Political Finance Rules

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Like everybody in the Chamber, I must be sure to draw the House�s attention to my entry in the Register of Members� Financial Interests.

�Follow the money� is one of those phrases we always hear, as if there is somehow a crushing inevitability that money determines outcomes in all areas of life, whether personal or political, but now in our democracy there is a clear and present danger that the loudest voices and largest wallets will dominate, and that the two are connected. Even in these difficult political climes, it is extraordinary to think that the existential threat to our country�s democracy posed by the suggestion that Elon Musk could donate �100 million to any political party here has not caused a Cobra meeting to be called, because it is a national security threat. A foreign agent, who is now part of the structures of a foreign state, is openly talking about interfering in our democracy�buying it, and boasting about doing so�and he is not the only one.

I guess that, for many, the idea that politics is so infused with money is not a surprise. After all, we have been trying for over 160 years to regulate foreign donations �and indeed local donations�in this country. For the avoidance of doubt, donating to a political party is a noble thing for people to do, given the concerns and passions they may have, and we in this Chamber have all sought donations. However, we have seen scandals through the years, starting with David Lloyd George and including the cash for questions affair and the personal protective equipment issue. Time and again, Transparency International has drawn our attention to the current data on this, and that is before we even get to Taylor Swift, because she is right: �It�s me, you, hi�we are the problem�. As politicians, we have not regulated this, even though we have seen these problems time and again.

In the short time available to me, I want to make a plea to the Minister to ensure she is looking at the impact at local level. When money is channelled through unincorporated organisations, many of us will have seen the impacts in our communities and our constituencies and, frankly, the failures of the Crown Prosecution Service and the police to intervene. In America, a 527 group is created primarily to influence the selection, nomination, election or appointment of candidates at local level, and many of us now have third-party organisations that are active in our local communities and trying to create disinformation to disrupt our local democracy.

People may ask what the problem is in my constituency, because I have a substantial majority, but given that one in five MPs have a majority of less than 5%, these activities�fake leaflets, third-party adverts on Facebook and so on�could be critical to the outcome of local and, indeed, national elections. We have gagging laws for charities, but we have nothing to deal with the businesses that are behind this and that are funding these activities. It is a grave irony to me that many of us came here yesterday to defend aid as part of national security work, because part of our aid budget goes on tackling disinformation and disruption in the democracies of other countries, but we are not doing anything about it at local level.

Just the other week, The Guardian reported that a network of Telegram channels with Russian links is encouraging UK residents to commit violent attacks on mosques and offering cryptocurrency in return. These activities are also happening online, as we have all seen. The online is now the offline threat, and vice versa. We saw that with Cambridge Analytica, and nobody really acted then. Members are right about the scale of the challenges with regulation and fines, but we need to do something about the fact that much more pressure can be brought to bear on MPs at local level because the results have been much closer.

This is not some Netflix drama; this is the state of British democracy at the moment. Everybody in this Chamber has a vested interest in resolving it so that we can have free speech. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.