My Lords, my name is also added to this amendment. I should like to say a few words not as a lawyer but as a politician. In my rather long political life, I have fought at least 11 general elections and two by-elections, and have lost some and won some. It is worth commenting as a politician in this very good debate, which has been rather dominated by lawyers, if noble Lords will forgive my saying so.
I think that a very simple message is coming out of this discussion. I thank the Government for permitting a consultation period. I quite agree that it is not as long as it should be, but it is worth recognising that this is a very useful innovation in this House, and one that I think will be helpful to us as we work our way through increasingly complex legislation, given that that is the nature of so much legislation nowadays.
Unfortunately, the Bill is largely concerned with amending the 2000 Act, which means that it is incredibly complicated. It keeps referring back to earlier legislation when it might have been better to make a clean break and have a completely new Bill. That is by the way and we have what we have, but I think it is one of the reasons why two issues have emerged very clearly in this debate—I speak as I see. First, virtually every amendment—amendment after amendment—has sought to exempt various bodies from the controls on the amount of expenditure that is incurred. Virtually every one of the many amendments that we have discussed
has sought to eliminate or take out something or other. They have all been negative amendments and have attempted to detract from the Bill’s impact on charities. That is not a desirable way of looking at a Bill. What it adds up to is that this is a Bill which has overwhelmingly caused such concern, worry and anxiety that it cannot stand as it is without huge amendment, or possibly a complete rewriting of Part 2. I favour the second.
The other thing that emerges very clearly from this is that the Ministers—I greatly respect their patience and their attempts to deal with the issues—have turned effectively into a sort of CAB. Everybody who gets up says, “Does this apply to me, or to this, or to the other thing?”. That is not a very happy way of demonstrating how clear and transparent the Bill is. It is a very happy way of demonstrating that it is neither clear nor transparent. This again means that there has to be a major look at how to reconstruct this part of the Bill.
I add one other thing. I say this in some criticism of the commission, which has been so widely praised, quite rightly, in this House. The commission has not taken sufficient cognisance of—I refer back to the brief speech made by my noble friend Lord Greaves—the impact of certain kinds of expenditure on campaigning, not least major expenditure on campaigning, on the whole issue of the cleanliness and transparency of politics itself.
We have blissfully walked past substantial evidence to show that, without some form of serious regulation of charities, but also of NGOs, there is a tendency for politics to become increasingly corrupted by the flow of money. The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, for whose intelligence I have the greatest respect, unwisely referred to the likelihood of some monster coming out of the jungle who would be a billionaire. There are many monsters who are billionaires coming out of the jungle. I know that because I taught the subject of elective politics for 10 years at Harvard.
The United States has effectively been taken over at the federal level by more and more major expenditure. For example, expenditure on congressional elections in real terms has gone up two and a half times since 1998. In the latest election cycle, in 2012, no less than $3.5 billion was spent on electing Congressmen and Senators to their elective seats. To take another example; it costs today, on the latest explanation we have, $1.5 million to elect a Congressman. Congressional districts are of course larger than parliamentary constituencies—let us say three or four times larger. However, when you compare the £12,000, which is still the British limit that can be spent within a constituency once an election has been declared, with $1.5 million, even if you take real values and all the rest of it into account, you are looking at a vast increase in the expenditure on how you can get legislation through Congress. A great deal of it is quite directly and precisely related to politics in its most raw sense, including the money that comes out of the so-called 501(c)4 regulations of the Internal Revenue Service—the tax system—which now allows specifically non-profit third parties to put money into election support and political payments. Let us not forget that the legislation picks out non-profit, picks out non-party and picks
out bodies with claims that they are pushing a charitable end, or in some cases a public service end. The outcome is quite simply that this particular element in public expenditure in the United States has risen from $9 million two years ago in 2010 to $457 million in 2012. That is an increase of the order of something like 45 times. Why? The regulations that applied to restriction on public expenditure of this kind by non-profit organisations were effectively allowed to lapse with the result of the so-called Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010, whereby corporations and unions were both allowed to come into that structure and give whatever they liked with no limit for political campaigns.
What I see in the United States at the federal level is effectively the breakdown of democracy. It is not surprising that more than half of Senators are millionaires or richer because, effectively, the ordinary man and woman have been driven out of politics at a federal level and it is too expensive for them to stand because the money that they have to raise to stand any chance of getting elected is now so extreme. I will not go on but the figures are terrifying. The estimated spending for the next presidential election in 2016 is around $6 billion at the federal level only. What one is seeing is a great democracy gradually turning into a plutocracy, and that is extremely dangerous.
9.30 pm
Why do I raise this? It is because in this debate nothing like sufficient consideration has been given to what one might call the other side of the Bill. I have made it clear—I share completely the views of my noble friends—that Part 2 has to be reconstructed from the ground up. However, the Committee should give more attention to one of the reasons for the Bill, flawed though it is at present, which is, in Parts 1 and 3, to attempt to control the flow of money into politics. Heaven help us if we do not take that seriously, and there has been far too little debate about that in this Committee in the past day or so.
I want to address the commission rather sharply, and I hope that I will be forgiven. It is a brilliant commission; everyone has said so and I certainly share that view. However, it has two huge holes. One has been mentioned by my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury. There is a real question regarding the need for separate regimes for charities and NGOs—I do not agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, on this point—because they are different creatures, working in different ways with different regulations. There is no reason why they should be treated in exactly the same way. I cannot see the argument for that and there is always a danger if you are not restricted by the Charity Commission rules that you will push over the envelope. One can to some extent argue that the envelope in one or two cases has been pushed beyond where it should have gone. I am thinking not only of the famous Taunton case but of the position of people who, for example, stand entirely on the basis of a campaign to keep a hospital open—things of that kind, which go far outwith the normal structures of politics.
The final question that I want to ask before I sit down is addressed to my dear friend, if not my formal friend, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, who is the chairman of the commission.
I simply cannot understand the suggestion that we abandon constituency limits; the argument in the report is extraordinarily weak. We know that they are not strong but they have been strong enough in a number of cases in recent years to disqualify candidates who have overspent on the limits before them. Fragile though the limits are, they represent probably the single strongest pillar we have to prevent corruption and money running politics in this country. I say to the commission—I beg it, actually—to look more seriously at that issue. If you remove constituency limits, you remove one of the most effective, although not very strong, measures we have to keep politics clean. I urge the commission to go look again and come up with a much more serious proposal in order to balance the rest of what it has said, which is undoubtedly excellent.