should be kept, and remove small fundraising events entirely from the onerous rules which reduced the level of local activity in politics. No one person should be able to buy a political party, but many people should be encouraged to engage at a sensible level and not be hounded for it. Unless we do these things, we will further denigrate our system at a huge cost to our security and future.

I also think to some extent this should relate to the unions. I am very careful, and I do not like the political manoeuvring that tries to limit the power of unions to donate, because the Conservative Party has a foundation, which is also an aggregation of donations, which is a very important part of our funding. We should be aware of where influence is directed, and to suggest that the unions do not have direct policy-making power is absurd. Indeed, they have been championed in terms of how they have selected the new leader of the Labour Party and, potentially, the new Prime Minister. In any debate we should be very open about that because what we want is transparency. If we have transparency, we will have faith in politics.

At the end of the day, we are missing a key point here. The real issue is to confront the fact that we now have, in this Parliament, MPs elected not on national issues but on narrow sectarian issues based on communities abroad. We have serious issues of voter fraud, family voting, intimidation of candidates and people’s trust in our elections is declining fast. We are so worried that a rich American might give some money to Restore that we are totally missing the point about where we should be directing our attention. The people trying to influence our politics from abroad are not donating to the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats. They are running their operations from abroad in order to influence voting intentions here. We are entirely missing the point if we think that it is about donations to parties.

We should use this debate not to spend our time limiting and controlling but to find ways to enlarge the support bases of our mainstream parties, showing the country that donating to a political party is a good thing, and using our powers here to encourage people to step forward and become a more meaningful part of our democracy. The alternative is state funding of political parties, which we can neither afford and I do not think we should support.