Political Parties and Elections Bill

That is absolutely true. I should also report that in the case of Pendle—I must be careful what I say; I do not want to breach the protocols of the relationship between this House and the House of Commons—our MP, Gordon Prentice, does not appear to have lots of rich friends in any quarter who are pumping a lot of money into what he is doing. He may have lots of friends, but they are not rich friends, as far as one can tell. They are certainly not funding his campaigns. The only activities that he appears to be undertaking are funded through the parliamentary allowance—issuing the Member’s report as MPs are allowed to do. That seems to me personally to be an abuse of public money but, again, that is not a party-political issue. In my view the system should not allow it, but it does. The scale of what he can do bears no relationship whatever to the scale of what the Conservatives are able to do and certainly no relationship to the scale of what we are able to do from our purely local resources.