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Political Parties and Elections Bill

I fully support that point. I had intended to deal with the hon. Gentleman's new clause 3 later, but I may as well speak about it now. In principle, I am fully in favour of what he says, for precisely the reason that he gives. Over the past 10 or 11 years the Government have become far too fond of creating criminal offences. They have invented more than 3,000 criminal offences, in many cases with no particular purpose in mind except to issue a press release. However, we must be careful to apply the same principles to everybody else in society as we apply here. I would be grateful for the support of the hon. Member for Leeds, North-East in other examples when we on the Liberal Democrat Benches try to make sure that the criminal law is not used inappropriately. We do not have the opportunity to do that now, but it is important to bear in mind—and on the whole I support his new clause—that we should apply the same argument in other cases as they come up. I am more concerned about some of the amendments tabled by the Conservatives. We should be wary of removing civil sanctions for contraventions that are short of criminal offences. Standard regulatory practice in the outside world applies that sort of idea to a range of other activities. Why, in this case, should political activity be treated differently? If we remove any sort of civil sanction for violations that fall short of criminal violations, we are left with no sanctions at all. It is pointless to pass statutory provisions that impose obligations on people and to have absolutely no sanctions to back up those obligations. The temptation for the Government will then be to make those obligations enforceable by the criminal law, so we will end up with yet more criminal offences. That applies even more in the case of removing the variable monetary penalties. Anyone looking at the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act 2008, for example, will see that those penalties are entirely standard. That is how regulation happens in general, and I cannot see any reason to remove such regulatory devices for the activity that we are discussing. There was an opportunity to object to them when the 2008 Act was going through Parliament; perhaps some Members did object. But given the fact that such devices represent the standard way in which regulation happens, I see no reason why what we do should get special treatment. That brings me to amendment 74, which relates to the appeal to the High Court and on which the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) wants us to vote. Under the 2008 Act, the standard practice—for everybody else, in every other regulatory field—is that there is no appeal to any sort of court, only to the first level of the tribunal. In giving them an appeal to the county court, we are already giving people in the line of activity that we are discussing a degree of special treatment; they have access to the ordinary courts. To go further and give people involved in politics access to the High Court would go way beyond what we offer people in other fields of activity. The hon. Gentleman said that doing so would provide for precedent. I should say that, as a matter of technical law, one High Court cannot bind another, so the amendment would not even do that. I have yet to be convinced that amendment 74 is fair in its treatment of political activity in relation to other types of activity. I am more sympathetic on the issue of discounts for the early payment of fines. It always seemed to me that those were a rather strange provision in the 2008 Act in the first place. Paying a fine early should not mean that people pay less; it is not a matter of civil debt, simply of when the obligation is fulfilled. However, the fact that that provision in the 2008 Act makes no sense is not a reason to give the activity that we are dealing with today special treatment with regard to it. We should be worrying about why we passed the provision in the first place.