National Security Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Leigh of Hurley

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 4th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

I beg to disagree and am happy to offer humility. I note that recently the Labour Party returned a donation from a Mr Ian Rosenblatt which it decided was inappropriate. All credit to it. It happens regularly. This is not a political issue; this a cross-political matter. As I say, every donation is listed, so there is 100% transparency. I welcome my noble friend the Minister’s proposals, which I think are extremely sensible and helpful to this argument.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

We on these Benches very much welcome the concessions that the Government have made. I disagree with the rather overoptimistic interpretation of where we are from the noble Lord, Lord Leigh. In the last exchanges, the Minister said that the National Security Bill was about national security and not about donations to political parties, but donations to political parties from foreign powers are a matter of national security.

Indeed, in the last Commons debate on this, a number of rather distinguished Conservatives intervened to say how strongly they supported the amendment as put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, on the last occasion. I recall Sir Jeremy Wright saying that he found it “very difficult to disagree” with anything in the amendment. He is currently on the ISC and was previously a member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life when it was writing its report on public finance.

I have just read a paper on political finance that the Institute for Government has just published. That stresses how rapidly the context is moving and how the law needs to adjust to cope with that. It particularly stresses the extension of overseas voting rights to British citizens who have been resident abroad for a very long time, many of them dual nationals. Checking on where the ultimate source is for those things is going to be extremely difficult and probably impossible, but political parties should be on their guard against undue influence and the suggestions the Government are now making perhaps will help political parties to take further moves in that direction

I was also struck by the speech that David Davis made in the Commons last week about a donor to the Conservative Party who had given £750,000—not a modest donor, even by the terms of the noble Lord, Lord Leigh—who had spoken openly about buying influence and “access capitalism” as part of what he expected. This was a dual national whose fortune appears to have come largely from contracts within a number of post-Soviet states.

There is a problem there, and it requires investigation, and I welcome the Government’s acceptance that there is a problem and that it needs further investigation, and we look forward to reading the text of the amendment that the Government will move in the Commons and to the further work that they will do then—we hope in co-operation with other parties—to last beyond the next election. This is an area where we need to have electoral rules that are agreed by all the participants.