Double Taxation Treaties (Developing Countries) Bill

Debate between Roger Mullin and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I wish to start by quoting a statement from the UK Government with which I agree 100%—[Interruption]—strange as that may seem. The UK Government’s aid strategy states:

“International development is about much more than just aid.

I am bringing this Bill forward, because international development is about much more than just aid.

I became interested in these types of issues many years ago when I first started doing international work. My first such job was for the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Over the years, I have worked on 26 international assignments that have involved countries in the developing world. I have worked in places that I did not even know existed before I was asked to accept a contract—being a Scotsman I accepted the contract and then looked up the place on the map. I have been in places such as the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and in the middle east, in places such as Oman and Yemen—where at one stage I thought I was being kidnapped—but most of my time and 16 of my assignments have been in Africa. On my last assignment before joining this House, I was funded by the Norwegian Government to evaluate the Benguela Current Commission’s research unit, which was researching the Benguela current as it ran up South Africa, Namibia and Angola.

I have had a long interest in development matters. I have never been funded by a charitable body, always by bilateral Government arrangements or sometimes at the request of the United Nations or the World Bank, as well as on a couple of occasions by the Asian Development Bank. One thing that struck me in my early days doing such work was that although I believe passionately in aid and funding and that the Government have done absolutely the right thing by being at the forefront of paying an agreed percentage of GDP to the developing world, that will never be enough to address the needs of some of the poorest countries in this world. Indeed, there is great danger in seeing international development solely as a function of aid.

Let me tell the House one thing. There have been estimates that if somehow the world was able to stop all the tax evasion and tax avoidance in the continent of Africa, and to clean up the system, including in the small areas I am considering, the tax that could be earned in Africa would be far greater than the entire international aid that is fed into Africa. My challenge today is to people who say that they do not like international aid in the sense of our sending money for good purposes to the developing world.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend has anyone in mind when he says that.

EU Nationals in the UK

Debate between Roger Mullin and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

I wish to compliment the shadow Home Secretary on the way he opened this debate. He set the matter out in exactly the right tone, with precision, and suggested how it could be resolved, and I am extremely grateful. I wish I could say that the Minister approached the issue with some degree of certainty, but he was able to offer only a convoluted and equivocal speech that will have generated not certainty but uncertainty in the minds of many EU nationals living in this country.

For me, this started not after the referendum but before it, when during Prime Minister’s questions I mentioned two of my constituents of German nationality who were so upset at the nature of the debate on immigration that they left Scotland and said that they did not want to live in the United Kingdom while the referendum was going on, such were their feelings about the way they were characterised. That issue went even deeper for them, because they had lived in Scotland at the time of the independence referendum when they were allowed a vote. For the EU referendum, however, they were denied the vote that this House should have given them and that would have helped to relieve some of their pre-vote anxieties.

Many Members have constituents who are caught in many different situations. Not only have those two constituents of mine already left—I am trying to persuade them to return to Scotland—but I heard yesterday from a local friend who is a mortgage broker and said that a couple who were due to buy their first home in Scotland withdrew at the last minute saying, “We’re EU citizens. We cannot take the risk of investing here when such uncertainty lies over us today.”

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

Does that put to bed the lie that the Government have a long-term economic plan?

[Roger Mullin]

I always thought that it was rather fanciful thinking on the Government’s part that they knew what a long-term economic plan might look like. We need not a long-term economic plan, but short-term and immediate action for every EU national who lives in this country.

One lady wrote to me in concern because her husband is from Denmark and is anxious about what will happen to them. She asked, “Will our family be split up?” These are anxieties and the Minister might say, “Well, some of those anxieties are ill-founded.” But the anxieties are not ill-founded if the Government lack clarity. If the Government decline to give the clarity and certainty they need, people’s uncertainty and their worries are perfectly legitimate. Minister, it is time to act. It is not too late: do the right thing, and do it now.