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Political Parties and Elections Bill

So far this has been a conversation between lawyers. I am not a lawyer, and I want to alert the House and the people outside to what this is all about. It is about very rich people buying elections. We can listen to the exchanges between lawyers until we are blue in the face, but that is what it is about—multimillionaires who live abroad buying elections. I congratulate my friends on the Front Bench on listening to Labour Members and to my friend Lord Campbell-Savours, who moved my amendments in the House of Lords. I am grateful to Lord Campbell-Savours and to my friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton), who has championed this issue for many years. When the tax exile amendments, if I may use that shorthand, were tabled in the House of Lords, more Labour peers voted against the Labour Government than voted for them—there was a majority of 22, including two former general secretaries of the Labour Party, Lords Sawyer and Whitty. That was the extent of the alliance. My friend the Justice Secretary said, in his opening remarks, that the Government were listening to the alliance—it was a huge alliance. Many of us think that the Government should have addressed the issue of the super-rich buying elections years ago.