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House of Lords (Members’ Taxation Status) Bill [HL]

My Lords, this is a small Bill about a large subject. I recall when I first came into this House being sharply corrected from the Conservative Benches about the important distinction between tax avoidance, which was quite acceptable, and tax evasion; and reflecting in the days afterwards that the line between tax avoidance and tax evasion is often a very flexible one. Those whose wives live in Monaco but who do their business in Britain, and those who fly from Monaco to Britain on a Tuesday morning and go back on a Thursday evening, are very much playing the line between avoidance and evasion. There has been quite an astonishing campaign in the Financial Times and elsewhere over the past few weeks to protect the interests of our non-domiciled minority. I have done a little research into the origins of the non-dom rule. It seems to me, if I may say so to my noble friend Lord Jacobs, that here we are talking about not just those few rich people in Africa, or the few in India, but mainly the West Indian sugar planters. Their slaves had just been taken away, and they were being compensated for that appalling theft of property by being given taxation privileges in return. That is not one of the most glorious developments in British history. What is now being defended is a deep historical anomaly. There is a wider question about tax evasion and tax responsibility that we all need to address in this country. Martin Woolf in the Financial Times last Friday quoted Leonora Helmsley, who famously said: "““Only little people pay taxes””." We cannot have a society in which the rich, the successful, businessmen, bankers and corporations manage successfully to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and I am appalled to see how many people think that they are entitled to avoid paying taxes while making profits out of our economy. So I strongly support the Bill. Citizenship is another issue that we are debating. The Government wish to emphasise that citizenship is a matter of rights and responsibilities. One of our responsibilities as citizens is to contribute to the maintenance and development of a civilised society. Tax is what you pay as your contribution to the maintenance of a civilised society. We in this House have political privileges and political responsibilities. Among those is to set an example to adhere to appropriate standards. Very evident among those standards is paying our fair share of taxation. I note that when I was discussing my moderate wealth the other week, I was offered an Isle of Man scheme, a Jersey scheme and various other schemes. All of us are in some way being compromised by the way in which the offshore world operates. I very much hope that my party and others will look much more sharply in the next few months about the whole offshore world and how it relates to the onshore world. I include Switzerland, as a large country, in the offshore world—not just Lichtenstein, Monaco, the Channel Islands, Bermuda and elsewhere. Meanwhile, this Bill takes us one small step in the right direction by saying that in this House—a central institution in the British political system—we should be clear that we set an example and we accept appropriate standards.