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Political Parties (Funding)

It may be that the point that I am about to make is the one about which the hon. Gentleman is so excited. The Labour party has publicly complained about donations made by unincorporated associations, such as the Midlands Industrial Council, although those arrangements are signed off by the Electoral Commission and the membership of the MIC has been made fully public. Despite that, Labour made a complaint to the Electoral Commission and received a response. A letter to the then Labour party chairman from the commission cleared donations by the MIC and explicitly referred to the central legal requirement that no one in the Labour party now claims ever to have heard of. The letter was sent in October last year, and states that the Act"““requires that where a donor passes a donation to a political party via an agent, the agent must tell the party the original donor's details so that the party can, first, establish that the donor is a permissible donor…and second, record the donation with the Electoral Commission as coming not from the agent but from the original donor.””" Now, it is possible that the letter went only to the chairman of the Labour party and was not seen by the then general secretary or by anyone involved in fundraising and that they have all been operating in complete ignorance of what I repeat is a central provision of the 1999 legislation.