Elections Bill

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

It is nice, while welcoming that I follow the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, to disagree with everything he has said, including that he hopes the noble Lord, Lord Moore, who he so enjoyed, will speak more. As a historian, although I have to say not of his eminence, I am slightly worried that, if the noble Lord speaks many more times, we will not get more books out of him. I ask that he keeps a balance, because we like his writings as well.

Much has been made of what I think are the completely unnecessary and indeed harmful mandatory requirements for ID at polling stations. Worse, as we have heard, is that this stands alongside the ability of expats, perhaps out of this country for 20 or 30 years, to vote by post with absolutely no check that they are alive or that they ever lived, worked or went to school here, or anything else. We will not even check that they are not in prison at the time; our own citizens who live here and are in prison are not given the vote, but these people will be. We are talking of people who do not live here or pay their taxes here—this really is representation without taxation. They do not depend on our schools, our health services, our roads, our police, our universities or anything that our taxes and our Government are responsible for but over which they would now be given a vote—even those, as we have heard, who may have no intention of returning here at any time.

It is true that other nations sometimes permit their nationals to vote, but they usually get them to do so at the embassy here; we have often seen them at election time turning up to vote. In fact, to retain your vote in America, you also have to be liable for American tax. So what we are doing is quite exceptional. We are offering those people a vote with no checks, and not even requiring them to do jury service, at a time when 16 and 17 year-olds, whose whole future is in the hands of the Government, still get no vote in elections.

Worse still, these expats will become permitted donors—that is, they can give virtually unlimited amounts of money, with no checks on its provenance, to UK political parties, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and my noble friend Lord Grocott have spoken about. I wonder which political party might be the beneficiary of some fairly opaque offshore money from long-exiled Britons—answers on a postcard, please. We should be reducing, not increasing, overseas donations to our political parties. These sorts of donations, even if declared, will tell us nothing about the people involved, who will have contributed nothing to our civic political life or paid any taxes if they are such long-term non-residents.

So why does the Tory party want to add them to the electoral roll? I will wager that it is not for their votes but for their donations. Indeed, despite my putting down a number of Questions, the Government have been unable to tell me how many of those expats currently able to vote have done so—and if the Government do not know, they probably do not care. It is getting some long-term non-residents into the permitted-donor category that is behind this move. The noble Lord, Lord True, is an honourable man, so if I am wrong and this really is in order to allow our wonderful Labour member in Rome, Harry Shindler—who the Government normally cite every time we talk about this—to vote, the Government will accept the amendment to restrict donations to people who are both on the electoral roll and resident in this country. If the Government refuse to accept the amendment, we will know it is all about enabling wealthy non-residents to fund a British political party. Indeed, at Prime Minister’s Questions today, the Prime Minister reasserted that money would be taken only from those on the electoral register—which is why he is extending enormously the number of expats who can now go on to the register.

We have been reading a lot about how the Conservatives like taking rather large bundles of dosh from money that has originated abroad. The wife of a former Putin finance Minister apparently paid £160,000 for a game of tennis with Boris Johnson. I gather that she is the most generous ever female donor to a political party—and I thought women had good political sense. We know there are many such examples of money from somewhat dubious sources finding its way into, I am afraid, the Conservatives’ coffers. While the Bill is about UK nationals, who is to say that those living abroad may not assist in facilitating such generosity, given the absolute lack of checks? It will be impossible to be sure that they ever lived here, because we do not have records going back over 30 years and no system is being set up to undertake such due diligence. So we risk disenfranchising some people with ID checks while giving the vote to people who do not live here, pay taxes here or have any ambition to return here.

This Bill is not good for democracy. I do not think it is good for the Conservative Party either, because if it gets more donations this way, it will become public, and that will not be in its interests.