On Monday and Wednesday of this week, the Lords debated the “Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill” which I have covered many times on this blog. After 6 weeks ‘consultation’ the bill returned to the Lords, for the Committee stage with a whole string of amendments, attempts by the Lords to correct failings and weaknesses in the legislation that had been passed by the House of Commons. It is clear that this Bill will be remembered by MPs and many within the Lords for a long time to come, whatever its outcome. Various MPs have admitted that this has generated far more correspondence than most other Bills. Sadly some MPs are treating the organised campaigns by groups such as 38 Degrees as though they were damaging democracy, rather than understanding that such campaigns may actually be attempts to reinvigorate democracy.

The idea that a petition would help inform our Government was begun by Tony Blair and has been repeated by Prime Ministers since. Sadly they have each proven less inclined to respond to Change.Org petitions than the ones on the Governement website, and even these are ignored a great deal of the time. Our Parliament wants its cake, but they want to have eaten it too. They wanted to be elected (or in many constituencies take this completely for granted) by citizens, but then once elected they are often offended by people trying to gain representation for anything more than personal issues that can be dealt with through a few letters or by making comments in the House of Commons. Many MPs appear to have no real appetite for engaging with constituents, when those constituents are making their views known, and when those views are contrary to those of the MP, particularly where the constituent has the naïve view that their views might be counted in the Palace of Westminster

In the Lords, despite a significant number of amendments to the lobbying bill being tabled, it was made clear that in some cases, the Government would simply not support the changes, and in others that work was already underway to address the issue being proposed in the amendment. With these rejections and reassurances, the Bill has now passed through the committee stage in the Lords, and with Christmas, will resume its passage in the Lords with the Report Stage, beginning on the 13th January. There is plenty of opportunity for further changes to be made as it goes through the Report Stage.

If the Committee Stage did not add any substantive changes to the lobbying Bill, it did reveal a few nuggets of value.

The first was from someone attempting to make a distinction between charities that are not primarily concerned with winning elections and Political Parties:

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab): We are professionals in a party. It is our job to run elections. That is the whole point that we are making. It is core to us; it is what we are trained for. I ran European elections. We know about it; we train our agents; we have the systems and have our computers set up for that; and we know ward boundaries and constituency boundaries. Here we are talking about different organisations that are here to help people with a drink problem, people in poverty and people who are going to be affected by the bedroom tax. They do not get trained in the way that we do.

I am reassured that the Baroness sees the distinction, as I do, but rather disturbed at the way in which she presents political parties. This surely raises a matter of professionalism within our political classes, that will act as a barrier to new entrants into the world of politics, people such as Martin Bell, pictured above. A further element which came later in the debate was regarding the public funding of Political Parties:

Lord Marland: Before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps I could reiterate what I said earlier. The state gives political parties £7 million a year. Does he not agree that, because he did not know that himself, this has not been transparently demonstrated to the world at large—and that the proposition in the amendment is much more transparent than what currently exists?

It is clear that our public support of this professional class of Politician, to the tune of £7M a year creates an immense barrier to ordinary voices being heard except through the filter of Political Parties. No wonder so many are turning to agencies such as 38 Degrees!