Political Parties and Elections Bill

The hon. Gentleman was a very participative member of the Hayden Phillips working party over many months. I did, indeed, on behalf of my party—I do not apologise for this—accept a number of compromises for the greater good. However, I have always made it clear that my starting point—I do not think that there is any dubiety about this—was that, in principle, I am not in favour of donation caps. I shall deal with the hon. Member for Cambridge's dismissal of the idea of seeking a consensus between the parties—such a consensus is more essential in the area of party funding than in almost any other area. If there is no consensus, those who happen to be in the majority end up using their majority for partisan advantage, and that is completely antithetical to the idea of democracy. As both the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) and I have mentioned, this idea of a donation cap was reconsidered when the Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs considered party funding in the 2006-07 Session. I was struck by the hon. Member for Cambridge's amnesia about what had happened in that Committee. I was not a member of it then and I am not now, but I do remember what it said—it made it clear that it was proposing a donation cap and state funding as part of a "package". Indeed, that was exactly how Hayden Phillips read those proposals, because he was considering the matter in parallel to the Constitutional Affairs Committee and, in a sense, took as his starting point for his proposals what was in its report, to which the hon. Member for Cambridge signed up.