My Lords, my name is on several of the amendments in this group, and I will therefore speak to some of them.
Amendment 197 would tighten the rules on permissible donors and incorporated associations. Amendments 198 and 199 would limit permissible donations to companies and individuals resident in the UK, as would Amendments 204, 212D and 212E. Amendments 200 and 212G, the longest in this group, offer different language on the need for much more careful scrutiny of donations. Amendments 212A, 212B and 212DA, with the reference to the CSPL, would put caps on donations. The Minister will have noticed that, among other things, we are concerned that people who do not live in the United Kingdom should not be allowed to donate to political parties, even if they are on the electoral register.
In a facetious moment, I wondered whether I might table a separate amendment banning British citizens who live in Monaco or the Channel Islands from donating to political parties. Since the major motive of British citizens moving to those places is to avoid tax, that would be a way of saying that we do not want people who are deliberately avoiding paying tax in Britain to be funding political parties here, which we know happens. Some people believe that the main factor in extending overseas voting in the slipshod way it is being done is to make it easier for tax exiles to make major donations to the Conservative Party. “Perish the thought”, the Minister may say—but not everyone in the Conservative Party is as honest as he is.
I will talk mainly about Amendment 200, which some noble Lords may have noticed makes a reference to the ISC report on Russia. I remind the Minister that the Intelligence and Security Committee specifically recommended that the evidence it had collected on foreign interference in British politics should be published as fully as possible, and that the Government have said that they see no need to do so because, in their opinion, foreign interference has not been successful. That seems to be a mistake, and I hope that the Government will come to their senses and publish that evidence. So long as it remains unpublished, it will look as though the Government have something embarrassing that they are trying to hide.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, mentioned a number of major donors. One has to say in passing that it is astounding that we are now six years after the 2016 referendum and we still do not know where the largest single donation to the Brexit campaign came from. I was told by a senior figure in the City that everyone in the City knew exactly where it came from and that it had come from a foreign state. I do not know that—but we ought to be informed and we ought to have had some ability to discover where that £8 million came from.
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Amendment 200 therefore includes, as do one or two others, the insistence that a
“company or limited liability partnership’s profits generated and taxable within the United Kingdom over the previous 12 months are greater than the value of the donation given.”
That is a clear reference to AQUIND and others, and the ability to create, in effect, fake companies that conduct almost no business in the United Kingdom but which serve as vehicles to provide large funds to one party or another—unfortunately, it is almost entirely one party. Restrictions on donations, foreign-influenced or foreign, must include stricter limits on unincorporated associations, limited liability partnerships and companies within the United Kingdom, and the amendment sets out various conditions and how to satisfy them.
It then moves on to the issue of donations which provide, or are thought to provide, a potential national security risk—the subject of several paragraphs of the ISC Russia report, which the Government appear not to have taken sufficiently seriously. On the risks to national security, it talks about those that may be linked
“to entities which may seek to undermine or threaten the interests of the”
UK, or have a distant and hostile ultimate controller, or are involved in criminal or illicit activities, and states that all donations above £25,000 should be treated in this way.
I will leave it to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, who kindly rolled Amendments 201 to 203 into this amendment, to talk about the fit and proper test, which it goes on to cover. I suggest to the Government that we need to strengthen this part of the Bill substantially and that it would do their reputation a great deal of good if they accepted that. I also support Amendment 210 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on
public contracts, because there is a not entirely unjustified fear that a nexus between external contractors and the Government could also quite easily become a corrupt two-way street.
At a slight tangent, I will add that I am also concerned by foreign influence on think tanks and contractors funding them. I was asked by a think tank to contribute not that long ago on the question of the future of public service. It was very unhappy with what I wrote for it. I discovered that it at least published on its website its major donors, which were almost entirely outsourcing companies. I thought it was very difficult to be a neutral think tank writing about the future of public service if you are funded by outsourcing companies. I had the same worry about Policy Exchange when I read its papers on freedom of speech and universities, which had a large number of footnotes to American rather than British sources, and to publications of some extremely right-wing foundations in the United States. Policy Exchange does not publish its sources of income, and there is no way, therefore, that we can discover whether it received money from those right-wing American foundations for that sort of publication. That would also be improper—but I leave that to one side.
We need to strengthen controls over public finance in the Bill: involving both major domestic donors and, much more importantly, donors with foreign influence. It is already a problem; it has contributed to a loss of confidence in public life. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will be willing to accept, in some revised form or other, some of the overlapping language that appears in several of these amendments, including the ones which have my name on them.