My Lords, at the core of any western liberal democracy is trust. The citizen must trust the institutions that make up their democracy and the people within those institutions. They must trust also that the oversight arrangements will work and, if someone or something breaches that trust, that there will be a mechanism to put things right. Within our democracy, and in common with other western liberal democracies, there will always be questions about political party finance. Political party finance in the UK is regulated by the Electoral Commission, which I will come back to shortly.
Trust in the ruling party in Scotland is at a very long-term low. There is the First Minister who could not see a huge and shiny motor home outside her mother-in-law’s house; the refrain in rural Perthshire is, “She should’ve gone to Specsavers”. This is the same First Minister who believes that full co-operation with the police is hours in their custody repeating “no comment”. Another First Minister is vigorously trying to stop a Scottish Parliament inquiry into something so damaging for our democracy—with no apology for the obvious and serious conflict he has—as such an inquiry would inevitably seek to look into his actions and inactions as well. Be it a Cabinet or a board of directors, members have joint responsibility for what has gone on. Indeed, a director is personally liable for their negligence.
The SNP leader claims the SNP national executive committee to be different. Members of the NEC, he feels, have no responsibility or liability for their actions and inactions over the decade of immoral mess. The judge in the case made it clear that the embezzlement was not particularly sophisticated, which only underlines how deep the NEC’s failure was, individually and collectively. The senior members of the NEC have then reached for the Pontius Pilate kit to wash away the blame. That is very wrong. The leader, former leader and long-term treasurer over the decade all owed a particular duty to their party and each year would have made the usual clear representations to their auditors. They remain the most active at trying to prevent more scrutiny that would examine their actions and inactions. This presents that horrible conflict. They do this to their great shame.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and to thank him for initiating this short debate. I agree entirely with his opening remarks in relation to what has happened in Scotland. Even my guide dog would have been able to see the motor home, never mind the multiple very clever coffee makers.
It is appropriate that we should be debating this before the latest Representation of the People Bill reaches us, because on the previous occasion, the 26th Bill, it was my pleasure to join with the noble Earl’s predecessor, the much-missed Lord Judge, in trying to get right what we were debating at that time—both the powers and independence of the Electoral Commission and where we were going. Much has changed in those very few years. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench, whose fault it is not, that we did not really need the Rycroft review, important and informative as it is, to tell us that there was a major problem with bitcoin. It is remarkable that the Bill as drafted, and not yet amended on Report in the Commons, missed this out.
Sadly, that is an indication of our time, where reviews rather than action, missing the point, being somewhat behind the door, and looking at the past rather than the future have been too prevalent. We have got to get real in this area. It is time to understand the absolute reality and check what is taking place now, to equip our laws and our Electoral Commission for the future. If we do not, the basic tenets of our democracy will be undermined.
It is a sadness to me that one of the great donors to Reform UK—£5 million direct to the leader and £12 million to the party—turns out to have been born in Sheffield. This is not something I can be proud of. Mind you, the particular location was not in Sheffield at the time he was born, so maybe I can avoid that one.
We have a situation where it is suggested, including by Rycroft, that it might be possible that people who are registered to vote—this underlines the importance of those who pay taxes—should be enabled to donate. I ask my noble friend the Minister whether we should always have a cooling-off period when people change their location or seek to renew their electoral rights, so that we cannot have somebody changing their domain and their ability to donate very large sums at a whim. In other words, we have to be much more sure-footed.
My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in thanking the noble Earl and congratulating him on introducing this debate. It is a timely and incredibly important subject. I speak as a veteran, at various stages in a long and chequered career, of engaging in cross-party talks on party funding.
The concern I have about where we are today is that the long-established convention on these matters of changing the rules on party funding—that they are pursued only after cross-party talks, with agreement being sought—seems to be being abandoned. The noble Earl made a powerful case for a much more comprehensive and simple approach to these matters, so it is a matter of regret and concern that the Government have chosen to pick a couple of cherries out of the Rycroft report and introduce them, at a relatively late stage, into a Bill already going through its legislative process. That is a breach of the approach which has been followed pretty rigorously.
I recall that, in the period after the 2005 election, when Sir Hayden Phillips—sadly, now the late Sir Hayden Phillips—was asked to undertake one of these reviews, Jack Straw and I, accompanied by the noble Lord, Lord Tyrie, had comprehensive discussions, which sadly did not reach agreement. They did not reach agreement because the Labour Party had a concern that a cap on donations of £50,000 could not be applied to donations by trade unions. At that point, the whole deal that was being fashioned—which would have gone some way to re-establish trust and support in the system—fell down.
There is another concern here, which is the introduction of a retrospective element into what is apparently being proposed. There is a cap to be introduced retrospectively on donations from legitimate electors—people who are entitled to vote but who happen not to be living in this country. I query the whole principle of saying that some voters are more equal than others. If there is a concern about the right of people living overseas—the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, slightly raised this point—to have full rights in our Parliament and our democratic processes then that should be dealt with differently, but to say that for one particular aspect of participation in our parliamentary democracy they should be disadvantaged in this way seems plainly wrong. These matters should be treated very carefully indeed.
My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Maude, with whom I worked in the coalition many years ago, I am thinking of the 2022 Act, through which the Conservative Government were certainly trying to advantage themselves and disadvantage their competitors. That is one of the reasons why we have this Bill before us today, and this is a debate to which we will return.
Last Thursday we debated the problem of rebuilding public trust in our democratic institutions, so it is highly appropriate that today, we move on to discuss the Electoral Commission as the guarantor of the integrity of our campaigns. To play its role effectively, the Electoral Commission needs to have sufficient powers and to be seen as independent of government. In last Thursday’s debate, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, argued that political debate is
“a free and open encounter”—[Official Report, 25/6/26; col. 820.]
in which truth will always emerge victorious, regardless of the channels of influence available to, for example, Elon Musk, as opposed to the ordinary citizen. In his speech, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, denounced
“the absurd and dangerous Rycroft review … which was written … to justify unnecessary and authoritarian solutions.”.—[Official Report, 25/6/26; col. 808.]
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, decried
“self-righteous campaigns against foreign actors”—[Official Report, 25/6/26; col. 816.]
as an effort by the establishment to distract the public from what she sees as the real reasons for public discontent.
Both the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, regard the BBC as a greater threat to democracy. All three dismissed the impact of money on politics. Yet all of us who have been involved in democratic elections know from painful experience how important financial resources are. Money on its own does not win elections if candidates are poor and messages weak, as Reform has been discovering. But effective campaigns carry costs. When one side is richly funded and the other is skint, campaigns are not an open and fair contest.
My Lords, I have learned much from the debate so far, and we will learn a lot from the speeches still to come. It is a particular pleasure to speak after the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. I am conscious that I am somewhat outside my comfort zone in speaking today, and so I will speak principally as a voter. I vote assiduously in local elections; I used to vote assiduously in European parliamentary elections, but alas no more, and I would vote assiduously in general elections were I allowed to do so. I hope the Minister will tell us what plans the Government have to enable Peers to vote in general elections in future.
The need to tighten up the present arrangements for political party financing is clear, as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has said. In 2020, when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, the Law Commission reported:
“The current laws governing elections should be rationalised into a single, consistent legislative framework”.
In April 2026, under the present Prime Minister, the Rycroft review recommended that there should be an annual cap on donations from British donors living abroad, a moratorium on donations in crypto assets, and that political parties’ ability to monitor donations and deal with the threat of foreign financial interference should be strengthened. That is all very sensible, and I am glad that some of the Rycroft report’s recommendations will be included in amendments to the Representation of the People Bill. Can the Minister update us on the progress of that important Bill and on proposals to strengthen the Electoral Commission, whose role in monitoring and enforcing the present system is crucial?
It strikes me that, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has said, this is all becoming quite urgent. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, has rightly spoken of the importance of trust in our political system and in our political parties. The Electoral Commission’s annual public opinion tracker shows that 14% of the British public thinks that political party financing is transparent. Without transparency there is no trust, and without trust we will see the rise of parties on the extremes and a dangerous lack of public confidence in our democracy, so we need reforms soon.
My Lords, I welcome this debate into this important matter, but more to help put the record straight than to add further fuel to the misconception about how mainstream political parties raise funds. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, raised some extremely important points, but the situations he illustrated were criminal acts in my view. The law is clear; it is the enforcement that is the problem.
With the exception of my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley, I think I have been involved in party fundraising for probably longer than anyone in this House. I see it as my duty to encourage people to support my party. Indeed, when asked by people from other persuasions if they should donate to their cause, I always encourage that too. I do not have an interest to register. I have stopped raising money for the Conservative Party for the time being—I am afraid I found I had run out of friends and people were crossing the road to avoid me.
In all my time as a treasurer, as chairman and as vice-chairman for finance for the last 15 or so years, I was never—not once—asked to influence something in exchange for a donation. All our donors wanted, and sadly seldom got, were basic conservative principles put to work in government. I see some union Barons opposite; they probably feel the same way about their own contributions. It is a totally incorrect idea that there is a nefarious influence, either from home or abroad. In fact, everyone involved in funding whom I dealt with in the Conservative Party was absolutely petrified that they might break the rules in some way.
What these debates and sentiments end up doing is building further on the myth that giving to a political party is somehow a bad act. We in this House should actually be making it easier to donate, with less friction, and, frankly, it should be more applauded. Noble Lords worry about the potential for Elon Musk to make huge donations, but that is illegal for him as a foreign citizen from a foreign entity. In fact, it would be worse for us if mainstream parties cannot raise enough money to take their messages out to the electorates and are superseded by fringe parties instead.
“protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties”—
an aim shared, I am sure, by all of us from whichever party or none. Trust in politics, Parliament, our system of government and lawmaking is crucial for the maintenance of democracy. Sadly, such trust has declined and we need action to restore it.
Money is one element. Donations to political parties have a whiff of buying influence or access, whether the money comes from companies or wealthy individuals. I say “wealthy” because it is big money that concerns people, not the purchase of £20 of raffle tickets, which, yes, we still do. The Government have taken action and, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Maude, I am delighted that the Rycroft review recommended a cap on donation from non-residents. It has been mentioned by other noble Lords. Most in the House will know that I have raised this issue ever since the previous Government extended from 15 years to life the period in which those who have left our shores but still have a UK passport can remain on the electoral roll. I welcome the cap, though I still cannot understand how someone who pays no tax here and does not use our services or contribute to our economy or to civil society should be able to fund a political party. They have no skin in the game, so why are they influencing our politics by financing a party’s ability to campaign and win?
My Lords, it is very good that we are having this discussion today; I want to raise two issues. The first is the role of the Electoral Commission and the second is the composition of the electoral register.
On the first, I cannot entirely agree with the general approval of the direction of travel of the Electoral Commission in recent years. I worry that we are creating another quango, as we have previously in other areas, that in day-to-day practice is relatively unaccountable. We have touched on the reporting arrangements that were originally brought in for the Electoral Commission when it was created. There is not real accountability to the Speaker’s Committee; it is a financial scrutiny loop, really. Of course, the Speaker’s Committee has a government majority on it. That is why the Government that I was briefly a part of changed this in 2022, so that there was at least some attempt to pay due regard to broader strategic priorities in this area. It seems that we are now going to change this back.
The problem is that somebody has to decide how the Electoral Commission acts. If it is not proper accountability from outsiders, then it is the permanent bureaucracy that runs it. The permanent bureaucracy is not, in my view, neutral, and has a very strong worldview in these areas. We saw that on the Electoral Commission during the Brexit period when the commission went after people without properly understanding its own rules, putting individuals through the wringer. We saw it—I say this at the risk of distressing the noble Lord, Lord Wallace—in the highly contentious and political recommendations in some areas of the Rycroft review. We see it in some of the actions of the Electoral Commission even today. I do not think it should be a semi-political actor and I do not think its head should be a political figure, but that is what is beginning to happen. I happen to agree with the comments by the head of the commission a few months back:
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The seriousness of the situation means a lot of questions must be answered. The nation has rightful questions over the short money, the policy development grants, the money raised for the ring-fenced funds that have disappeared, and simply the money of the members of the SNP. To the extent that funds have been improperly used, restitution must be made. The Electoral Commission is the regulator of political finance and I expect it to play a public and leading role in the process, but a parliamentary investigation also is more than warranted. I ask the Minister: do the Government intend to be fully supportive of any Westminster or other parliamentary inquiry to look at this very serious matter?
The other recent situation that has been so damaging to our trust has been the saga of the £5 million and Nigel Farage. Mr Farage announced in March 2021 that he was
“stepping back from front-line politics”.
Christopher Harborne, who had been a major supporter of Reform UK Party Ltd, gave Mr Farage £5 million in early 2024. Subsequently, in mid-2024, Mr Farage stepped back into “front-line politics” in time to be elected as the MP for Clacton-on-Sea. He says that there was no need for him to report the £5 million gift to anyone. The trouble with this account of affairs is that Reform Party UK Ltd is a company, and during the relevant period there were three directors: Richard Tice, Mehrtash Azami and Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage therefore never stepped back from politics. He is a very strong personality and he sat on the small central board of his party at all the relevant times. I imagine his lawyers are fighting very hard to get him off on a technicality, but morally at least he is in the wrong.
The vital thing where any regulator is concerned is to ensure that they have the correct powers, the correct duties and the correct level of resources. The Electoral Commission is rather a new body, born in 2001 following the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, or PPERA. It came to life in what was already a very large and very complicated field and canon of electoral law. In the intervening years since 2001, there have been several Acts of Parliament which have amended PPERA and several carefully thought-through reports pointing to a direction of simplifying and strengthening matters. I will briefly mention one or two of the key ones.
The Law Commission produced a 230-page report on electoral law in 2020. Although this was not so much about political funding, it picked up strongly on the theme of needing to simplify things. There were 106 recommendations. Recommendation 1 was:
“The current laws governing elections should be rationalised into a single, consistent legislative framework governing all elections”.
As we settle down to a 27th Representation of the People Bill later this year, I for one will recall this simple wisdom.
The Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by our own noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, published Regulating Election Financein 2021. This report, with its 47 recommendations, said at recommendation 1:
“The government should bring forward a bill to simplify and consolidate electoral law”.
That is the second respectable institution making the same powerful and obviously correct point.
Last year, in July, the Government produced a policy paper, Restoring Trust in our Democracy. The sponsoring Minister was Angela Rayner. This, essentially, was the trailing document for the Representation of the People Bill announced in the latest King’s Speech. There is, however, no mention of a consolidation Bill. I ask the Minister to comment on that.
In March this year, we had the welcome Rycroft review, which was aimed particularly at the difficult issue of foreign money. The Government’ response to this review was given in the House of Commons Chamber orally the day the review was published. It was most positive on the review and announced that there would be a ban on cryptocurrency and a donations cap of £100,000 for overseas voters. Can the Minister clarify exactly how these proposals will be brought forward? It is easy to see how the trust of the electorate can be in question when the legal environment is so complex and so unclear, and when institutions such as the Law Commission and the Committee on Standards in Public Life recommend major and logical change.
Before I close, I must set out at least some of the major areas where change would help, apart from a simple consolidation Bill. The first would be to decriminalise offences that are essentially administrative in nature. This would allow fines and enforcement notices to replace the full force of the criminal law. Regulators would no longer need to bother hard-pressed police to pursue wrongdoers, creating a much speedier and proportionate regime, as in most of the rest of regulated life.
Secondly, maximum fines are too low. The maximum fine for a breach of political finance law is £20,000 today, and that was set in 2009. For the special regime set up for the Scottish referendum, it was £500,000, which I suggest is a more proportionate number.
Thirdly, the Electoral Commission is today limited as to how it can give and receive information with other agencies and organisations. Most other regulators have statutory regimes that allow for this to happen, and the Electoral Commission needs to be put in a similar place. These things and others, I suspect, will be part of our work as a Chamber on the 27th Representation of the People Bill.
In closing, I return to the importance of trust in all of our institutions and in the people who work within them. As I survey the scene, I feel that the position is most unsatisfactory, and we owe it to ourselves and our citizens to be better here. The Electoral Commission must have greater legal clarity on its duties and powers. It must have sufficient resource to be able, as an independent body, to give confidence to us all in this difficult area of political finance. We will have an interesting debate and I look forward to every speech. In the meantime, I beg to move.
In my short contribution, I think it is important that we move quickly on developing still further, and reinforcing, citizenship and democracy in our schools and colleges. As the new Representation of the People Bill indicates, we will be asked to approve that 16 and 17 year-olds can vote in general elections. It is beholden on us to make sure that they understand how our constitution works—in fact, it is beholden on all of us to take a good cool look at how our constitution works. We are not a presidency. We elect a Parliament, and Parliament then selects and puts forward a Prime Minister Only in circumstances with complicated PR would a situation arise where there would have to be a general election, because the parties that had colluded in deciding who should be the Prime Minister would have to have changed. Therefore, the suggestion at the moment that a change in Prime Minister should automatically result in a general election is a misunderstanding of how our democracy actually works.
Today, it is beholden on us to send a message to the House of Commons to get on with bringing forward the Bill, to complete Report and allow us to scrutinise it, and, above all, to look to the future, not the past.
There was a very good reason, first set out by Sir Winston Churchill in the late 1940s, why parties should treat these matters very carefully. If a Government are seen to be using their position to advantage themselves and disadvantage their competitors, that can trigger a tit-for-tat approach, because no party has a lifetime hold on power. At various stages during the 2005 Parliament, and during discussions that took place subsequently in the coalition Government, the approach that Jack Straw and I took was that which the then Labour Party was strongly committed to. All of this was approached by seeking consensus wherever possible. I strongly urge the Minister to take this message back to his colleagues in the other place, because this is a dangerous path.
American democracy is providing us with a test case in the importance of money in politics. The Supreme Court’s ruling against congressional limits on political donations opened the sluice gates for donors to try to buy candidates. The sums of money now involved in congressional elections are eye-watering. A presidential campaign costs more than the GDP of several members of the UN. That brings with it corruption, and foreign interference. The Republican Party and the think tanks which drive its agenda have been captured by ultra-wealthy individuals and companies which resist progressive taxation and government regulation and often deny climate change and the impact of their products on human health.
Growing inequality between the extremely wealthy and the ordinary citizen exacerbates this distortion of democratic debate. Wealthy British expatriates who avoid paying tax but nevertheless want similarly to reshape British politics aim to change the balance of public debate in this country. The flow of private money from ultra-wealthy sources in America is now a greater threat to free and open debate in Britain than money flowing from Russia, China or—until the recent elections—Hungary. That money flows into third-party campaigns and partisan think tanks as well as political parties, and we will need to look at that.
So far as I understood last week’s speech from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, he sees the ultra-wealthy as better able to understand and support the real wishes of ordinary voters than government, or what he calls the “British political class”. I am not sure whether that makes him an anarchist or an illiberal democrat, which is to say, an authoritarian in the style of Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump. I believe in liberal democracy and in creating, so far as possible, a level playing field for all contending opinion in public debate and, in particular, in political campaigns. For that, we need a trusted Electoral Commission with sufficient powers to punish those who break the rules.
I hope that the Conservative Front Bench will admit the error it made in government in attempting to limit the independence of the commission and enormously increase campaign spending limits. Wealth piles up on one side of politics—which is not, whatever the noble Lord, Lord Frost, believes, the side of the poor or the left behind. Money is a vital aspect of political campaigning, but massive flows of money pollute politics and endanger democratic debate, and we must use the forthcoming scrutiny of the Representation of the People Bill to regulate that flow more tightly.
There are alternative ways of funding political parties. France, Germany and Spain all permit public funding under certain conditions, and to do so here would not be especially innovative. There is already Short money and the policy development grants scheme, and there is free TV airtime for party-political broadcasts. None the less, I know the outcry that further public funding of political parties might cause. One can imagine the response of the Daily Mail if it were proposed by the Labour Party, and of the Daily Mirror if it were proposed by the Conservative Party. But if the choice is between the continuation of the present system, with all its failings, on the one hand, and public funding effectively monitored by the Electoral Commission on the other, I would not, as a taxpayer, self-evidently choose the former.
I therefore hope that all three political parties, in responding to this debate, will make clear their absolute commitment to reformed and properly monitored political party funding arrangements that will still arguments for extended public funding.
The proposals for enhancing the powers of the Electoral Commission have some merit, though. The reducing of certain classes of offence, as has been mentioned, to a civil matter is eminently sensible. The fear of good people acting as election agents or some village tombola raising a few hundred pounds should not be a matter for the police where genuine mistakes are made. This is a good move for our politics. I applaud the current leadership of the Electoral Commission for its very sensible approach to proportionality, which we should always bear in mind.
What I would recommend is probably a bit contentious on my own side, but it is quite simple: we should impose a cap—I have said this consistently—on donations from any individual. It could be £100,000, £50,000 or £75,000—whatever it is can be discussed. We should, at the same time, raise the threshold of reporting to a higher level, maybe £20,000, under which only a record should be kept, and remove small fundraising events entirely from the onerous rules which reduced the level of local activity in politics. No one person should be able to buy a political party, but many people should be encouraged to engage at a sensible level and not be hounded for it. Unless we do these things, we will further denigrate our system at a huge cost to our security and future.
I also think to some extent this should relate to the unions. I am very careful, and I do not like the political manoeuvring that tries to limit the power of unions to donate, because the Conservative Party has a foundation, which is also an aggregation of donations, which is a very important part of our funding. We should be aware of where influence is directed, and to suggest that the unions do not have direct policy-making power is absurd. Indeed, they have been championed in terms of how they have selected the new leader of the Labour Party and, potentially, the new Prime Minister. In any debate we should be very open about that because what we want is transparency. If we have transparency, we will have faith in politics.
At the end of the day, we are missing a key point here. The real issue is to confront the fact that we now have, in this Parliament, MPs elected not on national issues but on narrow sectarian issues based on communities abroad. We have serious issues of voter fraud, family voting, intimidation of candidates and people’s trust in our elections is declining fast. We are so worried that a rich American might give some money to Restore that we are totally missing the point about where we should be directing our attention. The people trying to influence our politics from abroad are not donating to the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats. They are running their operations from abroad in order to influence voting intentions here. We are entirely missing the point if we think that it is about donations to parties.
We should use this debate not to spend our time limiting and controlling but to find ways to enlarge the support bases of our mainstream parties, showing the country that donating to a political party is a good thing, and using our powers here to encourage people to step forward and become a more meaningful part of our democracy. The alternative is state funding of political parties, which we can neither afford and I do not think we should support.
We have already heard from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and my noble friend Lord Blunkett about the enormous amounts of money paid to Reform by people who no longer live here. I think some of them are based in Thailand and elsewhere. That money from people who do not live here—they may have a British passport—is not good for politics or our democracy. Further than that, how can we check on the bona fides of overseas donors in a sort of “know your donor” requirement? Where did they get the money from that they are going to contribute? Is it their own or has it come from a non-permitted donor? Is the donor even alive or in prison? Are they working for another Government? It may be that they are, quite legitimately, but does it not feel a bit odd that they are then funding our political parties? How will the Electoral Commission, or any individual party, police these donations and undertake due diligence, either on the person or on the source of their money?
Furthermore, how effective in terms of democracy is a cap of £100,000 a year per person? Over a five-year Parliament, a couple could give £500,000 each. That is £1 million per Parliament from an expat couple, who may not have lived here for decades and may have no intention of returning. I hope that, when the Bill arrives here, I and others in the House can persuade my Government to reduce this cap to £10,000 a year, or else make donations possible only for those who are registered for tax in the United Kingdom.
My second ask of the Government is to support my Private Member’s Bill, which will have its Second Reading tomorrow. This would require any person or organisation lobbying a Minister or Permanent Secretary to be on the register of lobbyists and report such meetings. It is not a lot to ask, and it is what virtually all our equivalent democracies do. I am an old lobbyist, so I have no problem with the practice. In fact, I think when I was lobbying on behalf of Alcohol Concern, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, was arguing exactly the other case on behalf of the Scotch Whisky Association. It is quite right that we both did that, but surely that should be out in the open, because many lobbying approaches are from people with money behind them. Good government means listening to everyone affected by policies or legislation, but it should not be in secret. We should be able to see who has the ear of government.
I finish by thanking the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for his introduction, particularly his opening bits about Scotland. It is bad for the whole of the United Kingdom what has happened in one part of it.
“As a matter of principle, we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long planned elections”,
but I do not think it is his job to be rebuking the elected Government in these highly political areas. There are real risks here.
The only thing that would be worse than government direction of the commission would be the commission becoming a player itself. It should be an umpire, not a player. The head of an electoral regulator carries automatic media authority. When he pronounces on contested questions, he lends the weight of officialdom to one side of a live political argument. Public confidence depends on visible restraint by the Electoral Commission. I worry that the powers that we are about to give it will push it in the opposite direction.
On my second point, on the electoral register, we all believe and often say that you must be a British citizen to be able to donate to a political party—Ministers often say this. Actually, it is not true. The condition is that you have to be on the electoral register. As we know, the electoral register includes many qualifying Commonwealth citizens, and indeed Irish citizens, resident here, so the right to bankroll a British political party in fact goes rather further. The real problem is not the donation issue itself, but the absurdity in the first place of having large numbers of non-British citizens on our electoral register. I must say that, when I have written and spoken on this subject, I find that people are incredulous—they literally cannot believe that you do not have to be a British citizen to be on the UK electoral register.
The scale is not marginal; it almost certainly runs to the millions. The Electoral Commission itself holds no record of it, but we can estimate it. In the 2021 census, there were 1 million adults here holding only a Commonwealth passport. That figure has plausibly doubled, at least, since then. The Electoral Commission’s own report in 2023 found that 66% of eligible Commonwealth citizens in Great Britain were registered to vote. This is not even properly policed. Zimbabwe withdrew from the Commonwealth in 2003 yet, more than 20 years on, its nationals can still register to vote because Parliament never amended the relevant schedule to the nationality Act.
This is not a new problem. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, recommended in 2008 that the rules should be changed to establish a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote and donate. That has never been taken up. This is the real scandal. If we are really worried about foreign influence in our politics, we need to stop foreign citizens voting. If people want to vote in our country, they need to commit to our country and become citizens. This anomaly has lasted too long and it should be ended.