Oral Answers to Questions

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

If I understand it correctly, moves are afoot, although they are rather opaque to an outsider so far as the trade union funding link with the Labour party is concerned. More generally, transparency has to be a good thing when money is sloshing around the system and it could influence democratic electoral contests. To return to my earlier theme, this is what the transparency provisions on third party campaigning are all about—not to stop charities from doing their work or from campaigning, but simply to make them transparent in how the money is used, particularly where they choose to use money for explicitly political ends to engineer or influence a particular outcome in a constituency.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

The problem with the Deputy Prime Minister’s position is that he was willing to rush out a Bill to capture what amounts to a small problem, which may well damage democracy, but he was not prepared to put the weight of his position behind actually achieving a solution on party funding.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Talk about pots and kettles! It is no secret that, in a sense, the Liberal Democrats are not rich enough to have quite the vested interests that are involved in all this. It has always been resistance from the two established, larger parties that has prevented a deal, and that is exactly what happened on this occasion. I do not think that we should beat about the bush.

As for the hon. Lady’s first point, I urge her not to be complacent about the trend towards the funnelling of increasingly large amounts of money into the political process by non-political parties. Look at what has happened in the United States. Do we really want to go in the direction of super-PACS or very well-funded groups trying to influence the political process? I do not think that that would be healthy for our democracy.