My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, and, indeed, it is today. I speak with slightly less enthusiasm for the Bill than my noble friend Lord Tyler. I agree entirely with the objectives of transparency of lobbying and of the prevention of big money distorting electoral politics. However, asserting that there are problems and dangers in these areas and that something must be done does not necessarily mean that the details of the proposals in the legislation are the way forward. In one respect at least, this is an awful Bill; it is badly written. I often judge new Bills by whether an intelligent person with an interest in the subject, picking it up and reading it, could understand what it is all about. I do not believe that anybody picking this up and reading it could do that. I look forward to my noble friend the Minister explaining lucidly and clearly in Committee the intricacies of Clauses 28 and 29, which seem to be a nightmare.
I declare that I have a lifetime interest in electoral law because I am a lifetime election agent. It is more than 40 years since I started running election campaigns, and I do not suppose that I have finished yet, so I know about election law—and this is election law. We have had a stream of lobbying, ironically, on the Bill from all sorts of people. It seems that the whole of civil society in this country is up in arms. In particular, we have had a focus on the effects that Part 2 might have on charities. However, this Bill is not actually about charities. It is about all the third-party campaigners and campaign bodies. Nevertheless, charities say it will seriously affect them.
The Government’s response is to assert that it will not, but assertion is not enough. When a whole sector is up in arms like that, simply telling it that it is wrong is not good enough. There should be argument and explanation and, I humbly suggest to my noble friends on the government Front Bench, a willingness to look at changing the Bill to clarify it, to amend it and to improve it, is what is required. At the moment we simply have a pantomime argument going on, one side saying, “Oh, yes, it does”, the other side saying, “Oh, no, it doesn’t”, and so it goes on—and as we know from pantomimes, that does not get us very far.
In your Lordships’ House we are often told that our job is to scrutinise, revise and improve legislation. In order to do that, we also need a substantial willingness on the part of the Government to listen and discuss with us around the House how best to revise this legislation—the need for which, it seems to me, is absolutely certain. As I have just said, this is election law, not charities law. What charities can and cannot do is not per se the concern of the Bill. That is defined by charities legislation and regulated by the Charity Commission, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, discussed in detail. This Bill is about regulation of what all third-party bodies can and cannot do in relation to election campaigning.
One problem is that it is all part of election law, which is complex, obscure and widely ignored. Those of us who know a lot about it know how to get around it in many cases—not that I would ever do that. But the Bill specifically amends the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, or PPERA. Having gone back and read that part of the Act again in detail, for the first time in a long time, I think that it is poor legislation. I hope that the Labour Party will not get too much on its high horse about this Bill, because one of the real problems with it is that it is based on the structure and system set out in PPERA, which is frankly not fit for purpose. We are lumbered with it and have to do our best with it—but it will be legitimate in these circumstances to look in Committee not just at what the Bill says but at what PPERA says, to see whether a lot of the vagueness, obscurity and the problems in this area do not actually come from the original wording in that Act. We are told by the Government, or by my noble friend Lord Tyler, that over the past 13 years Part 6 of PPERA has been tried and tested—but it has not. It has largely been ignored; it has never been tested in the courts; and I think that we should subject some of that to scrutiny in Committee. It is complex and difficult to understand; it is full of vague expressions, when clarity is needed; it is untested in the courts; and it is subject to unsatisfactory advice by the Electoral Commission over the years. Those comments apply to PPERA, not just the Bill that we now have to amend it.
The whole thing is poor, flawed legislation. Whether we can make anything sensible out of it, we will find out in the next few weeks. This part of PPERA and these issues have really come to prominence only as a result of the present Bill—because the thresholds and spending limits are being reduced and what is defined as controlled expenditure is being substantially increased. That has put considerable fear among the campaigning organisations, whether or not they are charities, and that is what is causing the problems before us today. I suggest to the Labour Party that the Bill has reached Second Reading and, no doubt, it will pass Second Reading—although it is fair enough to make political points in this debate. But all of us—the Opposition, the Cross Benches and the two government parties, as well as anybody else in the House who is interested—need to get together and try to thrash out a way in which to make this legislation a great deal better than it is now.
I want to talk about constituency campaigning, which has a new emphasis in this Bill. It is a very difficult issue in relation to third-party campaigning, because it is within the confines of a particular electoral area, which is obviously considerably smaller than one of the nations of this country. It is considerably easier, if people have a lot of money, to throw money at a particular constituency and seriously affect the election result. This is a serious problem, and it is no good us pretending that it is not. Yet we live in a changing world, in which political and campaigning energies are more and more being directed into single-issue and themed campaigning groups. At the same time, coming from a different direction is the threat of a large amount of money and corporate power being used in this country; it is not necessarily exactly the same as
the super-PACs that are so distorting politics in the United States of America, but the same kind of problem is occurring. It is not easy to find a way in which to regulate all this, and to fit that into the traditional system of controls and regulation that is based on political parties and candidates being regulated. These are difficult areas at national levels; they are most difficult at the level of individual electoral areas, constituencies or even local government wards.
In the past, the system was much stricter. When charities or local groups called all-party meetings and one candidate dropped out, they usually cancelled the meeting, because it was thought that spending money at all in a way that was in any way partisan was contrary to electoral law and should not take place. That is in the past now—but any of us who have been in politics for a long time have scars from individual contests when third-party campaigning has made a difference. We may not have the scars—we may have the victory medals as a result of it—but in our party we tend to have the scars.
I remember in the Nelson and Colne constituency in February 1974, nearly 40 years ago, there was a very tight contest in which David Waddington, now the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, was defending his seat; he held it by about 135 votes. The candidate who came second was Doug Hoyle, now the noble Lord, Lord Hoyle, and the Liberal candidate was myself. That election was considerably affected by two lots of third-party campaigners. There were people from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, who managed to divert a lot of Catholic votes away from both of us—certainly from me. The others were the local unions, who used their base in what was then a very strong manufacturing area, with all the local mills and the factories, to make sure that the main opposition to David Waddington was the Labour Party and not me. I am not complaining about it, in retrospect, although at the time I thought that it was pretty underhand. I have changed my mind about these things. I have been out on the streets delivering Hope Not Hate leaflets in Pendle against BNP candidates, and I have contributed funding to those leaflets. So there has to be a balance. Third-party campaigning cannot be done away with or forgotten about. It is here to stay. What we have to do is to get the balance right, and we can do that in Committee.
It is rightly said that this Bill has had a disgraceful lack of scrutiny, and I agree with that. But we are where we are; the Government are not going to withdraw it, and it is not going to stop. So the task before us is to test the Bill rigorously, line by line and clause by clause in Committee. We have to look at workability, which is crucial, as well as proportionality and unintended consequences, and one or two of the principles in it. If we can work together as a House and the Government can work with us, we can make a much better fist of this Bill than we have at the moment.
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