Political Parties and Elections Bill

I might consider it as a matter of principle if I thought that it was practical. As I have said, if I want to find out where a Member of Parliament lives, I can do so. If I want to find out where the chairman of a big company lives, I can do so. It is not secret information and it is not possible to keep it secret in the modern world. In a practical sense, I do not think that it works. As a matter of principle, those of us who take part in active politics, to a greater or lesser extent, accept the risks of doing so. It may affect our families and other people connected to us. I do not know how many people in this Room can say that they have never had undesirable people threaten to do nasty things to them. I have certainly had threats to remove my kneecaps. A couple of years ago there was a banner headline in the local paper when a former BNP candidate was being prosecuted for having a large number of explosives in his house. He lived about a mile away from me then and the headline, from his wife, was, "He wanted to kill Tony Blair and Lord Greaves". I did not quite understand this extraordinary combination of people, but there it was. It was all reported in court in Manchester and no doubt this man was a threat. We all know what happened—not for political reasons, but because someone was mentally ill—to my noble friend Lord Jones of Cheltenham. His assistant, a local councillor, was killed at one of his surgeries. Yes, there is always a risk if you take part in public life, and the risk may be higher than it used to be, but it is a risk that we have to accept. If there are people who believe that they need protection, that protection should be provided whether or not they are government Ministers; a proper risk assessment should take place and, if they need the protection, they should get it. There is no doubt about that. My final point is that I cannot imagine a circumstance in which most parliamentary candidates or any other candidates would want to hide their addresses. Most of them, even if their main residence is not in the constituency, get another residence there—a pied-à-terre, a flat or something—and then put that address on their nomination paper for the parliamentary election. It is certainly somewhere where they live for a time and they are certainly living there during the election campaign. I do not think that candidates would want to hide their addresses and I have to say that opposition candidates would make a point of complaining, "This person will not tell us where he lives". You can imagine the populist leaflets that people such as my noble friend Lord Rennard and I might put out in such circumstances: "Who is this man? Where does he live? Is it true that he comes from the south of England or Tristan de Cunha or somewhere?"—I was going to say Belize, but that is probably not the right thing to say—"Why doesn’t he live locally? Why won’t he tell us where he lives?". Once you start on the slippery slope, you then get legislation that says that you cannot do that. If a person is entitled to be anonymous in terms of their address, there will be legislation stating that people cannot use that as an election tool and that you cannot attack candidates for that. And so the slippery slope goes on. This is a silly proposal, which is wrong in principle. It is nothing to do with carpetbaggers but is entirely to do with plain democratic common sense.