PM and Labour leader clash over revelations with Cameron admitting to have shelved plans for overseas tax register, Corbyn used PMQs to put the Panama papers back on the agenda pushing Cameron on the Tory voting record in Europe on tax regulations, cuts to the tax-collecting agencies and accusing him of failing to make the crown dependencies more transparent. Cameron responded that a UK register would be published, insisting that that was progress.
Snap verdict
That was probably a draw, but it was a reasonably informative one which saw both Corbyn and Cameron make some solid points. Corbyn’s best question was his first one, about the voting record of Tory MEPs on multinational taxation, and Cameron did not even try to address it. But Cameron was more comfortable when Corbyn turned to HMRC funding (because he was able to quote figures about staff numbers going up between 2010 and 2015 – although tellingly he did not say what would happen by 2020) and, when Corbyn got on to tax havens and whether their registers of beneficial ownership would be public, we got into the familiar political dialogue of “We’ve done more than was done before” versus “It’s not as much as you’ve promised”. But it is probably the first time Cameron has been as explicit as this in public about admitting that his original plans to get the Virgin Islands etc to have public registers have been shelved.
Best lines
Cameron accused Corbyn of sloppiness in his tax returns, which he described as:
Late, chaotic, inaccurate and uncosted
But Corbyn’s come-back drew the bigger cheers:
I paid more tax than some companies owned by people he might know quite well
- For more on PMQs and the day’s politics, read our politics live blog with Andrew Sparrow.
