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

Debate between Angela Smith and Pete Wishart

Wednesday 9th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

It is unfortunate that the Deputy Leader of the House has not had the opportunity to address my very important amendments 2 and 3, which were part of this group of amendments. I very much support the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) and we will support him in the Lobby tonight.

I do not have an opportunity to talk about Scotland, which is what I wanted to talk a little bit about before I got on to my own amendments, other than to say what a dog’s breakfast the Bill has concocted on issues connected with the referendum. The failure to see this is a travesty on the Government’s part. The fact that we have the same expenditure threshold as Northern Ireland is a total disgrace. Northern Ireland has a population of 1.8 million. We have a population of 5.2 million, which is more than double, yet once again we are lumped in with the same threshold.

I shall speak briefly to my amendments 2 and 3. It has surprised me that there has been very little talk about big money and the House of Lords. One of the defining features of the previous Parliament was the cash for honours crisis. It was a disgrace that a sitting Prime Minister was interviewed by the police because there was a belief that millions of pounds had changed hands for a place in that place down the road. The police eventually did not pursue the matter, not because they could not find particular evidence, but because they believed that it was not in the public interest.

The public were appalled by cash for honours, but the Bill does absolutely nothing to address big money in the House of Lords. Only China’s National People’s Congress is larger than that big bloated Chamber, which has 786 Members, but in their wisdom they decided that it required another 30 Members. When we look at a list of those 30 new Members, we see that—surprise, surprise—£1.26 million had been donated in the last round of honours. The public will be aghast that that has been ignored and that the Bill does not even touch on cash for honours.

I will explain what I propose very quickly, because I know that the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) is still to speak. We have seen £1.26 million donated by the 30 new Members of the upper House. Sir William Haughey is among them, as is Sir Anthony Bamford and Howard Leigh, all Labour or Tory donors. Do not think the Liberals get off lightly, because they have already suggested a few Members who have given them significant amounts of money over the years. This is a cash cow for the UK parties and it has to stop.

We cannot have this as a feature of our democracy. The fact that someone can donate to a political party and then be rewarded with ermine in the unelected House of Lords, which the hon. Member for Nottingham North hopes might fix this mess of a Bill, is absurd. Is that any way to run a democracy in what is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world? There will soon be 1,000 of these people if we do not do something about it. I do not know how much money that would bring in for the UK parties, but I suggest that it would be a lot.

My gentle little amendments are all about trying to address at least some of those concerns. I do not have time to go through them in detail, because I see that Labour Front Benchers are getting twitchy. I will not push this to a vote, but let us look at what goes on with big money and cash for honours. It is a disgrace and the public are appalled, so let us stop it.

[Angela Smith]

I put on the record once again the declarations of non-financial interests that I made in Committee.

As we made clear in Committee, many of the clauses in part 2 of the Bill depend for their validity on clause 26, which we have just discussed. We were assured then that the Government would think again about that clause, but the consequence of their rethink appears to be a loosening of the gag, and a gag is still a gag. Therefore, the Bill could still have a chilling effect on the third sector and is still, in effect, a gagging Bill designed to insulate the governing parties from the challenges that are always part of a healthy democracy. As we have just heard in the debate on clause 26, the Government’s amendments still leave the third sector and the Electoral Commission facing a great deal of uncertainty and ambiguity, which, combined with the measures in clause 27, will effectively dampen the third sector’s campaigning activity.

The Opposition have said repeatedly that we support taking the big money out of politics and having sensible controls on the money spent by third parties. We said that on Second Reading and in Committee. Earlier this afternoon my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) reiterated the big figures. In the 2010 general election, political parties nationally spent £31 million, compared with just £3 million spent by third-party campaigners. The biggest third-party spender spent a sum that equates to just 4% of the £17 million spent by the Conservative party.

We also made it clear in Committee that we understand and support the need to review the provisions contained in the 2000 Act. As the Electoral Commission has made clear, a review of the legislation relating to third-party spending in an election period would be useful. We support that, but we would support such a review in the context of a much more ambitious agenda relating to radical reform of spending by political parties in the election period. That is the proper way to deal with issues that are so important and fundamental to the health of our democratic process, as I said earlier.

However, not only does the Bill fail to deal with the first-order issue, reform of spending by political parties, but it has been brought forward in a rush. To make things worse, it has been amended inadequately. Even worse, the Bill did not get the pre-legislative scrutiny that it needed and deserved and it has enjoyed only minimal scrutiny in this House. Not only have the Government failed to tackle the big money in politics; they have also effectively manipulated the legislative process to minimise the proper, robust testing of the Bill needed to pinpoint its weaknesses and expose its badly thought through changes to the 2000 Act.

I say “expose” because our view is that the Bill remains a bad one. Part 2 is built on the shifting sands of the utterly inadequate clause 26. I challenge the Government to admit that the Bill is the wrong way to tackle reform of election spending and join us in going back to the drawing board, starting with meaningful negotiations on the reform of party political funding.

Clause 27 has caused huge consternation in the third sector. If it is passed into law, it will play a major part, along with the other clauses in part 2, in effectively gagging the third sector in election periods. In the year before the election, according to Helen Mountfield QC, the changes will have

“a chilling effect on the expression of views on matters of public interest by third sector organisations”.

She also said that

“The restrictions and restraints are so wide and so burdensome as arguably to amount to a disproportionate restraint on freedom of expression.”

None of the Government’s changes alters that fact.

The situation cannot be right for any modern, 21st-century democracy. The sceptical among us could be forgiven for thinking that in part 2—in clause 27 in particular—the Government appear to be trying to insulate their record and policies from legitimate, democratic criticism. Raising the thresholds for registration by third parties and dramatically reducing expenditure limits in any given election period undoubtedly poses a real threat to the legitimate role of third parties in ensuring that the voice of civic society is heard during the most critical point in the cycle that governs our democracy. One could argue that it is only in a general election that the people of our country truly hold power in their own hands. Consequently, it is crucial that we have the widest possible input into the debates in a general election period that are so essential to ensuring that informed choices are made by voters.

If the Bill had been law before the 2010 election, a number of high-profile third sector campaigns could have been curtailed by the combined provisions of clauses 26 and 27, as we pointed out in Committee. At the next election, if the legislation goes through, the National Union of Students could find it difficult to hold Members to account for their record on the tripling of student tuition fees.

We have tabled two amendments to clause 27. First, we propose the removal of the reduction in thresholds for registration of third parties. Our amendment 60 proposes a report from the Electoral Commission on the potential impact of the reduction in controlled expenditure by third parties in the context of existing limits for political parties’ spending. Clause 27 would therefore not come into force before such a report had been laid before Parliament.

It is still not too late. The Government could still withdraw the Bill and enter into meaningful negotiations with the other—[Interruption.] The Leader of the House seems to find amusing my mention of the prospect of meaningful negotiations on the reform of party political funding. Do the Government believe in such meaningful negotiations or not? The choice is on the table. We are committed to proper consultation and the scrutiny of proposals as they emerge in relation to party political funding and funding for the third sector, but the two must go together. That is why today we will support amendment 102.

It is absolutely clear from what we have just seen from the Leader of the House that the Government have no intention of engaging in such meaningful negotiations. If they will not do that today, I am confident that the other place will ensure that the Bill gets the parliamentary time it deserves and the scrutiny it desperately needs.