Tax Fairness

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Kelvin Hopkins

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Yes, that was absolutely regrettable. I know that my party will commit to introducing a cap on bonuses in our first few days in power after the next election.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

The hon. Gentleman always makes a powerful point. Having served on the Public Accounts Committee and on the ongoing inquiries into tax avoidance, I concur with him. I am a defender not of crony capitalism but of popular capitalism. He might not agree with me on that, being slightly on the left. In order to tackle corporate tax avoidance, we need to look at multilateral, bilateral, international and domestic legislation, but would he acknowledge that the previous Government flunked every opportunity to look at those issues over 13 years?

[Kelvin Hopkins]

We have seen successive Governments going in for what is called light-touch regulation on all fronts. I have never believed in light-touch regulation; I believe in tough regulation. I believe in employing thousands more tax officers to ensure that we collect the taxes. At the beginning of my time in Parliament, I visited our local VAT office, and the inspectors there told me that if they had more tax inspectors, they could collect billions more in tax. Each of those VAT inspectors collected more than five times their salary. I wrote about this to the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, and got a letter back from a civil servant saying that the Treasury was trying to reduce costs by reducing staffing levels. That was a completely illogical non sequitur; it was complete nonsense. Reducing the number of tax officers will reduce income by more than the amount of their salaries.

I have made the point many times—and I shall continue to make it—that we need more tax officers and more rigorous regulation. We need more control over what the corporates and the fat cats get away with. The reality is that ordinary working-class people have to pay tax through PAYE. They cannot escape paying their tax, but the corporates and the fat cats can. So, I have agreed with the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) on one or two issues, and I am pleased about that, although we have different philosophical views when it comes to economics.

I want to talk about the deficit problem, because that is what taxation is about. I do not think that we actually have a deficit problem. We do not even have a spending problem. We have a revenue collection problem. That can be addressed either by collecting tax in the way that we do now, or by changing tax rates, as proposed in today’s motion.

Tax collection is a serious problem, and we could make serious changes there, but I want to look back to a time when taxes were more progressive. During the previous Parliament, I made suggestions in this Chamber about the kind of tax changes that I wanted to see. I went beyond what our leadership is now suggesting, although I welcome its proposals. I think we should go further, however. In the 1970s, Denis Healey was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He said that he wanted to

“tax the rich until the pips squeak”.

I cheered him for that, and we did not lose any votes because of his statement. In fact, a lot ordinary working-class people said, “Quite right too! We want those who can afford to pay more to do so. Those who can only afford to pay less should pay less.”

Remuneration of EU Staff

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Kelvin Hopkins

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins]

This may be a light-hearted comment, but it always strikes me that people I have known who have gone to work in the European Union come back with a rather fuller figure than when they went. I may be wrong, but that is the impression I get. They are certainly loyal to their new organisation.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for consistently being right on this subject. Does he think it is rather perverse and insidious that one of the caveats attached to someone being awarded a pension by these European institutions is that they are specifically proscribed from criticising those organisations? Perhaps that is something that the Deputy Prime Minister takes on board on a regular basis.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

It is a feature of all authoritarian regimes that they cannot bear criticism, particularly from the inside. In a healthy democracy, we should accept challenges from time to time. If we are governing, it is very useful to have people telling us that perhaps we have not got it right. Even at my modest level as a Member of Parliament, I like my staff to tell me when I have got something wrong. I do not sack them; I say “I thank you for your comments, and I’ve got to think about this.” Occasionally they put me right, and sometimes I am right, but debate of that kind is always healthy in a democracy. It is anti-democratic to sack somebody simply for disagreeing or criticising. In the end, we always do things by debating and voting, one hopes, with openness and transparency.

I have a story from a few years ago. Someone I knew who was involved in Brussels arrangements drifted into a meeting unexpectedly and found senior officials discussing among themselves whom they wanted to get into the post of Social Affairs Commissioner. They openly said, “We don’t want Social Affairs to be effective because it is only there as a decoration to get trade unionists and socialists on side, so we want somebody weak and ineffectual. Who shall we have?” Eventually they found an innocuous, sufficiently weak commissioner from one of the minor eastern European countries—I will not mention the name—to make sure that the post was not effective. The person sat in the room astonished at what was going on. The officials were deciding who the commissioner was going to be, and of course it transpired that that is who it was.

That is how the European Union operates. It is very anti-democratic, secretive and closed. We cannot get a verbatim report, or any kind of report, of what goes on in the Council of Ministers. When the European Council meets, a decision is made by officials before it meets. People talk for a couple of hours in the meeting, and they come out and the decision is adopted. It has been drafted beforehand and is invariably accepted, because that is the way things work. Let us not pretend that we are involved in some thrusting, democratic organisation—it is a bureaucratic structure where people are expected to fall into line.

I would enter a caveat for low-paid staff in any organisation—cleaners, security officers, people who work in the restaurants, and so on, who should have trade unions representing them to make sure that they have reasonable pay. We are talking about the highly paid officials who are part of the slush fund of the European Union and are clearly looking after themselves, with those who believe in this organisation being prepared to turn a blind eye to their vast salaries because they want to secure their loyalty for the foreseeable future. The whole structure needs to be opened up so that we have proper democratic controls at every level.

If the European Union is serious about reducing administrative costs, the way to achieve that is to cut out some of the things that it does. For example, there would be a substantial reduction in administrative costs if we got rid of the common fisheries policy and abandoned the common agricultural policy, as we should. We have talked about the repatriation of regional policy. If Governments decided what was appropriate for their regions, moneys would not be sent directly to our regions by Brussels, but would come through our Governments. If those unnecessary activities were repatriated, the administrative costs of the EU would be dramatically reduced and it would be a much more acceptable organisation.

I support the motion and commend the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash), the Chair of the Committee, for bringing it to the House.