Why can’t the Lib Dems tell the truth about party funding?

Today the Lobbying Bill starts its journey into the Lords. It’s symptomatic of this tawdry bill that it was sent on its way with one last, blatant, untruth from Nick Clegg. Last Tuesday the DPM told the Commons:

“The parts on third party campaigning were discussed extensively by the three parties in the cross-party funding talks.”

Lord Tyler repeated the same claim that the cross-party talks ‘did actually make real progress about this particular problem’. I led for Labour on these talks . These statements are not only untrue, they are a bizarre distortion of what actually happened in the talks.

It was the Labour team more than any other which consistently raised the problem of third party funding. We were pushing for the lower possible cap on donations but insisted that a cap would be of limited value if the money just spilled out into other forms of lobbying.

But – and this is the crucial point – there were no substantive talks on third party funding at all. Far from discussing the current proposals ‘extensively’ they were never raised, never proposed and never discussed. Indeed, we all agreed that the issues were so difficult and so complex that they lay beyond our powers to examine and resolve them. It was clear that a separate piece of work would be necessary.

Despite what Nick Clegg and Lord Tyler has claimed, the cross-party talks were remarkably frank and constructive.  The talks did not break down. E-mail exchanges of drafts of an agreed set of principles were continuing when Clegg unilaterally called the talks off without any consultation with other political parties (or apparently his own negotiating team).

To claim that there were ‘extensive discussions’ or ‘real progress made’ on third party funding is just wrong, and Nick Clegg knows it. His inability to be honest about the party funding talks as a whole  has already done a great deal to erode the genuine trust that had been developed between the representatives of the three parties. He  should not now be allowed to make more false claims in support of the Lobbying Bill.