Cat Smith

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. His APPG sounds very interesting. I am sure that those on the Front Bench heard those points, and I agree with them. In my remaining time, I want to address the need to protect our democracy from foreign interference. In cleaning up politics, we need to address specific weaknesses identified. There is a very good blog by Professor Alan Renwick at the University College London constitution unit, which I would love to quote from, but my time is quite limited. He highlights that while the Bill introduces stricter eligibility criteria for company donors, there are still huge gaps regarding cryptocurrency and the potential for illicit funds to bypass traditional checks. We should be bold enough to start talking about a donation cap, too. There is no plausible argument against introducing caps on political donations to prevent a small number of wealthy people from exerting disproportionate influence. The changes made in the last piece of legislation that went through this House on electoral law have left a huge vulnerability. That legislation abolished the 15-year rule we used to have, whereby citizens who had lived outside the UK for 15 years or longer lost the right to vote and to donate to UK politics. When that rule was abolished, there was no way for elections officers in councils up and down the country to verify that people claiming to have lived at an address in another constituency in 1976 actually did so, because those records were not kept past 15 years, as of course there was no point. Now, there are permissible donors to the UK electoral system who claim to have lived in the UK, and we have no way of proving whether they did. That is a huge vulnerability, and I urge those on the Front Bench to look again at that, and at closing that potential back door that we have left open to foreign money interfering in UK politics. We are an outlier in having this rule; in the Republic of Ireland, for instance, those who leave the country lose the right to vote after one year. I would like to finish by saying that many colleagues have made the case for proportional representation, and this Bill would have been a great opportunity to set up a commission to look at all the different options that would be available to make sure that people feel that their vote counts, and that there is no such thing as a wasted vote.