Political Donations

Markus Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Monday 31st March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Markus Campbell-Savours (Penrith and Solway) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for leading the debate.

The Labour manifesto pledged to

“protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties.”

I am pleased that these important proposals are being developed. Both today’s debate and the 2021 recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life focus on foreign money entering the UK via companies and unincorporated associations, but I urge the Government, when they develop their proposals, to go further than that.

In 2009, Lord Campbell-Savours of Allerdale, who also happens to be my father, was involved in the tortuous debates in the other place before the passing of the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009. He and other Members worked to secure an amendment to the Government’s proposals. That amendment meant that individuals giving or loaning more than £7,500 to a political party must be resident or ordinarily resident and domiciled in the UK for the tax year in which the relevant donation or loan is made.

The Bill and the amendment were later given Royal Assent, but that clause, as with many other provisions of primary legislation, was subject to the development of commencement regulations. At the time, the Minister of State envisaged that secondary legislation would be completed not long after the summer of 2010. A general election interrupted that process. However, primary legislation is still in place, ready to be enacted—a quick win, one might say.

As has been said, the Conservatives enormously expanded the number of foreign residents eligible to donate to political parties in our country by removing the 15-year limit on British citizens overseas being able to vote and donate to a political party. Now, up to 3.5 million overseas residents can influence elections.

I am going to take on the baton handed to me by my father and his colleagues in the other place, some of whom are no longer with us, and urge the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Electoral Commission to take on the task of drafting the secondary legislation required to ensure that overseas residents who do not pay tax in this country are no longer allowed to influence the outcomes of elections with their money.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Member may not be aware that nearly $20,000 was donated from the United States to Sinn Féin’s 2017 Assembly election campaign—representing nearly one third of Sinn Féin’s spending in that election. Those who have been so exercised by political donations here have often done nothing to close the loophole that allows huge amounts of foreign money to influence politics in Northern Ireland. Nowhere else in the world would it happen that someone would be paying the bills of a foreign political party, yet that is what seems to happen with Sinn Féin. Does he agree that this loophole must be closed very quickly?

[Markus Campbell-Savours]

The hon. Member is quite right: I was unaware of that.

Under the rules set out the amendment, and made into law, these people would still be able to vote, and could even stand for election—arguably, that would be legitimate participation—but they could not spend money to disproportionately influence the outcome of elections in a country where they do not pay tax. Who runs this place should be a matter decided by those who live and pay their way here; it is they who live with the consequences of those electoral outcomes.