Hain hits back at Electoral Commission
By politics.co.uk staff
Peter Hain, the Cabinet secretary forced to resign following a donations scandal, has hit back at the Electoral Commission as “incompetent” and unaccountable.
Speaking at a Commons debate on the political parties and elections bill which would ultimately reform the Commission, Mr Hain told MPs: “I do think the Electoral Commission does need to be much more accountable and needs different leadership from what it has had in the first stage of its work.
“I must say, and I won’t go into detail, I found it to be incompetent, dysfunctional and unworldly, politically.
“I just could not believe some of the things that I experienced.”
The former Welsh and work and pensions secretary did not face a police investigation because of his late declaration of donations to his deputy leadership campaign when Gordon Brown came to power, but he was found guilty of “serious” failings by the parliamentary standards authority.
“There are countless examples I could quote… about my own unhappy experience which just prove to me that the commission has very little idea about the political world that it was regulating,” he told the Commons.
“And this is not in any way to excuse or to attempt to somehow sidestep the obligation to report within time, the necessity for the law to be obeyed by regulated donees.
“It is simply to say that we need, under the new leadership of the commission, a more effective commission, a more competent commission and a commission that is going to carry out the duties that this new legislation will enshrine.”
Mr Hain suggested the system whereby criminal law intervenes in the system of politics was manipulated for party political purposes.
“It does not seem to me to be a good thing for the police and the whole panoply of the criminal law and prosecutors to invade politics for often, not in my case actually, but it’s often for party political reasons,” he added.
“They don’t want to do this. It’s pretty clear, from my own direct experience, that the police do not welcome this particular practice that has grown up.
“We are in danger of following almost the American course of politics in which we just pollute politics with all this extraneous interference.”
He continued: “Where a mistake has been made on what are complex rules then I do not think that it is sensible for the police or criminal law to come in.
“It is a matter of regulation … either by this House or by the Electoral Commission.”
Mr Hain, who had his political upbringing in the anti-apartheid movement, was being considered for a return to front bench politics before parliamentary standards found against him earlier this year. His political future is not uncertain.
