Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Debate between David Anderson and Kwasi Kwarteng

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Anderson]

I haven’t got a clue what unearned earnings means—I have never been in a position to have unearned any earnings. The Minister might be able to answer that when summing up the debate, and I would be interested to find that out.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is paid £120,000 a year. He also receives £34,000 a year in rental income from his house, because he lives at No. 11 Downing Street, as well as dividend payments of £44,000 a year. But what does he say to nurses, care workers, prison officers, police officers, and, yes, tax collectors? He says they must work harder and longer—

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Anderson]

Sit down.

The Chancellor says to those people, “You must work harder, and you must accept that you will have to work for longer before you get your pension.” How can he expect steel workers in this country, who are facing the possibility of a life on the dole, to believe that he really understands what they are going through?

The Mayor of London receives £143,000 for doing his day job, a quarter of a million pounds a year for writing for The Daily Telegraph, another quarter of a million in royalties from his books, and more money from his savings. Ordinary people in this country are fed up with carrying the can for the mistakes of the rich in this country—mistakes that led us into the economic crisis that is blighting the daily life of men and women who will never get the chance to save anything in the first place, let alone squirrel it away in the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands or the Channel Islands, where no questions are asked as long as people know the drill.

In two weeks the Trade Union Bill will come back to this House, and the most tightly regulated body in the country will face even more restrictions under the sad reality of what we have been told is the sunshine of transparency. The hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) spoke about trade unions not paying corporation tax, but I dare bet that them not doing that involved fully audited accounts that have been signed off, not hidden away. Why do we not subject financial markets, regulators and dealers to the same tight regulations that this Government intend to impose on trade unions, whose only job is to look after the interests of ordinary men and women in this country? Why do we not put the same effort into chasing tax dodgers as we do into hounding so-called benefit cheats—a process that traduces innocent people and sees their families rubbished? People are sanctioned without money for weeks on end, and at the end of that someone says, “Oh, we made a mistake.” What happened in the meantime? Why on earth do the Government think that people in this country are angry?

A lot has been said about the politics of envy, but this is about the politics of fairness. Make no mistake—this week we are seeing the end of the farce of “We’re all in this together”. Hon. Members should read today’s motion carefully because it is a roadmap, a loophole and a get-out for Conservative Members to say to people in this country, “We’ve heard your anger and frustration. We hear what you say. Let’s work together and find a way out of this.” Instead, they have shut the door and want to carry on the dodgy deals. No matter what they say, yet again there is one law for the rich and one for the poor, and the people of this country will not stand for it.

ISIL in Syria

Debate between David Anderson and Kwasi Kwarteng

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I am pleased to see him in his place. He was not in the last Parliament, where we had an extensive debate about intervention. No one ever believed that an air campaign on its own would defeat and destroy that terrorist organisation. That was never the case that was made. I hear people say that an air attack is no good because Daesh will survive it, but that is not what anyone has suggested. It is part of a suite of things we can do to fight against this evil terrorist organisation.

[Mr Anderson]

rose—

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I have given way once; I shall make progress.

I hear Members opposed to the Government’s motion saying, “Why don’t we challenge Daesh on the internet?” I hear colleagues today ask why we do not try to attack the ideology. We can do all these things. None of them militates against the other; it is not a question of either/or. These actions are part of a range of responses that we need to deploy against something that we have never seen in the modern world.

When people look at what the Government are trying to do, it is no good talking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That was a completely different set of circumstances. It involved the commitment of British ground troops in a transnational coalition. What the Government are asking for today is an extension of what has already happened. People cannot, on the one hand, say that it will be the most devastating thing in the world if we bomb ISIS targets, and on the other hand say, “It wouldn’t do very much so what’s the point?” It is one thing or the other, but people on the other side of the argument have said both. They have said that airstrikes are so insignificant that we should not bother, and they have said that they will devastate and bomb Syria into oblivion. Both of those statements cannot be true.

It has never been part of the Government’s case that a bombing campaign in itself would destroy ISIS. Three things have happened: the Sharm el-Sheikh outrage, the Tunisian outrage and the particularly savage attacks in Paris. These have completely shifted the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and it is entirely justified for the Government to extend the provision to attack Syria, as they have done in Iraq.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between David Anderson and Kwasi Kwarteng

Tuesday 14th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Anderson]

It is absolutely clear that that is the case and that this was nothing other than a political ruse to try to mislead the country and to wrong-foot the Labour party to pave the way for the Chancellor to move from No. 11 to No. 10 Downing Street. It is nothing other than that.

The Government now call this the new living wage, but we have been here before. We were there in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Conservatives tried to pretend that the community charge was not really the poll tax. We have been with them over the past five years as they have tried to pretend that the spare room subsidy was not a bedroom tax. Just as those two ideas have never stuck, the new living wage will not stick. People know that it is nothing more than half of a new minimum wage that blocks out young people in this country.

I want to move on to something else the Chancellor said last week:

“The left will never understand this, but we on the Conservative Benches know that the wish to pass something on to your children is about the most basic, human and natural aspiration there is.”—[Official Report, 8 July 2015; Vol. 598, c. 330.]

Well, he is half right. The left never will believe that providing for the grown-up children of dead millionaires with a bung from taxpayers while poor families and children go hungry is a basic, human or natural aspiration. What is basic is that far too many families face the reality of sending kids to school hungry, and worrying about where the next meal will come from and whether they can afford to clothe and feed their children. Too many families are worrying about whether to keep the house warm or not, and now they are being hit even harder in the struggle to pay their rent. The hit is £60 a week in this city and £120 a week for the rest of us across the nation. When the landlord says, “I want your rent off you,” the tenant has to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t pay the rent this week and, by the way, next week I will pay you £120 a week less than I am now.” I really do not know where those people will end up. That is basic, that is life at the sharp end and that is what is happening in the real world. That is what happens when the children of dead millionaires are prioritised over the children of poor working people. It is an utter disgrace.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Anderson]

I certainly will, even though the hon. Gentleman has only been here for five minutes.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I think that I am the judge of how long people have been here. We have already had one intervention from Kwasi Kwarteng and I can assure the hon. Gentleman that he has been here for a lot longer than five minutes, although it might only feel like that.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I promise that my intervention will not last five minutes. Who are the dead millionaires that the hon. Gentleman is talking about?

[Mr Anderson]

The people who die leaving property worth £1 million. In the past, some of that would have been taxed and now it will not be. Instead, the Government will tax poor working people, people who are on the dole and people who have more than two kids—they can have two kids, but no more.

Let us also consider the deliberate misuse of language by this Government over the past five years. They have replaced the notion of social security with the idea of welfare, yet they pretend to be the workers party. The concept of social security is crucial to the notion of how civilised we are in this country. Social security underpins the lives of working people and is based on the real concept of people being in this together, with a national insurance scheme that we all pay into if and when we can work and a security net that will support us when we cannot work for whatever reason. I know that the Conservative party has spent the past 10 years trying to paint everybody who uses public services or needs social security as a skiver and not a striver, or a shirker and not a worker, to further its own political narrative. That despicable tactic has to be challenged as the poor, the vulnerable, the ill, the young, the women and the disabled people of this country struggle to make ends meet in desperate times. They are the people the Tories are making pay for the economic mess that their friends in the City, the banks and the hedge funds got us into.

At the same time, the Tories are attacking the millions of public sector workers in this country who take care of the nation by freezing their pay for what will become a decade. We have to stop making nurses, careworkers, firefighters, police and other public sector workers pay the price for the failure of the Tories’ friends. Let us acknowledge in the debate about productivity the productivity gains that have been made in the public sector, where far fewer people are doing a lot more.

Industry (Government Support)

Debate between David Anderson and Kwasi Kwarteng

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The hon. Lady is being quite clever and fixing the measuring rod.

Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, openly boasted of abolishing boom and bust. That was the central claim that he made. He predicated his entire policy on that premise. The premise was wrong. As we all know, and as hon. Members have commented, we went into a recession and we were faced with a huge deficit. That was a huge bust, which the former Prime Minister, in his wisdom, failed to see. That is why we were saddled with the deficit, and why we have had to make some of the tough adjustments to which Opposition Members have alluded.

That context is important. I know that there will be difficult times. I know that up and down the country Opposition Members will bemoan and complain about Tory cuts, but the context demonstrates why the adjustments have had to be made. They were forced upon us by the international environment. My hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) mentioned that investors would not buy British Government debt. As a consequence, we have to rein in our spending. That is common sense. It is wrong for Opposition Members to say that we are trying to strangle the baby in its cot and that we are savage and uncaring. It is a matter of practical policy. Without that, we have a bleak future.

[Mr Anderson]

The hon. Gentleman spoke about fairy tales and Bible stories. Some of us lived the reality. Some of us in this country were starved for 18 years, while others became fat cats. We know that his party is taking us back there.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am not talking about the 18 years from 1979 to 1997. I am talking about the 13 years in which we lived under Labour.

To finish my contribution, I want to talk about the private sector and the public sector. Someone described trying to grow an economy by focusing on the public sector as a man sitting in a bucket trying to lift himself up by pulling the handle. It does not work. The only way we can have a viable public sector is if we can have revenues coming in from a buoyant private sector. As my hon. Friends have reiterated time and again, it is only by having a prosperous private sector that we can grow our way out of the recession. The message about a strong private sector is clear. It wants less regulation, less red tape and bureaucracy and a clear tax system, and it generally supports the coalition Government and the Government programme. For these clear and simple reasons, I support the Government amendment.