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

My Lords, you see—you can get paranoid about this. Paranoia is quite a healthy phenomenon, I find. I said that we in the all-party group had on a couple of occasions met people from Liechtenstein, and this question came up. So I would like to make two points. One is that it is too easy for newspapers—in this case the infamous Murdoch press—to damage peoples’ reputations unnecessarily; but, secondly, it is essential to give support across Europe to initiatives like that of Angela Merkel, which is connected with the tax status of some German citizens, because this is increasingly an international problem. It is epitomised by the ““blackmail”” tactics that a number of noble Lords have implied, without using that word, which is: ““If you don’t give us what we want here, we will go somewhere else””. Of course a huge number of issues are swirling around here—the tax treatment of multinational companies is among them—but the great majority of this House would support Angela Merkel’s initiative on Liechtenstein. I very much support what is suggested in the Bill and it could not cover everything under the sun, but this is very much part of a bigger question. I welcome the progress being made in intergovernmental discussions about this in Europe. It is not an EU competence to do something about it, but I thought that it would be a useful opportunity to bring in that clarification.