Electoral Administration Bill

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), whose recommendation I have pleasure in supporting, and also to my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam) who helped to instigate it. It is a modest deregulation that will in no way affect the honesty of reporting and will help all involved. In an intervention, I raised one of the problems that I saw with putting a three-month control on expenditure before an election was called; namely, that there could be a local government by-election in the area. Would that mean that the MP or the leading challenging candidate in the subsequent general election would have to rule themselves out of active campaigning in the by-election, as otherwise all the expenses involved could be deemed part of the controlled expenditure? I speak as someone who, perhaps contrary to my views on free enterprise and economics, believes in regulation and control of the amount that candidates can spend in a general election. That we have extremely modest expenditure limits on individual races in individual constituencies is welcome. It means two things. First, it is easier for the challengers and, in a democracy, there should be choice and a proper challenge and, secondly, a Member of Parliament does not have to spend many months, or the whole of their time in Parliament, worrying about raising money, as, for example, members of Congress do. That unwelcome feature of an otherwise rather good American democratic system is one that I am pleased that we do not have in our country. I speak as someone who is philosophically in favour of tight expenditure controls. I also favour controls even tighter than those we have at present on the sums that parties can spend on the national race in a general election. Most of the money spent by national parties in a general election is wasted. The only problem is that they do not find that out until after the event. Looking at the voting figures for all three main parties in the last general election, it is clear that practically all the money was tipped down the drain because the number of people abstaining greatly exceeded the number voting for even the most popular party—in England, the Conservatives and in the United Kingdom as a whole, Labour—let alone any other conclusion one might draw from those numbers. Difficult cases could arise if we tried to extend the controls to the three-month period before an election was called. Let us suppose that quite close to the general election in this Parliament the Labour party needs a leadership contest, which is not that ridiculous a supposition. From time to time, the Prime Minister has said that he would like to serve all or most of this Parliament before bowing out, so there could be such a contest. We have been told that there is much talent and several people might like to be Labour leader and Prime Minister for a week or two. They would obviously want to put their names forward and campaign actively to attract support from the membership of the Labour party and the trade union movement in their democratic process. Therefore, very close to an election in the three-month control period, three, four or five Labour Members could spend a lot of money on promoting themselves and their views not just to the national membership generally, but in their own constituencies. It would not be their intention that that would have a big influence on the forthcoming race in their constituencies, but a great deal of money would certainly be spent on promoting them, as individuals and candidates for Prime Minister, just before the election was called. Anyone looking at such expenditure would say that it clearly influences voters in those constituencies during the subsequent parliamentary challenge, although it has a different purpose. We must take into account those very hard cases when trying to craft a regulation that could stop what we want to stop—a party or individual spending disproportionately huge sums of money before an election is called with a view to influencing its outcome—without stopping all the legitimate activities that go on, such as leadership contests, local government contests and the normal promotion of active party politics in communities, all of which takes money. We need a little bit of caution, however good the intentions may be.