Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Alex Chalk and Kelvin Hopkins

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

As always, my right hon. and learned Friend hits the nail on the head. There is no substitute for hard, detailed work. Ultimately, it is a game of cat and mouse, because those who seek to avoid tax will be ever more inventive. It requires detailed work to ensure that the loopholes are closed, and the Government are absolutely committed to that task. The Bill shows that and I am happy to support it.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I shall speak briefly. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) on her excellent Front-Bench speech.

Early in his speech, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) talked about morality. There is morality in paying tax: we cannot have a civilised society without people paying tax to pay for public services and income being redistributed from those who have more than they need to those who have less than they need.

The crisis in 2008 and the problem of tax avoidance and evasion, overseas tax havens and so on, all arose as a result of Geoffrey Howe’s disastrous decision in 1979 to abolish exchange controls immediately. That led to the crisis and the massive flows of money across national boundaries around the world, causing all sorts of problems. Even the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, suggested to the Treasury Committee at the time of the 2008 crisis that if things got really bad, we might have had to reintroduce exchange controls. I am not suggesting that I will be able to persuade the Government to do that at this stage, but in time we are going to have to look at how we manage the vast flows of money across national boundaries around the world. It is the bankers who are the crooks—not the good bankers who look after our ordinary accounts, but those who gamble with money and often worthless bits of paper on the foreign exchanges.

The hon. Member for Cheltenham talked about morality. Millions of ordinary people in this country do have a very moral sense. Many of them, including me—I am very well paid compared with ordinary people—say that they would pay a bit more tax if they could guarantee that the money went to the health service and to people who are less well off than themselves. At the same time, the mega rich, the corporates and the bankers are resisting any kind of constraint on their activities. I see where the morality lies: it lies with decent ordinary people, not with bankers. We must constrain those bankers somehow and have serious measures that will actually have the effect of stopping the tax avoidance and tax evasion that has bedevilled our society for so long.