Political Parties and Elections Bill

Tonight's episode has been a pretty unseemly end to what I believe the Justice Secretary will admit has not been a particularly glorious legislative process that the Bill has gone through in this House. The Bill started life in autumn last year as a thoroughly partisan measure designed to achieve—let us face it—political advantage. The policy goals were exceptionally poorly thought through, leaving the unfortunate parliamentary draftsman an impossible task. The main provisions attracted significant criticism from all sides; the Electoral Commission pointed out that a number went well beyond what it had sought and that other provisions provided no benefit and had a significant downside. All the political parties, including his own, attacked several of the Bill's original provisions. The storm of obloquy that the Bill attracted prompted the Secretary of State to return, belatedly, to the path of discussion and common sense, even if consensus was not achieved in all matters. The requirement to verify the source of donations was sensibly dropped, the powers for the Electoral Commission were sensibly trimmed back and the thoroughly partisan proposal to reintroduce triggering was dropped; the Bill is completely different from what was introduced in the autumn of last year. This has been achieved much less by dint of having full and open debate in the Commons—in this House and in Committee—because of the rigidity of the programme motion that was introduced, which allowed very little scope for the sort of matters that my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) raised this evening and has led to what most of the House would recognise to have been a fairly unseemly process. The Bill is a massive missed opportunity to deal with the big donor culture by having a genuine across-the-board cap on donations.