New Clause 23
Political Parties and Elections Bill
3:45 pm
David Howarth (Shadow Solicitor General, Ministry of Justice; Cambridge, Liberal Democrat)
Further to that point of order, Sir Nicholas. I would like to add my thanks, especially to you, Sir Nicholas, and to the other hon. Members who chaired the Committee. You have chaired the Committee in your usual exemplary fashion and I always enjoy serving under your chairmanship. I also thank the Minister for the open spirit with which he has approached the debate, and the Opposition for providing many hours of amusement, of one sort or another.
We have not made good progress, I am afraid to say. We have not reached a large number of clauses. More than that, we have not reached what are the central issues for many hon. Members and many members of the public. We have not debated properly the issue of party expenditure at the national and local level, although we almost got to it at the end of the previous debate. We have not debated caps on donations. We had a few moments on that earlier today, but we did not reach the new clause on it. We did not debate properly how to deal with foreign ownership of corporations—again, we had a few words on that—and we did not debate in any detail how to implement the other aspect of the Hayden Phillips compromise: dealing in a fair way with the relationship between the unions and the Labour party. I hope that those issues will be given priority on Report. We must show the public that we understand that those are the issues that matter for what the Bill must be about, which is getting big money out of politics and cleaning up politics.
To finish on a happier note, the spirit of the Committee has been very positive, and I hope that we will take the Bill onwards in that spirit.