The lobbying bill is no 'gagging law'. Caroline Lucas is misguided

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/13/lobbying-bill-no-gagging-law-caroline-lucas

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Caroline Lucas grabbed the wrong end of the wrong stick in her diatribe on the point of the government's transparency bill. In addition, she seemed unaware of the improvements we are making in the House of Lords. This week, cross-party initiatives are set to restore its primary purpose.

The road to parliamentary hell is paved with legislative good intentions. At the outset, ministers believed the bill would be a fairly non-controversial measure, limiting the political influence of maverick millionaires in elections. It was construed very differently by people we Liberal Democrats most strongly identify with: our natural, liberal allies in the voluntary and charitable sector saw the bill as a broad assault on their freedom of speech.

Yet it has a noble purpose. The point is to prevent big money piling into constituency election campaigns, dwarfing the spending limits of candidates themselves, and effectively buying seats for rich benefactors. We have seen in the US the corrosive effect of the millions of dollars spent buying political influence. The intention here is to keep that trend firmly on the other side of the Atlantic, and ensure what non-party "Super-PAC" type spending does occur is totally transparent. Electors have a right to know who is behind powerful campaigning voices, and what money is being spent on their amplification.

Liberal Democrats have always favoured, in addition to election spending controls, a cap on donations to political parties, so that influence and access cannot be auctioned to the highest bidder. The vested interests in both Conservative and Labour parties have conspired to prevent that happening. Only progress on limiting "third party" spending on election campaigning could be made.

Following the concerns expressed about the breadth of scope this legislation could have, Liberal Democrat MPs proposed and won amendments in the Commons to offer some reassurance. And since it came to the Lords in the autumn, we have got a lot further.

Ministers propose a broad package of amendments. They will raise substantially the threshold at which non-party campaigners must register themselves with the Electoral Commission. A campaigner will now need to plan spending of £20,000 in England or £10,000 in any one of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland specifically on "promoting or procuring the electoral success of a party or candidate" before they have to register and worry at all about this law. At that point, a registered organisation will be entitled to spend up to £450,000 nationwide.

However, this week we are calling on the government to go further still. Charities cannot campaign for and against candidates or parties, because charity law precludes it. Yet they remain worried that their routine policy campaigning could be caught up by the provisions of this bill. Our view is that the simplest way to avoid this problem is for the government to accept an amendment, entirely exempting charities from electoral law. They are already regulated by the charities commissions in each part of the UK, which are fierce in their enforcement of the principle that charitable campaigning may be political but not partisan.

Unfortunately, some of our coalition partners are not persuaded to accept this simple, reassuring amendment. They maintain that there is a "narrow band" of activity that could be both charitable and at least tacitly party-political. Our judgment is that the band is so narrow as to be irrelevant.

The government has moved a long way, and no one can now seriously claim that this is a "gagging law". But this one further small step would make a big difference, and a formidable alliance of peers, across parties, will commend it to Lords on Wednesday.

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