A new low has been reached in the handling of the Bill. I do not think that we have seen such a shambles since the last occasion on which the Leader of the House was involved with a piece of legislation. At least on that occasion there was a pause when the Government decided to go back to the drawing board. This time, we seem to be being expected to debate a Bill which the Minister himself, from the Dispatch Box, has said is not adequate and must be changed. I am pleased to see that the Chair of the Procedure Committee, the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), is in the Chamber, because I feel that the Committee should consider the process issues connected with the Bill.
It is peculiarly ironic that the Minister, the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), is a Liberal Democrat. One would think that, of all the things that the Liberal Democrats could defend, one would be liberal democracy. This is about the nature of our democracy, and I really think that the Liberal Democrat members of the coalition should learn to stand up to the Tory members. The Bill is clearly a highly political piece of legislation, aimed at defending Tory donors and attacking the civil society groups that might support any other political activity and any other political parties.
It is particularly worrying that the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith), has admitted in reply to a parliamentary question that the first time she spoke to voluntary sector organisations about the Bill was on Monday last week, at least two months after the publication of the Bill.
I do, of course, support amendment 47. I want to say a few things about my experiences working in the voluntary sector, as they help to explain why I am so horrified by the contents of clause 26. Before I was elected to this House I worked in three voluntary sector organisations: the Runnymede Trust, the Church of England Children’s Society and the National Association of Toy and Leisure Libraries, which I ran. The Church of England Children’s Society, in particular, did a lot of campaigning work alongside all the many practical projects it ran. It is perverse to put a limit on the amount that voluntary sector organisations can spend on campaigning in the run-up to a general election because that is when they can most effectively influence the political process, as that is when the political parties are writing their manifestos and when candidates are standing for election and re-election.
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The late lamented Member for Wolverhampton South West, Rob Marris, told me always to read the explanatory memorandum, and paragraph 60 says this about clause 27:
“the full fees and costs in the 365 days before a UK general parliamentary election associated with any advertising, unsolicited material to electors, or manifestos, or with the organisation of any rallies or events, would count as controlled expenditure.”
I am assuming that Ministers think this is completely acceptable because we are going to live in a world of fixed-term Parliaments where there is no possibility of any Government ever collapsing before the end of the fixed term or any circumstance arising whereby a general election is held at another time, but the Minister must acknowledge that the reality is that we can never be certain of when there will be a general election. A voluntary sector organisation might make a calculation that it can run a campaign, only for the general election to be held six months earlier than scheduled for some reason, in which case all that expenditure will be caught. This is wholly unfair and completely >unpredictable. I also hope the Minister will explain what the penalties will be for voluntary sector organisations that cut across these rules.
What is most worrying, however, is the wider implications for the voluntary sector. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) made it very clear that politics is changing and this is an attack on free speech in a civil society.