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Political Parties (Funding)

I should have liked to thank all hon. Members for a positive, thought-provoking and inspiring debate, but I doubt, given your recent remarks, Mr. Deputy Speaker, about interventions, that that would have been a strictly accurate description of the past couple of hours. However, I want to put on record my thanks, especially to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) for his measured response to the debate and for the fact that he, like us, still wants to make progress in the next weeks and months on the way in which we deal with party funding. I also particularly want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd), the chair of the parliamentary Labour party, who apologised for the incidents that have taken place in the past couple of weeks—as indeed do I, and as did the Prime Minister, very clearly, as soon as he knew. The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) should listen more carefully to some of these things. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick), who said that anything that brings Parliament into disrepute is a blow to parliamentary democracy. Maintaining and rebuilding faith in political parties is vitally important for us all, and I continue to hope that hon. Members from all parties will engage constructively in taking this forward. How political parties are funded matters because of the central role that they play in democracy. We should be able, in this democracy of ours, to have debates and conversations about the importance of political parties instead of the kind of debate that we have had today. The most recent review of party funding concluded that"““the debate about the financing of our political parties is””" therefore"““a debate about the health of our democracy and how we can improve it.””"