It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in this Committee, Ms Clark.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) has raised an important point about impersonation and other electoral fraud offences. He was very fair in what he said at the beginning of his remarks. First, he said that this is a probing new clause. I therefore do not intend to dissect the wording of his new clauses to any great extent, because I do not think that he intends to press for a Division. Secondly, he was fair in saying that electoral malpractice is not confined to one party. We all need to be aware of it, to be on our guard against it and to take all appropriate steps to ensure that it does not happen, either in our own parties or in the wider electoral process. He, of course, recounts what he has experienced in Birmingham, and it is perfectly proper for other hon. Members to raise issues that reflect the experience in their areas.
We have traditionally been extraordinarily complacent in this country about our electoral administration arrangements. We have assumed that most people play the game according to the rules, and most people do. However, in making that big assumption, we have sometimes omitted to take elementary steps that would be considered perfectly normal in other jurisdictions to prevent the possibility of those who do not want to play by the rules doing things that we would not consider to be normal.
As I indicated earlier in the passage of the Bill, I have considerable experience of monitoring elections overseas as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Indeed, I have led international monitoring missions in a number of countries. The things that I have seen done in other countries, which we say in international forums are the things that we would like to see, are completely omitted in our country. Some of the things to which my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley referred, such as the use of transparent boxes to avoid ballot stuffing, are normal in most new democracies. It is normal in most new democracies for representatives of parties to act as observers in polling stations as a trust-building measure. Indeed, it is common in a lot of countries to have a method of indicating that somebody has voted, such as the use of dye. Those are not measures that we should or need to take in this country, but it is important that we do not have a complacent view of fraud, or an old-fashioned view that such things cannot happen in the United Kingdom—they can, and we should be on our guard.