Elections Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would have rather welcomed being targeted by a foreign Government in the various elections I stood in. It would have been relatively straightforward to have turned that around—I would have used more traditional methods of communication—and exposed it. But I am not quite sure how we would be able to take North Korea, Mr Putin or whoever through the courts in this country for any remedy or preventive action. Donations, of course, are an entirely separate issue, but these amendments are on electronic communications.

I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and I will respectfully give a different point of view on his Amendment 180A, which is very well intentioned but rather misses the point about transparency and where the digital age is going. The concept of putting in an imprint to demonstrate who has put a particular advert or piece of propaganda out there is very valid.

It is quite feasible that I will not be standing at the time of the next general election, unless some odd mayoralty is formed that I suddenly decide I should run for. I have had my day fighting elections. But if I was, I would think about how I could harness the latest technology so that people’s clothes would carry my name and slogan. Particularly at football matches, you regularly see straplines that change every few seconds; I would have them at strategic locations, firing out different messages. If others were doing so at prime locations and I had sufficiently robust funds to allow me to join in with using those advertising methodologies, I would certainly look to do that.

When it comes to proper transparency, it seems to me that the concept of, say, an agent having to have everything declared precisely on a website is far more useful for the efficacy of elections than anything that would anticipate that, for example, the latest high-tech jumper I am wearing, advertising a candidate, could somehow be spotted to have on it something that could then be used to hold me to account. It seems to me that some of the tried and tested methods could be more useful for the intention—here I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones—of ensuring that there is maximum transparency and legality in elections. I would be interested in the Minister’s views on whether this section of the Bill is sufficiently future-proofed for where technology will be next week, never mind next year.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly intervene, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Mann. It is important to understand that, as far as Clause 39 goes, the amendment talks about making sure there is some way of identifying the message you have. Of course, if it says “Vote for Mann” it might be a reasonable presumption that it had been sponsored by somebody supporting the candidacy of Mr Mann, as it would be. But the evil, if I can put it that way, of much social media advertising is that it is not clear what it is doing. You have negative campaigning as well as positive campaigning. It is not necessarily done in a way that makes it obvious that what you are reading is not a news item or a fashion page—to pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Mann—but it nevertheless conveys an important message to a particular category of reader. So I ask the Minister to address the substance of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones’s Amendment 180A.

“Reasonably practicable” has already been completely circumvented in Scotland, so we know it does not work there. It is inconceivable that whatever lessons were learned by campaigners in Scotland will not immediately transfer to campaigns across the United Kingdom. It is a good challenge for the Minister to explain what is wrong with “possible” and maybe, behind that, to say whether the Government have decided not to implement the clear advice of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Electoral Commission, both of which, I respectfully suggest, might be offering advice that is slightly more researched than that of the noble Lord, Lord Mann.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones for the amendments he has brought forward with a great deal more expertise about this new dimension of campaigning than I have. I first learned about this new dimension of campaigning when I looked into post-Soviet Russian politics and discovered the new term “political technologies”, used by campaigners working for Putin to mould public opinion and to try to interfere in other countries, using the newly available digital media to help their efforts.

Of course, this also costs money. As we have seen in the United States, the use of digital media, data mining and negative campaigning—as has already been mentioned —is one way in which, unfortunately, American politics is being debased. We do not want that to happen in Britain.