Political Parties and Elections Bill

There are two problems with that. First, we do not need to look in a crystal ball. We can read the book: we can see that political parties—this Government and previous ones—do appear to have given things in return for money, and on a sizeable scale. Secondly, even if the problem is only one of perception, it will not go away, and we need to deal with it. I want to allude to the Hayden Phillips negotiations, which centred on the treatment of affiliation fees. Throughout that period, the Conservative position was absolutely clear, as it still is. Special treatment of affiliation fees can be considered as part of the introduction of a £50,000 cap. I mean "special" treatment, because logically a £50,000 cap should be accompanied by a complete restriction, meaning that only direct payments by individuals should be permitted as a legitimate source of funding for political parties. Corporate donations and donations from institutions and intermediaries, including trade unions, in which the individual is subsumed, should in the long run be restricted—and brought to an end after an interval. That point was set out in the Conservative party's proposals published in 2005. Incidentally, this is also the view of many in the Labour party, although only a few are bold enough to speak up and say so. Matt Taylor, former adviser to Tony Blair, has set out in detail in print and in a number of speeches exactly the position that I have described. A good number of Blairites on the Government Benches have told me privately that they agree, although very few are prepared to put their heads above the parapet. We are left with a crucial question. How could affiliation fees be allowed to cheat the logic of the £50,000 cap while upholding the principle that those donations are matters of individual choice? There are three requirements. First, there should be a genuine choice for an affiliated member. In the course of the Hayden Phillips investigations, we discovered that many affiliated members scarcely knew that they had made a donation to the Labour party. That, no doubt, accounts for the absurdity that, when polled, a majority of affiliated trade union members turn out to vote for political parties other than Labour. It beggars belief that they should want to donate to Labour while voting for the Scottish National party, the Liberal party or the Conservative party. The second requirement must be that the choice should be extended to donations from other parties. Therefore the means by which the choice is presented to the affiliated member as he joins the trade union must enable him not only to choose not to give to one party, but to choose to give to another. The third requirement must be that the individual must periodically be given an opportunity to review his decision—in practice, that does not happen in many trade unions. That opportunity should be provided annually. Before a decision is taken on whether to vote for the new clause, there is one large question to address. What would happen if the clause were introduced on to the statute book, but without any of the qualifying points that we, including the hon. Member for Cambridge, have made this afternoon? That question determines whether I would recommend to my party that it should support the clause. There would be several effects. The first would be that all parties were short of money. Does that matter? I have already discussed that question. Spending on party politics in this country is already high and it could probably be brought down. Billboards have been mentioned, and numerous other savings could be made with no material damage to the fabric of our party political system. Incidentally, I did a comparison, taking into account per capita income, between the amount spent in the recent US presidential election and in this country's last general election. To my surprise, I found that the numbers were broadly comparable—and without taking into account a costing of the party political broadcasts, which parties get free in this country but pay a fortune for in the United States. We already spend a lot of money on party politics in this country and I think that we could do the job with less. Of course, that is why we Conservatives support the reduction of the cap on general election spending from £20 million to £15 million. New clause 1 would have a second big effect, which I would not find acceptable. The playing field would no longer be level; it would be fundamentally altered to the detriment of the Labour party. It would be grossly unfair to disadvantage a party without giving it any time to adjust, however reasonable the principles on which that adjustment was taking place. What kind of adjustment would it be? Well, Labour Members could start to devote some time to thinking about how to make use of their party's huge databases of affiliated members and find ways of turning some of them into genuine individual Labour party members like members of other parties, instead of just sitting there moaning about how this is an assault on the fabric of their constitution, which is, in legal terms, complete nonsense. However, I recognise that that process would take time—perhaps a long time—and that a long transitional period would therefore be required.