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Political Parties and Elections Bill

I shall simply cite the Justice Secretary when that matter was raised in a debate a little more than a year ago. He said that what mattered was that a donor was legal and permissible under legislation that he had piloted through Parliament. He also said that an individual's tax status was a matter for that individual. I welcome the Government's deathbed conversion and I am grateful for it. I stress the point that I made in my intervention on the Minister. It is essential that the House should provide for preventing the use of allowances by incumbent Members of Parliament to promote themselves proactively, whether through newsletters or direct, unsolicited mail, to constituents during an election period. If the provision is to be fair and democracy is to work properly, there must be absolute symmetry. It would be outrageous to place statutory constraints on candidates' spending out of money that they have raised privately while Members of Parliament continued to be able to spend taxpayers' money on promoting themselves in their constituencies. I did not hear from the Minister with the clarity that I sought the commitment that the new clause would not commence without a cast iron resolution of the House to prevent the use of the allowances for such proactive purposes.