Emily Thornberry

No, I have only got two minutes. Come on! People should just pay their taxes and get involved. New clause 86 proposes that a donor would have to be a total citizen. It is not enough to come back to Britain and go, “Oh well, I’m here now. I’m going to pay a little bit of tax because there are various tax dodges and I can do that.” No, they have to be here paying their full whack of taxes, and then they can make donations to political parties. If they care so much about Britain and about democracy, they should come here and be a full citizen, in my opinion. My new clause 84 relates to descriptions on ballot papers. At the moment, instead of having just “the Labour party” on the ballot paper, it is possible to have “the Labour party, the party of equality and fairness”—fair enough. However, at the last local elections, the Greens registered candidates with the Electoral Commission as “first choice candidate” or “lead candidate”, so that, in an election with three votes, there was an instruction on the ballot paper as to who someone should vote for. That is an abuse, and it should be stopped. That is what that new clause is about. New clause 87 is about ballot papers always being in alphabetical order. I speak as a T. My constituents had to look very hard to find me, and fortunately they did, but when we vote in alphabetical order, the Ts are at the far end—and there were hardly any of us. It is definitely an advantage to be at the beginning of the alphabet. Why do we not have the Australian system, and just randomise it? There is so much more that we could do. Although there are rumours that a group may discuss how much more we can do, will there really be enough legislative time to bring forward another Bill that will deal with the many problems we have? My predecessor, 180 years ago, was the MP for Finsbury, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe. He brought in the massive Chartist petition—3.3 million people wanting to be allowed to vote. So many people had signed it that they had to take the doors off the Chamber to get all the bits of paper through. Presumably it did not go into the Bag behind the Chair, but there was that much enthusiasm—that was what democracy was about. I do not want to be an MP for Finsbury who sits back complacently and allows our democracy to be undermined. We have to fight back.