Lord Evans of Sealand (Lab)

My Lords, I strongly support the Bill and many of the powerful contributions noble Lords have made, which I do not propose to repeat, not least those of the noble Lord, Lord Macintosh. I look forward to his observations on the procedures of this House and how they compare with those of the Scottish Parliament. I am not going to repeat what has already been said, but will do something a little bit different. I want to address the larger question behind the Bill, why it is not enough and why we must look to ourselves to do more and to do better. Parliamentary democracy faces an existential threat from populism, of the left and the right. I spent much of my working life in the Labour Party, including as its general secretary, so let me make an unfashionable defence of mainstream political parties. Democracies cannot function without them. Parties provide essential choice for democracy. Their expertise is sometimes viewed with scepticism, even suspicion, but that expertise is essential to the fabric of our democracy and we need to speak up for ourselves more than we do. Of course we should regulate parties. We should insist on transparency and punish cheating. But we should not regard political parties themselves as the problem. In fact, they need a helping hand, because we are far from perfect. When people stop believing democratic politics can improve their lives, simple answers to complex problems become attractive. We should be careful who we blame for that. When voters abandon mainstream parties, our first question should not be, “What is wrong with them?”, as it often is. It should be: “What did we do—or fail to do—that has caused them to lose faith in us?” Politics is the art of competitive storytelling, and we must confront an uncomfortable truth: for many voters, the populists are currently telling a more compelling story than we are. Former MP Shaun Woodward, who served on both sides of the other place, was a good storyteller. He had been a producer on “That’s Life!”, a highly successful consumer programme. He once told me that pinned up in the production office was the slogan: “Always assume minimum information and maximum intelligence”. That should be a watchword for political parties. People may not know the detail of policy, but they know whether they can pay their bills, whether they feel safe and whether their children have opportunities. I applaud the work of the Electoral Commission, but I worry that its centre of gravity, generated by us, is more about stopping political parties cheating than maximising participation in our civic life. Stopping cheats is essential, but registration is not participation, and participation is not trust. For that reason, I believe removing the strategy and policy statement for the Electoral Commission is a backwards step, not an improvement. I strongly support operational independence, but independence should not mean isolation. Parliament should be able to transparently identify priorities for our democratic system, not least increasing participation. For example, when I was interrailing, nearly 50 years ago, as an 18 year-old, I was the only person in my school year to be a member of a political party. I was stunned to meet a group of young Swedes who were all members of different political parties. The reason was that they were encouraged and rewarded with points towards university entry for joining a party. It is simple. We need creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit like that to strengthen our democracy. I join others in asking my noble friend the Minister to consider requiring think tanks to report and publish information about their donations. It seems an obvious loophole. Of course, the recent £72 million donation to Reform should concern us, and it has been mentioned, but we must not mistake the symptom for the disease. Money can amplify populism and social media can accelerate it, but neither creates the original grievance. Like the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, I would like to quote Churchill. He famously described democracy as “the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1947; col. 207.] The deeper threat to that democracy is the distance mainstream parties have allowed to grow between us and the people we represent. If politics is competitive storytelling, we must tell a better story and make that story true in people’s lives. Just as we need a national conversation about defence, we need one about democracy. It is that serious. Like the Prime Minister, I hope this Bill can be the start of it. We cannot regulate our way out of a trust crisis. The responsibility for restoring that trust does not lie with voters. It belongs to us.