Electoral Commission

Peter Bone Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the shadow Minister and the Leader of the House. I have concerns about today’s motion. Hopefully, the Leader of the House will be able to reassure me in his closing remarks. This is a very important appointment. There are only 10 electoral commissioners, and they have, overall, five different strategic reasons for being there. The most important, perhaps, is to set the overall strategic direction of the commission, to ensure delivery of its strategic goals, and to ensure public confidence in democracy.

As the Leader of the House rightly said, the process was started way back last year, and many things have changed since that process began. If the Electoral Commission had widespread support, a routine appointment of another electoral commissioner would be no problem. I fear that both the Leader of the House and the shadow Minister are treating it in that respect. I have a great deal of personal experience of dealing with the Electoral Commission, before and during the 2016 EU referendum. Since the appointment process started, there has been a huge amount of criticism of the Electoral Commission, and we do not know what Mr Attwood’s views on the proposed changes are.

I have absolutely no criticism of Mr Attwood. I do not know him, but his CV looks very good and he beat the Liberal Democrat and Plaid Cymru nominees for the post, but he is joining an organisation that is in serious trouble. As the shadow Minister referred to, one of the criteria was: “How are you going to deal with hostile criticism?” I wonder why the Electoral Commission had that as such an important point. It could be because it is not fit for purpose; it is an awful organisation.

What struck me as strange about this Humble Address was the length of time of the appointment. Nominated commissioners for the smaller parties are usually given only a two-year term. This motion calls for a three-year term. Nowhere in the report from the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission can I see why it changed it, and I notice that the Leader of the House did not explain why there was this change. It would seem to me, given the state of affairs in the Electoral Commission, that the term should have been shorter.

I am not seeking to block Mr Attwood’s appointment; I am just seeing whether the Leader of the House will consider withdrawing the motion and appointing Mr Attwood for a shorter period. I will explain why I think that is essential. I also hope that the Leader of the House will be able to answer some of the questions that I would have liked to pose to Mr Attwood personally, because the House needs to know his views on certain things to do with the Electoral Commission to see whether he is the right person to set its goals.

As the Leader of the House said, it is up to the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission how it makes its appointment of an electoral commissioner. It could, before this stage, have recommended pre-appointment scrutiny, perhaps via the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and the questions I am posing now could have been posed then. I understand that if we were appointing the chairman of the Electoral Commission, the Committee may well have gone for a pre-appointment hearing, but we have not had one on this occasion, so I am going to have to press on with the questions I would have liked to ask.

The process outlined by the Leader of the House was exactly how it happened, and it is recorded in the sixth report of the Speaker’s Committee. But of course, that Committee meets in private, so we do not really know what the thinking is about the Electoral Commission. We do know, however, that the Speaker’s Committee has rejected the application for the existing chairman to have a new term of office, which I would have thought implied some criticism of the way the Commission has been run. I think that the situation is so grave, and what the Electoral Commission has done is so wicked, that I want to know what Mr Attwood’s views are on certain things.

I mentioned the fact that PACAC was looking into the looking into the Electoral Commission. In fact, it is a wide-ranging inquiry that started sometime last year, and there are eight areas that the Committee is looking into. The third area asks whether the remit of the Electoral Commission should be changed. The sixth covers public and political confidence in the impartiality and ability of the Electoral Commission, and the eighth asks what, if any, reform to the Electoral Commission should be considered. I would like to know whether those points were put to Mr Attwood and what his answers were.

I also think it is unfair to Mr Attwood to appoint him for three years when he does not know what he is actually going to be appointed to. I have no doubt that PACAC will recommend massive changes to, if not the abolition of, the Electoral Commission, yet he is being appointed for three years to something that could be completely different after only a few months. I hope that the Leader of the House can tell us what will happen if the Electoral Commission is abolished later this summer. I understand that the Committee is likely to report during the summer.

I suppose the question I would have most wanted to ask, and which I hope the Leader of the House can shed some light on, involves the wicked behaviour, political corruption and nastiness of how the Electoral Commission dealt with people who were involved in the details of the 2016 referendum. It has been widely reported, and it will not come as any surprise to the House, that the Electoral Commission tried to persecute people who were heads of the leave campaign—the directors of legal organisations, like myself. I was a director and founder of Grassroots Out, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove). There was widespread coverage of this, and perhaps the most well known and vicious attack was on Mr Arron Banks. In the end, the Electoral Commission had to fight a law case and lose. During that period, Mr Banks suffered malicious attacks in the media. His reputation was damaged: commercially, bank accounts were closed because of the ongoing investigation, and press leaks from the Commission occurred. This was done by the Electoral Commission, whose electoral commissioners are responsible for its actions, yet they used the power of the state, the money of the state, to persecute people who had headed up leave campaigns. I would like to ask Mr Attwood what his view is on that and what he would do in future to stop it happening again.

The area that has not got much coverage, and should have done, is the position of what was called the responsible person. Every leave campaign had a responsible person. I will just mention four of them. For Grassroots Out, it was Mr Richard Murphy; for Better for the Country, it was Liz Bilney; for BeLeave, it was Darren Grimes; and for Vote Leave, it was Alan Halsall. They were threatened with prosecution. Their names were rubbished. Their professional reputations were attacked. They had to endure the worst of malicious state treatment. The money that the Electoral Commission could use in legal fees was endless, yet the individuals had to fight back. They had no support. Quite often the Electoral Commission would demand lengthy explanations of things and give a very short timescale to reply, and it then got months and months to come back. It was disgraceful.

I joined the Conservative party when I was 15, so I have now been in local and national politics for more than 50 years. Often I have disagreed with things and often I have been upset about things—very upset, quite often, by things my own party did—but at no time did I think there was an organisation that was maliciously undermining the democratic process and attacking individuals because of their political views. Let us remember this: the responsible people are not politicians. They are not the Peter Bones or the Arron Bankses; they are just people who want to be involved in the political process and have knowledge of how to do campaign returns. Anyone who thinks the Electoral Commission treated those people fairly either has no idea of what happened or is not telling the truth.

Many of these people had their health severely damaged, their reputations tarnished, and their finances destroyed by having to raise thousands and thousands of pounds to fight the Electoral Commission. Every time, those people won, and not a single one of them was ever charged with anything. They were honest, decent people who were attacked by the state through the Electoral Commission. I want to know from Mr Attwood what he thinks about that, and what the other commissioners think, when we get a chance to debate this. It really was the most disgusting thing that I have ever seen a state organisation do.

We should be immensely proud of the referendum and the debate that surrounded it. It was the greatest exercise in democracy in this country. Whether you were on the leave side or the remain side, it was a great debate. From my point of view, as I said, I formed Grassroots Out. I did not know at the time that Richard Murphy, who was put there to look after the paperwork and everything relating to the requirements of the Electoral Commission, would be in such a terrible, terrible state because of the Electoral Commission—and the electoral commissioners did nothing to stop it.

I put on this rather garish GO tie to show the extent that we went to to comply with the rules. I doubt if anyone else in the country has a tie that has an imprint on the back of it with Richard Murphy’s name on it. That is because we were assiduous in making sure that we did everything right. We went to the Electoral Commission’s buildings when we registered—we went throughout the process. We filled in its pre-poll reports. We broke off campaigning to deal with some return or other it wanted at the last minute during the campaign. My hon. Friend the Member for Corby and I toured the UK, going up and down the country, talking to people and having three meetings a day, but we would break off, if necessary, to deal with the Electoral Commission.

When we finished the campaign, we did the return, which was not that complicated; we had spent a few hundred thousand pounds, which was way under any limit that we could possibly have broken. Being a chartered accountant, I looked at the paperwork we were submitting and it was fine, but we took the extra precaution of going to the Electoral Commission’s offices—I, Richard Murphy and my hon. Friend the Member for Corby—where we went through the return line by line before we submitted it. We said, “Is there anything wrong with this? If there is, we will go back and check it.” It was given the all clear, but months later we are dragged through months and months of an inquiry by a commission whose only reason to do it was that they hated leave campaigners. Instead of being at the heart of the democratic process, encouraging democracy, the commission did exactly the reverse. I would like to know from Mr Attwood how he is going to restore trust in democracy for any future referendum. I would bet a few pounds that none of the responsible people in the EU referendum would take the job on again—I could not advise anyone to do it. They do the work and do it properly, and do not get paid for it, but then the state organisations use all the power of the state; first, it does the regulation, then it does the inspection, and then it becomes the jury and judge and executioner. That cannot be right.

Mr Attwood, I want to know what you think about the reforms necessary to bring confidence back to the Electoral Commission. It may well be that it has to be abolished and that the culture in the Electoral Commission is so wicked, bad and unfair that it has to be scrapped and we have to start again. I fear that we are appointing a commissioner to carry on in the same old way, for a three-year term. It must be clear to everyone that there is not cross-party support for the Electoral Commission and it has lost the support of people. This is not party political; Conservatives, Labour members, United Kingdom Independence party members and people of no party all found themselves being persecuted by this organisation. It is a disgrace. It spends more than £15 million of our money each year. So if Mr Attwood was standing there now, I would say, “What are you going to do about all this?” It may well be that he could give me the answers and I would be able to support him, but this system does not stand the test of scrutiny. I hope the Leader of the House will be able to reassure me on these things when he answers, but I doubt it.

In 2016, we had a revolution. It was not a bloody one; it was a democratic revolution. It changed our relationship with Europe peacefully. More people voted in that referendum than ever before. The Electoral Commission should be helping and encouraging a repeat of that in the future. Its wicked persecution of responsible people after the referendum is a disgrace. I have nothing against Mr Attwood personally, but I think we are being put in a very difficult situation tonight; we are being asked to ask Her Majesty to appoint him as an electoral commissioner when we do not know the views.