MPs may live to regret this rash bid to neuter charities

The lobbying bill's attack on the right to campaign at a time of public disaffection could cause the biggest upset since 1651

Illustration by Matt Kenyon

On Tuesday night, in the last hour of the working day and the final metaphorical hour of their credibility, the government agreed to pause the second part of its lobbying bill. We have many reasons to suspect this "pause", not least its newness. Like the "omnishambles" and the "rebuke by a statistical authority", I don't remember anyone "pausing" before 2010. Looking at the pause in action during the health and social care bill in 2011, it seems designed to concede enough small, technical things to humiliate its key defenders and bore everyone else into submission – while slipping in enough new, large things to show the world who was in charge once the government hit play again. Humiliation, shmumiliation! What doesn't unseat you makes you stronger.

Nonetheless, before we write off this particular pause, it marks a significant victory for this week's dry-sounding but firecrackingly page-turning report by the former Bishop of Oxford: Non-party Campaigning Ahead of Elections. It read like a novel. From the ex-bishop to the chief executive of Mumsnet, from the TaxPayers' Alliance to Amnesty International, from the joint select committee on human rights, through the … well, all the relevant committees, they rose as one, channelling the outrage of Joan of Arc through the baffled derision of (Elizabethan era) Blackadder.

"This bill is an object lesson in how not to produce legislation," stated the political and constitutional reform select committee; "we urge you to stop, to listen and to work with us," said Oxfam and the Women's Institute, among others. They called it perverse and terrifying and undemocratic, and pointed out that it had gone through no proper constitutional process. The report was so strongly worded that, had it only contained swearing, you would have assumed it was a spoof consultation paper on late-night Radio 4.

Why was this bill presented to parliament with only two working days to read it? In a massive, unprecedented shake-up of charities, why were no charities consulted? Why did Nick Clegg claim that the "parts on third-party campaigning were discussed extensively by the three parties in the cross-party funded talks" when nobody else can remember this extensive discussion, and one Labour MP, John Denham, suggested rather that they were "never raised, never proposed and never discussed"?

And the most obvious, pressing point belongs to Juliet Swann of the Electoral Reform Society in Scotland: "What are they trying to prevent? What terrible thing has happened that they think this will stop from happening in the future? … Why are they trying to fix a hypothetical situation that you can't give me any examples of?"

As little light as any of us can shine on the tearing up of due process and the inside of Clegg's troubled mind, I believe I can help with the "hypothetical" situation that this regulation seeks to fix. The government is attacking charities because it is terrified of them, and this is for a very good reason.

A few statistics have been plaguing MPs for some time. The National Trust has four million paying members; 38 Degrees has 1.9 million (we don't have to pay subs but sometimes do anyway); many animal or wildlife charities boast 500,000 members. Membership of political parties, meanwhile, has fallen to 1%, or under 500,000 (in the three main parties combined). This means there are more people who care about birds than who can get meaningfully exercised about the victory of any particular candidate. If MPs are anxious about the impact a charity could have with a campaign they are dead right to be: just one petition from 38 Degrees could decimate a candidate's chances for years.

This has come to fixate the Commons – the idea that "other political or campaigning organisations … are competing with parties for members" (House of Commons Library, 2012). Is the National Trust seriously drawing away the Tory hardcore? Or is it possible that many people, beyond Russell Brand, think that if a conventional politician is the answer, you have asked a really weird question? Do people need some other outlet for their civic spirit and sense of exuberant possibility?

Rather than asking these questions, politicians have determined that they can stave off this threat to their power by bringing down the third sector. Hubris combined with – in the kindest possible light – not giving themselves enough thinking time has resulted in a suggestion that, were charities sincerely to mobilise their supporters against it, it would fuel the closest thing we've seen to a revolution since 1651.

No doubt in some blue-sky meeting, some sunny morning before Steve Hilton left, when everyone was still allowed to wear sandals and think of ways to turn the UK into a teeny, cut-price America, this seemed like a good idea: why do charities have to stick their oar in? Why can't they keep to what they're good at, delivering services we should be delivering – for free? Why can't we ask for some third-sector neutrality? You don't see Barack Obama getting his chain yanked by Child Poverty Action Group.

Tory politics is littered with Americanisms, from food parcels to free schools, cheap attempts to choke off decent state provision in the name of the free market, or "freedom" for short. But to attempt to strip charities of their right to campaign, damp down a philanthropic passion that is centuries old, that predates universal suffrage? It's so unlikely that it might even be fun to watch them try.

Guardian