Electoral Conduct

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are all aware of the difficulty of distinguishing between free speech, robust campaigning and incorrect and improper speech. I think all noble Lords in the debate have taken part in some fairly robust campaigns. The first campaign I took part in, in 1970, had National Front candidates. To say the least, they stretched the boundaries of acceptable campaigning in a whole range of ways. The Liberals in Huddersfield did our best to stand up to them. We were complimented by our Conservative and Labour counterparts for so doing. They were not quite so explicit but they captured more votes; that is always part of the delicacy of campaigning. We have to remember that the electorate do not solely consist of liberally, openly and tolerantly minded people, which means that the sort of robust campaigning we are talking about often has real appeal and gains great political dividends. When she presented this report in a Commons debate, Natascha Engel said:

“We tried to achieve balance in our report”—[Official Report, Commons, 7/5/14; col. 98WH]—

between “where … robust political campaigning” ends and discrimination begins. That is the problem we all have.

All parties have suffered embarrassing moments, usually from local election candidates and campaigns but sometimes also from parliamentary candidates and campaigns. As has been said in the debate, all parties have done their best to tighten up their procedures: to produce internal codes of conduct and to vet, assess and train their candidates and agents in advance. That does not always succeed and there are occasions when our local representatives slip beneath the standards that we would like. We are also aware that there are parties outside what one might call the consensus of established parties. We are going to have an election in which there will be a large number of candidates from a range of different parties, some of which will not want to accept the current consensus. They will decry what they will call political correctness and wish to be politically incorrect. We are going to have to cope with that when the next election comes along but it is much easier to cope with through the established procedures when conventional methods of campaigning take place, through leaflets and so on.

The new media, all the way from telephone canvassing through to the internet, with Twitter and so on, are much more difficult. In one of the seats where I was campaigning in the last election, I was very conscious that telephone canvassing appeared to be putting out messages that the Liberal Democrats were in favour of uncontrolled immigration into this country. That message was clearly coming back at us in the last week on the doorsteps; it clearly came, I suspect, from a script provided by one of the other parties for telephone canvassing. Of course, that is very difficult to get hold of and when you then move on to social media, we are all familiar with the internet trolls who exist and the dreadfully negative comments that are attached to so many of the media areas that we see. How you get hold of those politically minded internet trolls is, again, going to be very difficult for us all.

The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has done us a good favour by raising a range of questions. Let me try and answer the government questions because, of the 30 recommendations in this report, only five were really addressed directly to the Government. Some were directed to the parties themselves; others were to the Law Commission, the EHRC, the Electoral Commission and so on. On the question of issuing a voluntary code of advertising, the Government are certainly prepared actively to encourage political parties themselves to agree such a code. Recommendations 25 and 29 suggest that the requirement for an imprint for parties and non-party campaigners should be extended to incorporate online and other election communications. We are certainly willing to look at that. The Electoral Commission is of course directly responsible for looking at such issues but it will be very complex to devise workable rules that would extend to online materials, let alone in primary legislation. That is part of what we are all going to have to struggle with in this coming campaign.

Recommendation 27 suggests that non-party campaigners in local campaigns should register with the returning officer and submit spending returns. We went through the issue of non-party campaigns on the transparency of lobbying Act. I bear the scars of that Act, during the passage of which a number of non-governmental organisations refused to accept that there were real problems with non-party campaigning groups and that we needed to take a degree of action to limit them, as the Act has now done, in spending limits and in requiring them to retain receipts for expenditure, both nationally and within constituencies.

Recommendation 28 proposes that non-party campaigners be required to maintain a database of election campaign literature to assist the police when accusations of misconduct arise. That would be ideal, although I am not entirely sure that every established political party maintains a correct library of all the leaflets that they have put out.

I now address some of the other issues touched on. There are recommendations to parties on the diversity of candidates—women, the disabled, ethnic minorities. My party has had a particularly worthwhile scheme, led by my noble friend Lady Brinton, who I am happy to say has just been elected our party president, to encourage candidates from those groups. I have no doubt that the other two parties have been doing the same—indeed, the evidence is there in some of those elected last time. It is very important that all the parties—at least, all the three parties—now have clear internal codes and elements of training for candidates and agents.

I turn to the EHRC, which has been criticised. First, the EHRC is not the CRE; it has a more limited remit. Some of the areas where the CRE worked are now being managed by the Electoral Commission and a number of these are matters for the police. We are all aware that there have been concerns that the police, in past election campaigns, have not treated allegations of this sort with sufficient attention. I am very glad that this report has drawn attention to the need for ACPO to pay much more attention to problems of electoral fraud and campaigning of the sort which we have seen evidence of in parts of London and elsewhere in recent years. Certainly, from my limited experience of talking to police in Yorkshire and elsewhere, the police are now more aware of this as a problem, so we hope that there will be greater attention to this in the coming campaign.

The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, suggested that a single code of conduct would be better than a proliferation of different party codes. I have to say, speaking on behalf of the Government, that that is a matter for the parties to agree among themselves. The Government should not interfere too sharply in what parties do among themselves, but it is something we encourage the parties to talk further about. On the question of guidance for campaigners from the Electoral Commission, I say that the Electoral Commission will be publishing its guidance in time for the 2015 election, and the chair of the commission has written to Natascha Engel to say that it will engage with those parties which are not part of the statutory parliamentary parties panel on the form of this guidance. We are all conscious that five, six or seven significant parties will be fighting a wide range of constituencies in the coming election, so we need to engage with a wider number of participants.

The EHRC is now looking at how best to update its guidance on elections for local authorities and other organisations for use in 2015. That is thought to provide the sort of guidance that others have been asking for.

On the question of the role of IPSO, clause 12 of the editors’ code of practice, which is administered by IPSO, deals with discrimination. It is vital that editors adhere to the code at all times, not just in elections, and we look to IPSO to ensure that the code is obeyed by the media during the course of the campaign.

Lastly, I touch on the role of the Law Commission. The commission will be publishing a consultation setting out its proposals for electoral reform early this month, with a report to be published with recommendations in the summer of 2015, which thus will not be of use to us in this coming election but means that we are moving forward for the campaigns after that.

The Government are extremely grateful for this report because it raises a whole set of questions that all parties need to think through. I hope that this conversation will continue and that all those who are consulting on this, with the Electoral Commission and elsewhere, will ensure that the three parties we now refer to in some ways as the established parties, and indeed which UKIP loves to accuse of being the established parties, will draw in others as well—the regional parties, the other national parties—to ensure that we have a robust but clean campaign and do not stretch the boundaries of free speech too far.