Elections Bill

Clive Lewis Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

May I first say how pleased I am to see the Minister, my constituency neighbour in Norwich, back in her place? She may have been back before today, but this is the first day that I have been back, so I welcome her to her place.

I will start with a question. If your policies are unpopular with most voters and your own party’s demographics are shrinking, what do you do? Do you change your policies so that your party’s platform is more appealing to more voters, or do you make it harder for people to vote? After reading the Bill, I think we now have this Government’s answer.

Such is the extent of the crisis of democracy, there is truly no shortage of issues that the Elections Bill could have addressed. Our first-past-the-post electoral system already means that millions of people’s votes are wasted. When the House of Commons and the House of Lords are taken together as our legislature, half our legislators are not elected. We do not even have a constitution that is publicly accessible or that has public consent. This Bill does nothing about any of these issues or the many more real problems in our elections and our democracy. Instead this Government are pouring oil on the bonfire of democracy that is taking place not just in the UK but across the world.

When public confidence in the running of elections is at its highest since 2012, we are left to ponder the obvious question: whose interests is this Bill actually serving? It certainly is not the interests of the estimated 2.1 million people who will be put at risk of being excluded from voting because they do not have recognisable photo ID. Nor does it serve the interests of working people and civil society. Their right to freedom of expression in elections through trade unions in campaigning will be hamstrung by punitive red tape and put at risk through the Government’s control of the Electoral Commission. I think it is pretty clear: the beneficiaries of this Bill are this Government and their vested interests. It is this Government who benefit from the disproportionate exclusion of the very voters hit hardest by their policies. It is the wealthy tax exiles, not members of the public, who will benefit from rules that will enable overseas electors to influence parties in elections through donations.

However, as even Conservative Members have noted, the most cynical aspect of this Bill is of course the phantom problem of voter fraud that has been summoned by this Government to create a smokescreen for naked self-interest.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman says that voter fraud is not an issue, yet in my constituency during a by-election less than a month ago, over 30 pre-filled-in voting ballots were found dumped in a bin in a church. My community of Rutland and Melton is perhaps not normally considered a hotspot of voter fraud. If there is not voter fraud going on, why are we currently having to investigate such ballots being found around our country?

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Lewis]

That is a fair point. Let me retort with an alternative statistic for you. There were 34 allegations of impersonation in the 2019 general election, out of 58 million votes. I took out my calculator and that works out that there was 0.0000058% fraud in the last election.

The Government have produced a piece of legislation straight out of the far-right playbook from the United States to look for a problem that does not exist. This tactic is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook of racist American legislators. Their voter suppression laws have been and are being used to reinstate Jim Crow-era mass disenfranchisement via the back door. The Southern Poverty Law Centre, which has commented on such legislation, says:

“The real reason these laws are passed is to suppress the vote, and that is in fact what happens.”

We have a crisis of democracy precisely because established institutions have failed to represent the public as a whole—failed to challenge economic self-interest in favour of the common good. The truth, as this Government know, is that their ideology of destructive and unequal growth, fuelled by oil and gas, is not shared by the British public. Even the super-wealthy see the uninhabitable world this system is creating. They choose to flee to private islands or hide out in vast compounds in the depths of New Zealand and elsewhere. This Bill, along with the protest ban and the attacks on the independent judiciary and human rights, is a buttress against the public. Authoritarian control is being shored up because this Government know they cannot win public consent freely and fairly for policies that will continue to impose poverty on an ever-greater number of people so that wealth can be extracted for a few. [Interruption.] You sit there looking incredulous, yet that is what your politics and your policies do, day in day and day out.

[Anthony Browne]

I wonder whether the hon. Member is aware that actually voter ID is very common in other countries. You said that it is a racist policy to bring back Jim Crow laws from the US. Are you aware that the world’s most successful multi-racial democracy, Canada, uses voter ID, as well as highly respected democracies such as Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy and France? They all use voter ID.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) answers that, can I please remind everybody, on all sides, not to refer to “you”, because that is me, and I have no views on this matter, as you know?

[Clive Lewis]

The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire will also know that many of the countries he mentioned already have ID cards fully in use by their populations. As you well know, we do not have them here. I know you are talking about a regional ID scheme, but if you are talking about a national ID scheme, fine, make that comparison. I do not believe you are, so I do not believe it is a fair comparison.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

“He”, not “you”.

[Clive Lewis]

I will conclude with my question to Members on the Government Benches: how comfortable are they with Government Front Benchers who are eroding the fabric of our fragile democracy? When will they speak up and express misgivings like the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) about the Government’s fleeting, rocky relationship not just with the truth but with democracy? Choose soon, because history will not judge your silence well.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

There will be a five-minute limit from now on. It is nothing personal, Steve.

Elections Bill

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to new clause 16, in my name and that of Members from four of the parties represented here in Westminster. We tabled the new clause because the Bill has many flaws, but among the worst is the lack of any attempt to clean up the laundromat of British politics, which is now awash with dark money from dubious sources. We cannot in good conscience now pretend we are unaware. The Government can no longer plead ignorance or innocence: they are either careless or culpable and we in this House cannot tolerate the situation for a moment longer. That is why the amendments we are moving are so important.

Our Pandora amendments are simple. They would insist that party donations must come from profits made here in the UK, and they would establish a new regime that would allow the Electoral Commission to call in donations for an assessment on national security grounds. As it happens, the Government have just introduced precisely that regime for investments in critical national infrastructure. What infrastructure in this country could be more important than the essence of our democracy itself? We have heard warnings from Chatham House, the Intelligence and Security Committee and from Lord Evans this weekend that our system of party funding is now wide open.

We have heard and debated in this House the example of Mr Banks, Leave.EU and the mysterious source of his gigantic loans from Rock Services—or was it Rock Holdings? Thanks to evidence given to Carole Cadwalladr and the heroic reporting of The Guardian, we know that there are all kinds of interesting and no doubt innocent connections, such as the fact that Mr Banks’s wife, Katya Banks, was given entry into the country on a passport serially numbered to a passport given to someone who MI5 reported as a Russian spy. That is no doubt completely innocent, but the fact is that, when the National Crime Agency dropped its investigation into the source of the money, it left the source of the money shrouded in mystery. The Electoral Commission was so alarmed that it issued a warning that it could open the floodgates to donations from offshore.

Let me underline why the national security assessment is important to those on the Opposition Benches, but should be of importance to the Conservative party, too. Let us take another honourable donor, Mr Mohamed Amersi, a man who together with his partner has given nearly £800,000 to good causes and who, it would seem, might qualify for a walk-on part in John le Carré’s “The Night Manager”, but not as Jonathan Pine.

Information I have seen from well-placed sources in the Kremlin shows that Mr Amersi is an associate and business partner of people with all sorts of friends, including some with close connections to the SVR and FSB. They include Yuri Lopatinsky, Ernst Stauffer, and Aleksandr Barunin, with whom Mr Amersi worked on several telecom deals, including the takeover of Megafon, the firm later accused by the Georgians of

“illegal business operations and participation in the military and economic annexation of Georgia”.

Mr Amersi made a fortune helping to sell PeterStar to a Luxembourg-based company, which—surprise, surprise—turned out to controlled by Leonid Rieman, who was none other than President Putin’s former telecoms Minister. Coincidence? You be the judge, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend has made some excellent points. The chair of the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation, Mick Whelan, has said that trade union money is the cleanest money in British politics, and, listening to my right hon. Friend’s speech, I think I can agree with him. Given that the Bill will make that more difficult, do we not begin to see a pattern forming?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right and he will horrified to hear that there is more.

Perhaps the most concerning of Mr Amersi’s connections is Leonard Bogdan, a man with very interesting friends in the FSB and the SVR. Mr Bogdan was a minor partner in Tempbank, which held Soviet Union Communist party assets and then specialised in covert foreign transfers. The bank was associated with several Syrian citizens supplying arms to Syria and Iran and was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2014. But Tempbank also helped to facilitate another sanctioned firm, Hudsotrade, which dealt with Russian arms and ammunition suppliers. Sources inside the Russian Government say that Mr Amersi was involved in these deals, providing finance from Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, along with private clients from Syria and Iran, to help exports into the middle east. Mr Amersi, it is said, dealt directly with Hudsotrade and two of the shareholders, who were later sanctioned.

Despite those connections, however, correspondence that I have seen shows that Mr Amersi was asked to chair COMENA—Conservative Friends of Middle East and North Africa—a new political interface between the Conservative party and the middle east established

“on the authorisation of CCHQ”.

Mr Amersi says that he had a half-hour chat with officials from the Conservative party before writing his cheques, but on the basis of the evidence to which I have drawn attention today, I think we would all benefit from the Electoral Commission’s being empowered to call in donations for a national security audit. We have allowed this regime for donations and investments in critical national infrastructure; we now need to bring in that regime to clean up the laundromat of British political funding.

Time does not allow me to highlight further coincidences—