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Political Parties and Elections Bill

Under any of these proposed systems, what limit would have made any difference in the circumstances of 1974? That is why it is fundamentally right that there should be a control period over the length of the Parliament. I have thought long and hard about Amendment 121 and whether it might be practical to bring back the trigger, having raised concerns in 2000 about what we were doing. In effect, a complete coach and horses has been driven through the principles of the 1883 legislation that you should not be able to buy an individual constituency. Some of my reservations arise from the fact that I do not have quite the same confidence in the mechanism as the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, does. She referred to a relatively recent court case in which she said that perhaps it worked. She may have been referring to the case in Newark after the 2001 general election. My view is that that legal action showed how it did not really work. After the 1997 election, it was shown that it did not work. As agents, a number of us have significant experience that there were more problems perhaps with the trigger mechanism than the noble Baroness suggested—for example, how you deemed yourself to be the editor, the prospective candidate, the candidate, et cetera. When I was organising elections and the noble Baroness was organising them on behalf of the Labour Party, I really wish that I had known that all I had to do to get a Labour candidate out of the race was to phone her at her headquarters and tell her that the election expenses—