Third-party Election Campaigning

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Thursday 13th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to take part in this debate. In response to the point made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, I suspect every Member of this House is involved in a number of charities and I have also been a full-time employee of a major charity in the past—so I have an awareness of their concerns and current interests.

We are enormously indebted to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, not just for securing this debate but for his leadership of the very important group that looked from outside Parliament at the work we were undertaking in preparation for the original Bill, and then through its passage and beyond. The four commission reports to which he referred are extremely important and I am glad that much attention is being paid to them today.

I am also extremely conscious of the importance of the work by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. Noble Lords may recall that there was huge support across the House for the proposition built into the Bill that there should be a review. I acknowledge the success that the House had in doing that. I think that the Commons had not even thought that that might be useful and necessary; we thought that it was and we were fully justified by the very effective report that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, produced. In it he emphasised, as he has again today, the importance of the word “transparency”. That did not appear in the Bill’s title by accident. It is the purpose of the legislation. It might well be said that we need more transparency in other areas of politics—I shall come back to that—but that was a very important motivation.

The noble Lord said that it was important that the public—all of us—should be aware of exactly who third-party campaigners are and what they are spending. It has again been emphasised to your Lordships today that this is not a new concept. It was not suddenly thought in 2013-14 that it was desirable to do this; it went right back to PPERA in 2000. As my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who was also involved in that process, emphasised, a great deal of thought went into trying to get the balance right. The fact that we did not get it completely right first time, as implied by the title of the review by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, may well indicate how important it is for your Lordships’ House and Parliament generally to undertake post-legislative scrutiny just as much as pre-legislative scrutiny. This is a classic case.

It would be worthwhile very quickly to refer to the excellent brief from the Lords Library on this debate, which summarises neatly the recommendations of the report from the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, which are:

“A revision of the statutory definition of regulated activity. The report argued that the current definition of regulated activity captured activity that could be ‘reasonably regarded’ as intended to influence voters, which created ‘too much ambiguity’ about what expenditure on campaigning activity was regulated. Therefore, the statutory definition should be changed to ‘one of actual intention’ … A reduction of the regulated period before a general election from twelve months to four … Clarification on how staff costs should be regulated to ensure that work undertaken on electoral campaigning that is ‘incidental’ to a person’s normal job does not count … Registration with the Electoral Commission which is published on their website should provide greater transparency about each individual third party campaigner, and therefore more information should be provided as to the purpose of the campaign, where that campaigning is planned to take place, and broad estimates of likely expenditure … The Government and the regulator to monitor the use of social media to ensure that the regulatory framework continued to strike the right balance”.


All those recommendations are valid. They meet a number of the points made by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, but they go beyond that. They open some very important questions about the integrity of our political process, especially in relation to social media. As a number of colleagues have said, life has moved on quite a long way since 2000—and even since 2014. While those recommendations echo some of those from the noble and right reverend Lord’s commission, a number of issues go beyond that which should now be taken seriously into account as the Government prepare for the next Session, which one hopes will not be dominated by the complete traffic jam of Brexit.

I am not sure that we have all yet taken full account of the changing circumstances to which the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire referred. For example, it is important to look back to some of the discussions that took place in 2014. For example, I recall my then noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby, who is an acknowledged expert on US politics because of her role at Harvard and a number of other roles on the other side of the Atlantic, warning of the increasing influence of a small group of right-wing billionaires in American politics outwith the party system. Indeed, since then I have read with huge interest the extraordinary book Dark Money, which is analytical and takes forensic interest in the way money is used in the United States. The Koch brothers, to whom my noble friend Lord Wallace referred, are among a number of people who have invested huge sums of money seeking to influence American politics outwith the party system.

Since 2014, we have had three important developments: Trump; the 2016 EU referendum, to which reference has been made; and the extraordinary increase in the amount of money invested between 2015 and 2017 in social media messages. Unsolicited campaign messaging in social media has exploded. Some say—I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Young, say it in the past—that we have no direct evidence that this is all very influential. Well, if it is not influential, it is an extraordinary waste of money.

On this side of the Atlantic, the increase in the amount of money invested by the political parties and by the campaign groups in the referendum in 2016, has been astronomical. It has gone from a few hundred thousand pounds in the case of the Labour Party to millions; and it has gone from millions to doubling millions in the Conservative Party—and, as my noble friend Lord Wallace said, we still do not know precisely how much money was spent by campaigning groups in the 2016 EU referendum. If all that expenditure had no impact on the result of the 2015 election, in the referendum of 2016 and in the election of 2017, the donors who provided all that money—whence I know not; in some cases, it was clearly foreign money—must surely believe that their money was wasted.

As has already been said, it is extraordinary that we have not caught up with the need for imprints on all messages to all voters that come via social media in the way that there has to be with written material. I understand that that was a requirement during the referendum on Scottish independence. Having learned the lesson that it was important then, why did the Government not insist on such an addition for the elections and the referendum that have taken place since? I understand that the Electoral Commission recommended that about 10 years ago, so it at least was ahead of the game.

I will refer briefly to two further issues, because we should take them into account during this one opportunity that we are likely to have in the immediate future to debate these important concerns, to which all Members have referred. Members of your Lordships’ House may recall that Lady Williams and I suggested at quite an early stage of the Bill that we should at least examine whether its provisions should exclude charities. A number of colleagues here today have said how it is charities that seem to have been most affected by the so-called chilling effect. We argued that, since charities are already subject to the requirements of the Charity Commission, there was a perfectly valid argument for saying that they should be excluded from the legislation and treated differently—and if it was necessary to improve or update the charities legislation, and the role and responsibilities of the Charity Commission, so be it.

We undertook to pursue this with coalition Government Ministers at the time, who were sympathetic to that view. However, the charities seemed ambivalent as to whether that would be to their advantage. Other organisations from a very different background, some of which my noble friend referred to—a rather more right-wing background, if I may put it that way, that was much more comparable to what was going on in the United States—were only too pleased to keep the charities with them. It gave them a degree of extra respectability; it was a sort of human shield for some of their less desirable activities.

I do not know whether the charities still feel that they should be subject to this legislation; clearly, if it was going to be a matter for review and amendment, we should look at it again. The Sheila McKechnie Foundation, which provided us with an excellent brief—not least because it was very brief: just two pages—made the point that the Act as it stands:

“Makes it harder for charities to pursue their mission”.


It reduces the abilities of charities and—a key point:

“The effects of the Lobbying Act on how charities approach campaigning can’t be isolated from other policies and opinions that reduce the ability of charities to speak out”.


It would appear that its representations are actually just about charities. If that is the case, we should be open and honest about this and say that it is an issue that may need to be addressed in due course. I very much accept what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said about charities. I have been active in support of charities over many years and continue to be, particularly charities concerned with international development in Africa and Asia, and I entirely understand the point he made.

There is one other issue I will refer to briefly, because I think it is important: it has been referred to obliquely by other noble Lords. I believe that it is about time we made sure that there was an even playing field between non-party campaigning and party campaigning. The present restrictions on party campaigning are clearly no longer fit for purpose in the present world of social media. We have had a number of discussions in your Lordships’ House and in the other place on this issue. We really need to look at it very seriously. I know that there is a problem of time, but in due course I hope that we will get to a Session when we are not completely tied down by Brexit legislation—and it will be important, for reasons that have already been advanced, that all this legislation is reviewed before the next general election.

It is simply not true that there is effective transparency on national expenditure in constituency campaigns. The two regimes that apply, and the difficulties that the Electoral Commission and even the police have in dealing with what should and should not appear in the reports of constituency candidates and their agents, are clearly matters of real concern that affect the whole integrity of our electoral process. Similarly, I have already mentioned the lack of effective transparency on unsolicited campaign material, and the vast increase in expenditure with very little identification of where it is coming from and who is paying for it. For all we know, the biggest single investors, in terms of time and staff, in the British electoral process at the moment are some Russian guys: it is extraordinary, the way we have allowed that to happen. It is being examined very carefully, of course, in the United States, with no conclusion. It is being examined by the DCMS Select Committee in the other place, but we have not yet had an authoritative response from the Government.

Reference has been made to the extent to which non-party campaigners are suffering from a disproportionate impact. That is due partly to the fact that the clarity of the law in terms of party campaigners has not been completely resolved: it is still work in progress, it is unfinished business and it is urgent. There is a need for thorough parliamentary review and reform, to apply not just to the non-party campaigning activities that are important to this country’s democratic health but to party campaigning as well. I have a Private Member’s Bill that might go some way towards that, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, knows. Maybe, one day, there will be a chance to get to Committee on that Bill.