Iraq War (10th Anniversary)
Debate between Michael Meacher and Caroline Lucas(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Meacher
Yes—I am glad the hon. Gentleman has given me the opportunity to say, in the spirit of honesty and frankness of this debate, that I am utterly ashamed of what I did on that occasion. It is the worst political mistake that I have made in my lifetime, but I want to say why I did it. I did it because I listened carefully to the then Prime Minister during those two crucial debates. He spoke with enormous assurance and authority, and I believed that, as Prime Minister of this country, he would have been presented with the fullest degree and comprehensiveness of UK intelligence, and he would use those data in a proper and honest manner to make the case. Perhaps I was naive to think that—I now believe that I was—but that is what I believed. I am speaking today because I am so angry at having been deceived. That experience has deeply damaged my trust in the role of Prime Ministers and in the link between intelligence and the various Departments of State and the Prime Minister, who speaks for the Government. I hope that that will be repaired in future, but the damage done has been considerable, certainly to me.
I was talking about the 45-minute claim referring to battlefield nuclear weapons. When the media took it up—the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) forcefully recalled the Evening Standard headline—that was not corrected, even though the authorities knew very well that the wrong impression was being given.
Thirdly, the claim that Iraq tried to buy 500 tonnes of yellowcake, which is required for nuclear fission, from Niger was included in the dossier, despite its having been confirmed by a visit by the former US ambassador to that country six months before that it was completely bogus. None the less, the claim was included.
The fourth point, which is very important but which has received little attention, is that the then Prime Minister of this country claimed to the House on 25 February 2003 that the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, in 1995 had revealed
“the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme”.—[Official Report, 25 February 2003; Vol. 400, c. 123.]
However, as we now know, from a Newsweek exclusive just a few weeks later, what Hussein Kamel actually said during his debriefing was precisely the opposite. He said:
“All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.”
Caroline Lucas
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for the tenor of his speech and for putting that fact more strongly in the public domain. To clarify: that piece of information was available in February 2003. The fact that it was covered up to such an extent—not even covered up, but completely contradicted—is one of the most shocking deceits in this whole process.
Mr Meacher
I entirely agree. That is precisely why I feel so let down by someone who was in the unique role of Prime Minister behaving in such a way. I do not expect any Prime Minister of any party ever to behave in that way.
As the Butler report points out so poignantly, all the ifs, buts, qualifications and caveats in the raw intelligence data were dropped from the dossier, while the positive allegations were distinctly overhyped. We all know that. Sources were treated as reliable when they were clearly not, and they were not checked against the expertise of intelligence staff. Anyone who has read appendix B of the Butler report, which was excellently put together, can see set out, step by step, how the massaging and accretion steadily accumulated until we were told in the final September dossier that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programme was—in words that have echoed for the past 10 years—“active, detailed and growing” and that the intelligence on which that judgment was based was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”. In fact, as we now know, Blair had been told just over a month previously, by the UK intelligence community, that
“we…know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988”.
The first great issue is accountability in relation to the Prime Minister’s own judgment, his deceitful presentation and his over-eagerness to take Britain into a war on grounds that far exceeded the evidence to justify them. One cannot take a country into a war under false pretences and then proclaim, as the Butler committee did, that no one can be held responsible.
Indeed the most striking characteristic of the Butler report is this disjunction between analysis and judgment. It is excellent on analysis and very poor, very cautious and very fearful about judgment. It catalogues a litany of failures and then pulls all its punches by declaring that, in effect, no one was to blame. I have to say that George Tenet was sacked as head of the CIA for intelligence failures over Iraq, but John Scarlett, who held the equivalent position in the UK and was equally responsible for the intelligence failures, is still recommended by the report for promotion, despite all the damning evidence in the report to the contrary. It is a very British establishment charade, when what is really needed is genuine accountability. I think everyone on all sides of the House is seeking that. But that the excuse is made that no one can be held to account and that it just somehow happened is completely unacceptable.
Finance (No. 2) Bill
Debate between Michael Meacher and Caroline Lucas(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Meacher
I have already mentioned two that have had a great deal of publicity—Google and Amazon—but there are many, many others. Only a very narrow and small proportion of the most “aggressive”—the Chancellor’s phrase—or abusive tax-avoidance schemes would be caught. What worries me is the impression given that everything else is somehow okay with the Government. I think that is a very unwise position to adopt.
Briefly, the third advantage of GAntiP is that the incentive for accountants, lawyers and bankers to sell tax-avoidance schemes would be curtailed. That would be a thoroughly good thing, because they and their clients would know that most of those schemes would fail in future.
Lastly, my fourth advantage might be the single most important one. GAntiP really could help to change the rancid culture in British society today whereby the top 1%—whether it be super-rich individuals or the big corporations—are widely perceived to be ripping off the honest remainder of the population.
Caroline Lucas
That is very kind of the right hon. Gentleman, who is making a compelling case. Does he agree that it would be helpful to have a clear commitment from the Opposition Front-Bench team that, if it were to form the next Government, it would introduce the sort of principle that he describes so compellingly? For all the reasons the right hon. Gentleman has outlined, the principle is simpler, it provides greater certainty and it will catch far more of the kind of things we are trying to rule out than the rule approach that we have at the moment.
Mr Meacher
As always, the hon. Lady has a similar mindset to mine. That is what I hope, too. Discussions are, of course, going on within the party, and we are yet to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) who speaks from the Front Bench. I am certainly very keen to try to ensure that before the general election, for all the reasons I have given, the Labour party signs up to GAntiP. I am thus pleased to commend to the Committee new clauses 7 to 16.
Tax Avoidance and Evasion
Debate between Michael Meacher and Caroline Lucas(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Meacher
I thank the Minister for that helpful intervention. Once again, I find myself at one with the hon. Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker).
The haemorrhaging of tax revenues on the scale that I have described matters a great deal. First, and obviously, it is deeply unjust because tax avoidance and evasion are heavily concentrated among the big corporations and the mega-rich. If they pay hugely less than their real liabilities, that must mean that, for any given expenditure, those on average and low incomes have to pay more. That is always unjust, but it is particularly unjust at a time of prolonged austerity.
Secondly, there is the obvious point that if tax avoidance were cut sharply, many of the Government’s cuts in public spending and benefits would not be necessary and, I think, could not be justified. Thirdly, the tax avoidance industry—I do not exaggerate in saying that it is a parasite on the body politic—would be rendered largely obsolete.
The fact that City lawyers and accountants are paid vast sums to get round and neutralise what Parliament plainly intended in its Finance Bills is an open sore that would infect any democratic and fair society. The fact that they are allowed to do it makes monkeys of the Government. The fourth, and very important, point is that if most tax avoidance were stopped—I realise that it will never stop completely—companies would be forced to compete not on the basis of who was best at abusing tax law but on the quality of their goods and services. The benefit for the British economy would be substantial.
What has been the Government’s response? Tomorrow is the last day of the Government’s consultation on what they call their general anti-abuse rule, or GAAR, for tax. The background to that repays some examination. The Government commissioned the Aaronson group—Graham Aaronson is a prominent lawyer—to advise on the construction of such a rule. The group reported last November, I think. Extraordinarily, the report states right at the start that a broad anti-tax-avoidance rule is not necessary or desirable; it should apply only in the most extreme cases, so that for the overwhelming majority of cases circumventing taxes should continue as before.
I should point out that Aaronson has only ever represented companies or persons against HMRC; he has always acted pro the tax avoidance industry and never pro tax. Appointing him is rather like putting a poacher in charge of the grouse moors. Aaronson chose as his adviser Lord Hoffman, the man who killed the Ramsay principle—the general anti-tax-avoidance principle, or GANTIP—in the Westmoreland Investments case in 2001. The Government’s two key advisers on anti-tax-avoidance measures were carefully chosen in the sure knowledge that they would never recommend any such action. Thus, of course, it has proved. The Aaronson report recommended that if a general anti-abuse rule were accepted at all, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs should be obliged to consult and get the approval of a tribunal before it could be used against any particular person or company. In other words, the Government’s official tax collection agency should have to get permission from an external body before it could exercise its legal powers. That is an extraordinary proposal. However, it gets worse. The Aaronson group proposed that the tribunal should have three members—fair enough—of whom two should be from the tax avoidance industry. That makes it an open and shut case: the general anti-abuse rule will certainly gather dust on the shelf.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The right hon. Gentleman is making a compelling case to suggest that the Government are not fully enthused about this kind of idea. Will he give me a sense of where his Front Benchers stand on the matter? I absolutely support his views, but I would love to know whether they are behind him.
Mr Meacher
We have our representative on the Front Bench who will speak about that, but I will come to what I think should be done.
The Government have said that they will accept the Aaronson proposals in full—what a surprise! So the Prime Minister’s boast that he was cracking down on aggressive tax avoidance turns out to be nothing more than a paper aeroplane job devised in the certain knowledge that it will never fly.
After this tragic-comic charade, what will Government’s Bill, scheduled for next year, achieve? If it is used at all, other than as a fig leaf to cover the Chancellor’s nakedness on this issue, I think that it will be drawn extremely narrowly to include only the most egregious and extreme cases of tax abuse. It will exclude national insurance and VAT, which are a pretty large part of the tax system, and will not even regard the shifting of income, profit or gain from one tax category to another in order to gain a tax advantage as being within the definition of tax avoidance. I ask you, Mr Deputy Speaker! Indeed, the fact that the Government’s own economic impact assessment for the proposed general anti-abuse rule states that it will have little or no measurable impact makes it absolutely clear that the anti-abuse rule is just a massive white elephant.