---

Communications Allowance

I will not. If the hon. Gentleman will permit me, I will carry on, although that is purely for reasons of time. The incumbency value is between one and three percentage points, but it falls away after the first re-election and scarcely shows up in the statistics after that. Interestingly, it has scarcely changed for 50 years—whatever we put in place, it seems to remain pretty much the same. Although people want the communications allowance to entrench incumbency, it does not seem to have that effect—nor, indeed, does the campaigning on the other side of the ledger. The extra money spent in marginal seats in 2001 and 2005 for the Conservative party had the reverse effect to the one intended. In fact, the swing was two percentage points lower in 2001 in the seats where the most money was spent, which I find statistically significant. Furthermore, we later discovered from Labour literature that the Labour party had abandoned those seats, so there was not even a cancelling-out effect, which is normally the key reason why it is so difficult to identify the benefits to local campaigning. My objection to the communications allowance is not that it may actually be effective—although it could become effective at a future date—but that it is state funding of political parties by the back door. If we want state funding—I am not against it in principle, as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) will attest—we should explain to the electorate what we are doing and vote it in, not supply it by the back door. Incumbency, in any case, is already being bolstered by increases in parliamentary secretarial allowances, particularly where MPs have relocated a large number of their staff to their constituencies, where I strongly suspect a number of them are engaging in campaigning rather than constituency work. I very much hope that IPSA will investigate that and clamp down on any malpractice of that type in the months and years ahead. The right hon. Member for Streatham argued that the communications allowance is needed to offset Conservative funding in marginal seats. He emphasised that point at some length, but by making it he let the cat out of the bag and revealed his desired purpose for the communications allowance. Now we know that, in his view, the communications allowance should be and is a campaigning fund—exactly what it is designed not to be—and not the constituency allowance that he and his party dressed it up as when they encouraged the House to allow it. The right hon. Gentleman is, of course, upset that a rich donor is seeking to influence a British election by pouring money into target seats. I, too, am upset about that and about the funding being provided by a small number of big donors, including trade union bosses and corporations, as well as rich individuals. They should all go; they should all be got rid of. We need a donations cap, and I should like it to be set well below the level of £50,000 that I set out in a document, to obtain compromise. Those rich donors—the unions, corporations and rich individuals—should be wholly removed from the funding of political parties. To his enormous credit, the Leader of the Opposition not only agrees with that view but has said so publicly on numerous occasions, and has published jointly with me a pamphlet setting out how it can be accomplished. I think he agrees with me that there is a stench in the nostrils of the electorate about the way parties are funded and he wants to do something about it. However, the obstacle all along, I regret to say, has been the unions. The publication of the document triggered some very important talks, which took place over two years, chaired by Hayden Phillips, to get to grips with the issue. Tony Blair was involved in those talks, and he too supported the idea, as did the former head of his policy unit, Matt Taylor. Unfortunately, the Labour party did not support it. In particular, the present Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, when he became more closely involved in the talks, obstructed any progress on the key issue, which was the inclusion of unions in the cap:""The problem was that the system could not be overhauled without some loosening of the ties between Labour and the trade unions which together contributed about £11 million a year"" to Labour coffers.""Unfortunately, that was unthinkable to large swathes"" of the Labour party. Those are not my conclusions, but the conclusions of Peter Watt, the Labour general secretary, who like me participated in every one of the talks. He went on to say that the current Prime Minister had""nothing to gain from picking this fight"" with the unions.""He needed the support of the trade unions to become Prime Minister"," so we know why he engaged in so much obstructionism as well. Peter Watt continues that he""disliked the extent to which we had to dance to the unions' tune"" and that""the trade union barons were never shy of articulating what they expected in return"" for their cash. He said:""My primary emotion during the process was intense frustration, because my own party was the biggest block to reform"." The heart of the matter is that the communications allowance was introduced with party political purposes in mind, whatever its outward name and whatever the pretence of the way it was described. Labour was the incumbent party. Anything that went only to incumbents would inevitably be of benefit to it. It has been rumbled, first by the way that Parliament has begun to examine these issues, and now by the fact that in this debate the right hon. Member for Streatham has let the cat out of the bag about the real purposes of supporting the communications allowance. I am delighted by the findings of Sir Christopher Kelly on the issue. I am very pleased that my party supports the removal of the communications allowance, and I hope that it will be implemented immediately after the election by IPSA.