Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 20 May 2020
I draw members’ attention to the register of members’ interests, which shows that I am a member of the Poverty Alliance and an associate member of the National Union of Journalists, which is relevant to group 2 and to later groups of amendments.
As I said during the discussions at stage 2, I support Neil Findlay’s amendments in the group, as they add important measures to the bill, and I hope that all members will support them.
At stage 2, I lodged an amendment that addressed the provision of business support in a range of forms to firms that are based in tax havens. The Scottish Green Party has been campaigning on that in the past fortnight. Since we established an online petition, over 7,000 people in Scotland have added their names, calling for that important restriction, which has already been adopted by Governments in Denmark, France and Wales, among other places. We know not only that there is a groundswell of support but that it can be achieved within devolved competence, given that Wales has already done it.
I lodged my amendment to introduce that measure through the bill and, I have to confess, I expected that the Scottish Government would say, “We will try to find a way to do that, but not in the bill.” I was pleased that Michael Russell agreed that the measure should be included through an amendment to the bill, although he persuaded me that some aspects of my amendment would have risked rendering it beyond the scope of devolved powers.
It is an important point of principle that we are able to add problematic tax jurisdictions beyond those that are on the European Union’s list. My amendment would have enabled us to do that, but that option—that flexibility—could have risked the whole amendment being incompetent, so I have accepted that we cannot do that now. We will have to build on that case, to ensure that all problematic tax jurisdictions—all tax havens—are restricted from receiving taxpayer-funded support.
The cabinet secretary also said during the stage 2 debate that he thought that that measure should apply to coronavirus-related support as well as to support that is given for other purposes, and I agree with him on that.
It is important that we worked together, because now we have an amendment that I believe the Government will support and because the opportunity to address this injustice has to be taken.
If any of us walks up and down the high street or into a shopping centre in Scotland, we will see high street names that have arranged their tax affairs to hide their wealth through tax havens. That wealth was generated by their workers, who were often on poverty wages and zero-hour contracts. They are hiding that wealth from taxation, and that legal tax avoidance is one of the principal sources of inequality and economic injustice.