I have noted the hon. Gentleman’s interest in this issue in the past. I point to the answers given by my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland earlier: funding agreements between the state, local
government and charities tend to make it virtually impossible for charities spending public funds to spend them on any other purpose.
This is a dog’s dinner of a Bill and, as the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) said a short while ago, even that description of the Bill is an insult to dog nutrition. So let us be clear: our invitation today to the Conservative partners in the coalition is to place reform of third party spending in elections clearly in the context of a cross-party consensus on political party funding and political party spending. We need to see a cap on donations to political parties—our leader has suggested a cap of £5,000 —and we need to see meaningful reductions in spending limits by political parties in general elections. We need to stop this spending race, which sees spiralling sums of money spent on successive elections. No more dodgy dinners in Downing street; no more bankrolling of the Conservative party by a tiny number of wealthy City donors. The Electoral Commission itself has made it clear that reform of third party spending is needed, but not like this. Clause 27 has caused huge consternation in the third sector, because if passed into law, it would play a major part—along with the other clauses in part 2—in effectively gagging the third sector in election periods. The changes will have a chilling effect on our national debate in the year before the election. That cannot be right for any modern, 21st-century democracy.