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Political Parties and Elections Bill

Perhaps I can please the noble Baroness by giving first some of the most notorious examples under the previous Conservative Government, when they attempted to suggest that they cared passionately about finding jobs for people. There were huge adverts in national newspapers about how the Government were working very hard in this area. Yet all the adverts appeared in affluent areas where people were not genuinely unemployed and the adverts did not seem to appear in other areas. If you were genuinely trying to suggest that this was an opportunity for people to find work, you would perhaps have advertised in those areas, rather than in the more marginal areas where jobs appeared to be plentiful and unemployment was low. At the moment, one might accept that entirely legitimate government advertising was on things like the potential flu pandemic. I have no doubt that there is widespread advertising in other areas, such as on the introduction of the so-called Australian points system on immigration to advise employers about what they have to do to conform with government regulations. I do not believe that this was the most cost-effective way of telling employers what they have to do in terms of policing the Australian points system. But it was very good way perhaps of reassuring voters through public advertising, paid for by the taxpayer, that the Government were doing something about a problem which they said needed to be addressed. My suggestion is that somebody independent should vet government advertising, reduce the bill significantly, give some of the money back to the taxpayer and use other parts of the budget to allow the parties to state their case democratically. At the moment, we have state funding for things like Short money and delivery of council election addresses. The implication of a cap of £50,000 is then to say that you have to do something else instead. I also recognise that part of the overall package of fairness is to address some of the anomalies in trade union funding. While there might be significant regulation within the trade unions at the moment, some things about how the trade unions give their funds to the Labour Party are not right and should be reformed. It is incumbent on the Labour Party to accept significant measures of reform in its trade union funding as part of its overall package. We nearly got there in the Hayden Phillips talks. My impression is that the Labour side came close to accepting what effectively is put forward now by my noble friend Lord Tyler and me in Amendment 109, which is based very closely on the Hayden Phillips report. Informed consent is the essential principle. The argument is often made on the Labour side that individual trade union members are deciding with their £3, £10 or £15 that they wish to be members of the Labour Party and wish that sum of money to go to it. That is invariably done through an affiliation system, yet it is a system in which the number of members of the Labour Party affiliated by particular trade unions is often greater than the number of members paying their political levy. If, for example, a union affiliates 110,000 members but has 100,000 members paying their political levy, where is the informed consent of the 10,000 members? Clearly, it does not exist. There is a general appetite in this country for saying that large donors, whether individuals, private companies or trade unions, should not have excessive influence over the political process. We all know that cash counts in politics. We should deal with all these problems together, for all the parties at the same time, whether they relate to individual donors, companies and the trade unions. It may not strengthen my case with a number of noble Lords present to note that, this weekend, Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary, argued that among the things that the Government are not addressing is the need for fundamental reform of political financing in this country and that part of that necessary reform was put forward in the Hayden Phillips proposals—namely, the reform of trade union financing in particular of the Labour Party, as put forward in our Amendment 109.