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Political Parties (Funding)

I would accept an awful lot more from the right hon. Gentleman if he would get Lord Ashcroft to come forward and make it quite clear where his money comes from and whether he pays tax on it in this country. That is the real challenge. Is the Tory party prepared to wean itself off the Ashcroft moneys and clean up its own house? In the end, that is the measure that the British public will judge the Conservative party on—not whether we can have an agreement across the different parties on a cleaner political system, but whether that agreement will operate only between the Liberal Democrat party and the Labour party, leaving the Conservative party once again on the sidelines, facing the allegation that it does not want to clean up British politics.