Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am only surprised that the proposed cap in the new clause is so large. If I look back over what has happened to politics in my time in this House, certainly over the past 15 years, I see, election by election, a decline in voters' attention to a fundamental necessity in their lives—the political process. If donations can be allowed to be so large, that makes things unequal because, naturally and understandably, it is an obvious observation that political parties become very interested in the large donor and let go of the little donor. As a consequence of that detachment from political processes over the years, revenues at local level have fallen and political parties are contracting. In many constituencies, parties are shadow organisations with very few members exercising, for instance, choice over who should be the candidate. Big donations have enabled the centralisation of political choices through party headquarters. The parties in London seek to garner all this money, so they run campaigns aggrandising the centre, but the vitality of the political history of this country comes from the grassroots. All the great movements that have swept this country, including the extension of suffrage, were intensely public, popular movements supported by the many, not the few. If I have a criticism of the proposal, it is not of the intent behind it, but let us stand back from Hayden Phillips, and the new spokesman for the Conservative party—I thought that they normally sat on the Front Bench—who expressed views to which I could not sign up. We used to have an expression in this country: "You cut your coat according to your cloth." Political parties are bypassing that by seeking very large donations that will determine the future of our political processes from the centre, whereas I profoundly believe that constituency parties from each part of this kingdom are the dynamic that should determine what it is we are about. I support the new clause, although the cap is set much too high. I also dislike the idea of state funding beyond what we have now, which is far too gross. To think that we can only fight an election with £15 million or £20 million, which requires large donations or, as a substitute, the poor, oppressed taxpayer having to reach into their pockets. The process by which we are trying to determine an ideal or a principle has not been gone about in the right way. Parties should run on the small donations that they can raise. Someone mentioned what Barack Obama had succeeded in achieving through new communications—although those communications are well beyond my pay grade. If one has a cause and stands for something, one can reach the people in this country. I want local constituency parties, and therefore constituencies, to have the opportunity to choose and determine for themselves who their candidate should be, rather than for that person to be selected from the centre, because of money. For all the havering that I have heard, I shall support the Liberal amendment as a matter of principle: we need any measure that can reduce the interest shown in the multi-millionaire, the billionaire or the individual who can contribute £50,000. That is not representative of the nation as a whole.