My Lords, my name is on Amendments 43 and 44 and Amendment 45A is in my name. I welcome the clarification in the government amendments and stress that this is an important area in which getting the language right is particularly difficult. I speak as a non-lawyer.
When I read the original text, I had my doubts as to the use of “misrepresentation”. I also have serious doubts about the use of the offence of spiritual injury. I recall being a candidate in a very Irish area of Manchester in 1974. My wife and I spent a long evening with the nine Roman Catholic priests in the constituency during which we discussed what were the important issues in the election to them; of course, they were Northern Ireland, abortion and Catholic schools. We certainly hoped that their sermons the weekend before the election would not have a particular bias against voting Liberal. Spiritual injury is an extremely difficult area to get into; I am not sure that it should be in the Bill but I bow to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and others to say whether they really think that this is an area where one could prosecute.
We need to be concerned about enforcement and enforceability in this area. I have a strong memory of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, coming to supper with us in Saltaire in the middle of a general election campaign. He had come up as an official of the Labour Party to look at some of the problems of election campaigning in Bradford’s constituencies, in particular within the diaspora community in two or three of those constituencies. He was furious about the police’s refusal to intervene because of what they regarded as not only the difficulties of prosecuting but the dangers to social cohesion of attempting to prosecute in such difficult circumstances. We recognise that this is part of the problem we get into in these important clauses.
We on these Benches are in the unusual position of thinking—others might think it too—that this is an area where the Bill is not yet strong enough and where threats to democracy, of which we are now much more aware than we were a few years ago, clearly need to be countered. We have seen the threats to democracy in the United States, with the efforts of former President Trump and his sympathy for authoritarian regimes across the world. We have seen some on the right of the Conservative Party—certainly in what was UKIP but is now Reform UK—who are much more sympathetic to Orbán than they are to the French or Dutch or other countries on the continent. We therefore all need to be sure that our democracy is protected as strongly as it can be from foreign interference.
At Second Reading, I said that I regretted that the Government have refused to follow the recommendation made by the ISC in paragraph 47 of its Russia report: that the Government should agree to publish a further account of the experience of attempted Russian interference in British elections and the referendum campaign, to alert the public to the threat and demonstrate that it is real. We all understand that to do so would be embarrassing for the Conservative Party, but it should accept the embarrassment and publish. We still do not know where the huge amounts of money that Arron Banks has given over the years came from, including,
most recently, writing off another £6 million of debt. We are talking about something in the order of £10 million to £15 million that has come from abroad. I have been assured by others who say they know that it must have come from Russia but I—indeed, we—do not know that.
There are some major issues here. I will focus on the money dimension. It does not have to be amounts of that size, although we are all well aware that the British-citizen partners of Russian oligarchs in London have given some very large donations to the Conservative Party in recent years. Again, that is something about which we should be concerned, but think about someone wanting to influence the outcome in a particular constituency. The sums would not have to be that large. For example, if you are concerned about a candidate who is critical of human rights in the particular foreign power from which the diaspora community comes, those sorts of interventions are relatively easy.
We then come to the question of how we make sure that our overseas voters are who they say they are. A large gap was left on this by the Elections Act. I wish to stress to the Minister that a great deal more needs to be done. I raised a question on this the other week. Yesterday, I received a letter answering my criticisms from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which now deals with elections. I suggested that overseas voters do not have adequate checks on who they are and that they will not have them when we extend it to lifetime. The letter said:
“Similar to domestic electors, overseas electors will be subject to identity checks when registering to vote and, if they choose to vote in person, will be required to show an approved form of photographic identification.”
The idea that any significant number of overseas voters would wish to vote in a British election in person is laughable. Many of them live thousands of miles away—for example, on the west coast of California, in Bermuda, in Azad Kashmir or in northern Nigeria.
On several occasions, I have visited the Bradford electoral registration office to discuss these questions. Bradford currently has 1,000 overseas electors from more than 30 countries in its five constituencies. It is difficult to check back on whether the identity verification offered in those countries, which is looser than that now required under the photo ID requirements for domestic voters, is real or not.
When someone says that they lived in a particular constituency 30 years ago as a child and are therefore now entitled to vote, and you are doing it all online, verification is not easy. It would be reasonable to ask the consular dimensions of British embassies abroad to play a role in this. I tabled a Written Question for the Foreign Office last year about what role it would be playing in checking the identity of overseas voters. The answer was none. The French have a very different attitude to this; they attempt to maintain some clear links and checks on their citizens in other countries.
The letter from the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, goes on to say that if an overseas elector chooses to vote by post—under the Elections Act, et cetera—then, as this Bill and the Explanatory Notes make clear, they will vote by proxy. Proxy votes will therefore be an important part of this. Rightly, the
Elections Act limits the number of proxy votes that any elector can hold to two for domestic voters and four for overseas voters. However, if I were an authoritarian regime in a foreign power with a significant diaspora in the United Kingdom and a significant number of dual nationals back in their country, I would not find it difficult to add several hundred alleged voters to a particular constituency where I wanted to get the MP out, and to arrange for the scattering of those proxy votes among enough people to make a difference—perhaps 500. Some metropolitan constituencies already have over 1,000 overseas voters.
As it happens, there was a fundraising event for the Cities of London & Westminster Liberal Democrats last night. It was a very interesting mix of people, with a range of international links, some of them born in Russia, Kazakhstan, Greece and elsewhere. They have over 1,000 overseas voters on the register already. One could imagine the estimate in general is that the numbers would double as we relax the limitation from 15 years to a lifetime. This is a serious issue.
Amendments 44 and 45A address this serious issue and suggest that it needs further consideration. It may not be of advantage to the Conservative Party to apply tighter controls on where the money comes from. I recognise that, but all of us who are interested in maintaining the quality of our democracy must ensure that money that comes from someone who says that they are a long-time British resident now living in Dubai, Singapore, Bermuda or Panama must be checked very carefully, and the identity of that person must be checked even more carefully if they are giving substantial sums of money. All these issues must be investigated further, and I suggest to the Minister that we need further dialogue on this.
I have a couple of other points to add. One example given in the Explanatory Notes is troll farms. I do not entirely understand that, since troll farms do not have to be in this country, nor do I understand how that comes within the scope of this Bill. Perhaps we could discuss that off the Floor. I strongly support Amendment 45 on introducing the concept of a critical incident, since we understand that, in the age of social media, bitcoin and other things, the potential for foreign interference in our elections has grown exponentially. I hope that this will not be pushed through by the Government without further amendment.
I end where I began, by welcoming the Government’s clarifications in the amendments that they have tabled. But we need considerable further amendment and greater concern about how these intentions are to be caught and enforced before this becomes an adequate part of a new Act.
12.45 pm