Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso]

I counsel my hon. Friend to read the many excellent briefings from the Electoral Commission, which point out that the 2000 legislation contains an objective test. I shall argue for a return to those words because that is an objective test that is relatively understandable. Objective tests can, of course, be argued in a court of law—we all know that—but they have a far greater degree of certainty than a subjective test. That is why I will not be seduced down the route of amendment 101.

I want principally to confine my remarks to the other amendments, proposed by the Government in response to the amendments I tabled in Committee, which I was asked to withdraw so that the Government could make their own proposals. Like the hon. Member for Nottingham North, let me state my gratitude that on that occasion the Government clearly understood what we were trying to do.

Let me give some of the background behind those amendments. Basically, the Government were seeking to redefine the legislation based on the request they had received from the Electoral Commission and others. This was seen at the time—when that legislation arrived before us—as making significant and potentially unintended changes that we had not been able to look into. Incidentally, I reiterate the point that I made on Second Reading and in Committee, which is that if ever a Bill deserved pre-legislative scrutiny, it was this one. But as has been said before, when we want to go to a certain place, we might not have wished to start from here, but we are here, so let’s get on with it and go to where we want to be.

It seemed to me that the sensible course of action to deal with the concerns being expressed by all the people who were in contact with me was to say, okay, let’s not make those changes. Let’s stick with the existing wording, and if we stick with the wording that exists already, we will have addressed that problem. That was what I proposed and what the Government said they would do. The test for me today is, therefore, whether the amendments do what we wanted the Government to do, and that is where I shall concentrate my remarks.

Following on from two of the interventions that I have made today, I shall try to answer one of the critical questions behind the Bill: what is the purpose of part 2? If one does not believe in the purpose of part 2, there is not a great deal of point in seeking to amend it to achieve the objective. To me, part 2 is a critical and essential part of the Bill. Part 2 sets out to regulate the political campaigning activities in favour of or against candidates by third parties. As such, it hardly touches on charities, which are already regulated, as has been mentioned, by charity law. That is not the target and that is why we are not seeking to regulate on that. The target is the non-charity third parties. That is why, among other things, the 2000 Act was brought into being and passed, and it is thoroughly appropriate to look again at it.

I look across the Atlantic, as I mentioned earlier, and I see what happens when organisations such as the National Rifle Association or others start to pour large amounts of money into one district, Senate seat or state, or into one issue. Such organisations have had considerable success in that country in changing the political representation in the House of Representatives and the Senate. I observe in passing that the extremism that has entered American politics over recent years seems to have followed naturally from that.

In our United Kingdom we have a plurality and a diversity in our politics which I think is exceptionally precious and needs to be preserved. I hope we would agree on that. I do see a danger of third-party organisations being created and funded in a way that could have a serious impact on the body politic, which I do not want to see. For me, part 2, far from gagging charities, is an enabler of the freedom of speech of the smaller people in politics throughout the United Kingdom.

I stand wholly behind the principle, as indeed did the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) an hour and a half ago, when I asked him this precise question and he responded that those on the Opposition Front Bench were in favour of the principle being put forward and were behind the 2000 Act. They agreed that the Act needed updating. The point of his reply to a straightforward question was that the principle behind part 2 was in essence one with which the Opposition still agreed. If the Opposition feel that there should be no regulation of third parties, if they genuinely feel that third parties in politics—great rich blocs of people—can come and shove money into distant constituencies and get away with it unregulated, I invite them to say so. If not, I hope for their support for the principle of the Bill.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

What a straw man the hon. Gentleman has just raised. Does he not realise that that is all avoided by the existing law, which was put in place in 2000? What we are dealing with here are changes that this Government are introducing, in a partial and partisan way, without any consultation or any attempt to discuss them with wider civil society, campaigners or third parties. What we need to do is take the Bill off the agenda and do it properly so that we can develop the electoral law for third parties and political parties on a cross-party basis in order to prevent the kinds of abuses he is talking about, which the existing law, unamended by the Bill, already prevents.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

On Second Reading, I said that this was one of the worst Bills any Government had brought before the House in a very long time. I called it a

“hurried, badly drafted…agglomeration of the inadequate, the sinister and the partisan.”—[Official Report, 3 September 2013; Vol. 567, c. 186.]

The Government have chosen to ram this disgrace of a Bill through the Commons as fast as they can, and nothing that has happened during this process has changed my verdict. If anything, my initial judgment has been reinforced. The unfortunate disappearance in the Government reshuffle of the former Minister with responsibility for constitutional and political reform, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith), halfway through the Bill’s Commons progress was a cruel reward for her willingness to stand up and defend the indefensible. I wish her well, but it is a pity that the Bill did not disappear with her.

The Bill will do absolutely nothing to shine the light of transparency on lobbying, which the Prime Minister himself called the next big scandal waiting to happen. It will let Lynton Crosby, the tobacco lobbyist at the heart of Downing street, continue lobbying undisturbed, and does not even require him to publish his list of clients. It does not regulate big tobacco, but seeks to silence cancer charities that campaign against the malign influence of big tobacco nestling at the heart of this Government. It does absolutely nothing to ensure greater transparency in the Government’s cosy relationship with the big six energy companies, which make record profits while forcing energy prices ever higher for households and businesses, and which reacted so hysterically to Labour’s announcement of an energy price freeze.

The Bill seeks to silence critics of the Government in the run-up to the general election, while letting vested interests operate out of sight. It demonstrates all too clearly that they are a Government who stand up for the wrong people and are willing to abuse the legislative process in their own partisan interests. The one success that the Bill can claim is that it is an object lesson in how not to legislate. In his more candid moments, even the Leader of the House must know that the proceedings to which he has been a party on the Bill have been an affront to Parliament and a stain on any reputation he might have wished to develop as a parliamentary performer.

Let us consider the history of the Bill. The House has been subjected to an abusive and disgraceful process that brings shame on the Government. The Bill was published after three years of inaction on the day before the House rose for the summer recess. Second Reading was scheduled for the day after the House returned for its September sitting, and the Committee stage was then scheduled for the week after, on the Floor of the House, thus ensuring that there could be no pre-legislative scrutiny of the proposals in parts 2 and 3, which the Government drew up in secret. Those proposals had not been consulted on because nobody even knew they existed. Report and Third Reading were then scheduled for the first two days back after the conference recess.

Three Select Committees were caught unawares and had strong objections to the Bill, but the Government’s timetabling, by deliberate design, gave those Committees little time to develop or publicise their views. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee had to meet in the recess in order to be in a position to publish its highly critical report on the Bill. The Standards Committee had significant worries about the Bill, some of which the Government have been forced to address. The Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights has written to the Leader of the House complaining that the Bill could have a chilling effect and risks damaging the quality of debate in the run-up to the general election. That is a serious charge in any democracy, but the Government have simply chosen to ignore it. Their decision to ram the Bill through the House has ensured that the Select Committee will not even be able to publish its report until after the Bill has completed all its Commons stages.

The Government did not consult the many thousands of campaigners, trade unionists and charities directly affected by the sinister gagging proposals in part 2 prior to the publication of the Bill. Even more astonishingly, the Electoral Commission, the Government’s own regulator, was not consulted either and continues to regard many of the proposals in the Bill as undesirable and other proposals such as the constituency cap as unworkable, yet it is expected to police these partisan changes in electoral law. No one in the Government has plausibly been able to identify the problems that parts 2 and 3 of the Bill are meant to address or, much less, to solve.

It becomes clearer by the day that this is a disgraceful attempt by the Government to gag their critics in civil society in the run-up to the general election. It is a gagging Bill masquerading in true Orwellian style as a transparency Bill. The well-established tradition that changes to the law governing elections should be agreed on a cross-party basis has been abandoned by this Government in a partisan abuse of the legislative process that is aimed at hobbling their growing body of critics in civil society. This is an abuse that will not be forgotten.

The Government promised to sort out lobbying, but the Bill defines it in such excruciatingly narrow terms that it renders all claims by the Government to achieve transparency completely laughable. Indeed, it could even worsen the current situation by undermining the existing registers. It excludes in-house lobbyists completely and instead applies only to consultant lobbyists. It has been estimated by the industry itself that it will catch only 20% of lobbyists and a minuscule 1% of lobbying episodes. The Bill is so inadequate that it has achieved the previously unheard-of feat of uniting the transparency campaigners and the lobbying industry in opposition to it. It is so narrow that it would not apply to a lobbyist lobbying a Member of this House about the lobbying Bill. During the unacceptably rapid passage of the Bill through the Commons, we have argued that there should be comprehensive coverage of the entire industry, a code of conduct and sanctions for misbehaviour. We continue to believe that such a system must be legislated for in the future, and if this Government refuse to do that, we will do it.

Part 2 of the Bill has caused the most outrage and worry in civil society, and quite right too. Part 2 will place a sinister gag on the Government’s critics as the election approaches. It will create regulatory uncertainty, and it will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on civil society and on local campaigning in the year before a general election. Indeed, it has been deliberately designed to do so.

Instead of dealing with the funding arms-race between political parties during election periods, the Bill slashes the amounts that can be spent by third-party campaigners, leaving the political parties untouched, despite the fact that third parties spent only one tenth of what political parties spent at the last general election. The Bill significantly lowers the spending thresholds for third parties during the general election period, which will ensure that many thousands of small charities, bloggers and campaigners will be caught by the strict regulation required by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Indeed, the Bill will make that regulation far more onerous for all third parties and create a massive new administrative burden for them, further increasing the incentive for them simply to keep quiet.

The Bill introduces a new constituency spending limit, which the Electoral Commission has described as unworkable. After their initial bluster, the Government have at least acknowledged the furore that part 2 has caused by tabling their rather modest amendments to clause 26 and schedule 3, which we have debated today. But as we have seen, those amendments barely scratch the surface of what would be needed to make the Bill workable. A lucent gag is still a gag.

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations has said:

“The assurances given by ministers on the floor of the house to ensure that charities will still be able to support specific policies that might also be advocated by political parties have not been met.”

The Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations has said that

“these amendments don’t prevent the Bill curbing freedom of speech around elections.”

Just yesterday, an impressive coalition of Church groups including the Quakers, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Conference, the Assembly of Reform Rabbis, the Evangelical Alliance, Islamic Relief, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development stated:

“Following legal advice and a statement from the Electoral Commission, we remain concerned that…we still do not have the necessary legal certainty that Part II of this Bill could not be applied to a wide range of legitimate campaigns, despite such activities being intended to be party politically neutral.”

In other words, the gag is still very much in place. It must be removed or else we will see the triumph of the new breed of Tory authoritarians who, like the Justice Secretary, believe:

“Britain cannot allow a culture of left-wing-dominated single-issue activism to hold back our country”.

Presumably, he refers to the TaxPayers Alliance, the many right-wing blogs, the Adam Smith Institute and ConservativeHome, which have all opposed the restrictions in part 2.

Part 3 seeks to punish all trade unions by burying them in pointless and expensive administrative requirements for their membership lists because some of them have had the temerity to be affiliated to the Labour party. It should be seen for the grubby little piece of partisan legislative abuse that it is.

Tonight, then, the Government will succeed in using their majority to ram this illiberal Bill—virtually unamended—through the Commons. It will now be for the House of Lords to give it the scrutiny that Government timetabling has made it impossible for us to deliver in this place—and it is vital that the other place now does so. This is a very bad Bill. It is badly drafted and in places unworkable; it lets vested interests proceed unchecked in the shadows, while it gags charities and civil society. It is a sinister Bill that seeks to silence the Government’s critics in the run-up to a general election. It will have a chilling effect on the quality of our national debate, which is why we will vote against it the Lobby tonight. I urge all Members to join us there.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—