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Political Parties and Elections Bill

The answer is that I have not put forward in the Bill proposals ““peculiar”” to the Labour party, any more than the proposals in the 1999 Bill were ““peculiar”” to my party. I want to seek a consensus on the proposals. The right hon. Gentleman was a party to the talks. I greatly regret that no agreement was reached, but he knows that Sir Hayden Phillips entered those talks saying, quite properly, that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. We can spend time going backwards and forwards on the issue of what happened in those talks, but the simple fact of the matter is that there was not agreement. At the risk of tedious repetition, I repeat that there is little purpose served by the House ramming through changes to the party funding regime that do not command a consensus. If the right hon. Gentleman does not believe me, he need only consider what happened in another area of electoral law when there was not consensus. He went to the United States; there is no consensus there about boundaries, so what happens, as he will know if he has ever seen a boundary map of congressional districts, is that each side gerrymanders the boundaries, which are subject to one rule only in basic law, which is that the boundaries should connect. It leads to a ridiculous position. I do not want to get into that situation. Nor do I want us to experience what has happened in at least two western European countries, where the electoral system was changed for political advantage. We have to be very careful. In particular, there is a responsibility on the Government, who have a majority, to be careful.