Andrew Sparrow 

Cameron says he is opposed to taking Syrian refugees from France – Politics live

Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happened
  
  

A Syrian child in an informal refugee camp in Bar Elia, Bekaa valley, Lebanon
A Syrian child in an informal refugee camp in Bar Elia, Bekaa valley, Lebanon. The Home Office is announcing details of plans to admit some unaccompanied child Syrian refugees to the UK. Photograph: Jamal Saidi/Reuters

Afternoon summary

  • Labour has accused the government of not going far enough after the Home Office released full details of its new plans to settle a relatively small number of unaccompanied child Syrian refugees in the UK. James Brokenshire, the Home Office minister, explained the proposals in the ministerial statement (see 12.01pm), after media reports generated some confusion about what was going on. (See 1.48pm.) Yvette Cooper, chair of Labour’s refugee taskforce, said:

We’ve now seen the full announcement from the government and it is a step forward in response to the strong campaign but doesn’t yet go far enough. It is welcome that Ministers have recognised the need to help lone child refugees, but we should help some of those who are alone in Europe as well as in camps near Syria.

Children’s homes and reception centres in Italy and Greece are full and unable to cope, and thousands of children are disappearing - often into exploitation, abuse or prostitution at the hands of people traffickers. That is why Save the Children were right to call for Britain to take 3000 of the 26000 child refugees alone in Europe right now. The government is not doing enough if it only helps “exceptional cases,” or makes a false distinction between vulnerable children inside and outside Europe.

Ministers had said that some unaccompanied child Syrian refugees could be admitted from Greece or Italy, but the proposals do not involve admitting children from camps in France. Defending this decision, David Cameron said:

Those people in France should be claiming asylum in France. And incidentally, people who claim asylum in France, if they have a direct family connection to Britain then they are able to come to Britain. But they really should claim asylum in France.

France is a safe country, so we shouldn’t be supporting the idea that it is a jumping off point for coming to Britain.

  • Labour has urged the government to exempt people “discriminated” against by the “bedroom tax” rather than write a “blank cheque” for legal fees. In a Commons urgent question, Owen Smith, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said the government should abandon its legal challenge to Wednesday’s court ruling saying victims of domestic violence and the families of severely disabled children should be able to get exemptions from the policy. He asked Justin Tomlinson, the welfare minister:

As a matter of urgency, will the government immediately exempt the two groups that have been found to have been discriminated against from paying the bedroom tax - victims of domestic violence and the families of severely disabled children?

Can you confirm that there are 280 victims of domestic violence who have panic rooms installed in their house under the Sanctuary Scheme affected by the policy? And can you further confirm that exempting those people from the bedroom tax would cost the government a mere £200,000? By comparison, can you tell us how many hundreds of thousands of pounds you have spent already on legal fees defending this vile policy and how much more you are prepared to spend - is this a blank cheque to defend this to the end?

Tomlinson told MPs that the court decision was “a very narrow ruling” in “a complex area” and that councils were given discretionary housing payments funds to help in case like the ones that went to court.

  • Tobias Ellwood, the Foreign Office minister, has said that United Nations allegations of Saudi-led bombing of civilians in Yemen - which have raised questions over British involvement - are based on satellite technology, not first-hand evidence from the ground. Responding to an urgent question in the Commons, Ellwood insisted he would take the report by the UN panel of experts, which found “widespread and systematic” attacks on civilian targets, “very seriously” - and said the UK was complying with arms exports rules. He also said he had not “officially” received the leaked report, which was obtained by the Guardian, but revealed he had a copy of it before suggesting he had not had time to look at it fully.

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

Updated

Tories have highest lead over Labour on leadership for nearly 30 years

Ipsos MORI has published its January political monitor, and the findings are fairly bleak for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn. Here are six of worst.

  • The Tories have a 27 point lead over Labour as the party with the best team of leaders. This is the biggest lead for the Tories since Ipsos MORI started asking this question in 1989. But the Tories are only four points ahead as the party that would be best as looking after the interests of people like you.
  • The Tories have a 20 point lead over Labour as the party most united over policy. This is the biggest lead for the Tories since the question was first asked in 1991. And the Tories have a 10 point lead as the party with the best policies.
  • Voters are overwhelmingly opposed to getting rid of nuclear weapons. Some 58% are opposed, rising to 70% who say they are opposed if the question is phrased in terms of getting rid of Britain’s nuclear weapons while other countries keep theirs.

And a majority of voters (52%) support renewing Trident. But 28% favour building new submarines while not equipping them with nuclear missiles - an idea floated by Jeremy Corbyn.

  • Jeremy Corbyn’s satisfaction rating is significantly lower than David Cameron’s.
  • And Labour supporters are getting increasingly dissatisfied with Corbyn - although they remain more likely to say they are satisifed than dissatisfied.
  • The Conservatives have a nine point lead over Labour on voting intention. They are on 40%, compared with Labour’s 31%.

But it is not all bad news for Corbyn. Here is one very positive finding for him.

  • Some 66% of people support Corbyn’s proposal for companies to be banned from paying dividends unless they pay their staff the living wage.

Here is Gideon Skinner, Ipsos MORI’s head of political research, on the poll findings.

Labour starts 2016 with big challenges ahead, being the furthest behind the Conservatives on perceptions of unity and leadership team since we started asking the question. The last time one of the big two was this far behind was in May 2001, when William Hague’s Conservatives were trailing Tony Blair’s New Labour. Meanwhile, the British public are as opposed to unilateral disarmament today as they were when we were asking them 30 years ago.

David Cameron has told Sky News that he is opposed to taking Syrian refugees from the camps in France.

Cameron also defended his decision yesterday to describe the people Jeremy Corbyn met in Calais as a “bunch of migrants”.

According to what Reuters is billing as an exclusive, the EU is going to offer David Cameron an “emergency brake” that would enable Britain to curb EU migration as part of the renegotiation.

The European Union is offering Britain a new “emergency brake” rule that could help curb immigration from other EU states in a reform package before a British referendum on EU membership, sources close to the negotiations told Reuters on Thursday.

The proposal would give any member state that could convince EU governments that its welfare system was under excessive strain a right to deny benefits to new workers arriving from other EU countries for up to four years. That has been a key demand of Prime Minister David Cameron and one which many EU leaders have said risks conflict with citizens’ treaty rights.

Cameron will discuss the proposal in Brussels on Friday with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, whose institution would have to initiate any such legislation, sources said. Cameron is keen to have measures adopted that can convince Britons to vote to stay in the EU, possibly as early as June.

Osborne repeats claim about Google tax deal being a 'major success'

George Osborne has repeated his controversial claim that the HMRC tax deal with Google is a “major success” despite a widespread backlash against the £130m agreement for being too lenient.

The chancellor was criticised after hailing the deal as a victory for the tax authorities over the weekend, with Labour claiming it amounted to an effective tax rate of around 3% - compared with the corporation tax rate of 2020.

No 10 repeatedly refused to echo Osborne’s language, saying merely that it was a “positive step” and a “good deal, while stressing there was further to go on clamping down on tax avoidance.

But the chancellor has now given a broader defence of his approach to tax, saying it was indeed a success for Google to have gone from paying no tax to paying tax.

His comments suggest he believes that Google is now paying the correct amount in accordance with its profit made on economic activity in the UK.

He told Sky News:

My only interest, as the country’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, is to get the best deal for Britain - to bring the jobs here, the businesses here and to make sure that taxes are paid here.

When I became the chancellor, Google paid no tax. Now Google is paying tax and I have introduced a new thing called a diverted profits tax to make sure they pay tax in the future. I regard that as a major success.

Updated

Anyone reading the papers this morning trying to understand what the government is doing about unaccompanied child Syrian refugees will have found the headlines confusing, to say the least.

The Daily Mail splashed on a story saying that David Cameron had rejected calls to take 3,000 refugee children from Europe.

But the Guardian’s front page story said that David Cameron had changed his mind, and that he had decided Britain would take in some unaccompanied Syrian children who have made it to Europe.

Although the headlines are very different, the Daily Mail story and the Guardian story did not directly contradict each other. Cameron has been urged by Save the Children and others to take 3,000 unaccompanied child Syrian refugees from Europe, and although the Guardian focused on the fact that child refugees would be admitted from within Europe, it did not say the numbers would reach 3,000. The Daily Telegraph, like the Daily Mail, led off on Cameron rejecting calls to take 3,000 migrant children from Europe, but the Mail story did at one point say that in a “small number of cases” child migrants in Greece or Italy could be allowed to come to the UK.

So what, you might ask. It is not unusual for newspapers with different political leanings to interpret the same events in different ways. It happens all the time.

But part of the explanation may be down to the fact that there are at least two versions of the Home Office press notice announcing this. And they are subtly but significantly different.

One press notice, sent to the Guardian last night, contained this paragraph:

In addition, the UK Government will commit to providing further resource to the European Asylum Support Office to help Greece and Italy identify migrants, including children, who could be reunited with direct family members elsewhere in Europe under the Dublin Regulation. Where it is in their best interests, this will include bringing them to the UK. [My bold]

But in another version of the press notice sent out by the Home Office, which I got hold of this morning, this paragraph was different. It read:

The UK Government will also commit to providing further resources to the European Asylum Support Office to help in “hotspots” such as Greece and Italy to help identify and register children at risk on first arrival in the EU. The UK has already sent experts to both countries to assist with the ongoing situation and the Home Secretary has asked Kevin Hyland, the Anti-Slavery Commissioner, to visit the area and assess what more can be done to ensure unaccompanied refugee children are protected from traffickers.

There is no explicit mention here, or anywhere else in what we’ll call press release 2, of child migrants from Greece and Italy coming to the UK.

There is one other significant difference. Press release 1 (the one that came to the Guardian last night) said:

The UNHCR, who have experts working in the countries surrounding Syria and other conflict zones around the world, have been asked to identify exceptional cases of unaccompanied children whose needs cannot be met in the region and whose best interests would be met through protection in the UK.

This was also in press release 2. But press release 2 contains an extra sentence making it clear that the government is only thinking of taking in a few hundred extra children, and nowhere near the 3,000 that campaigners have been demanding. It said:

The UNHCR, who have experts working in the countries surrounding Syria and other conflict zones around the world, have been asked to identify exceptional cases of unaccompanied children whose needs cannot be met in the region and whose best interests would be met through protection in the UK. It is expected this process will identify several hundred children who will be resettled here. [My italics.]

It’s all very curious. Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation. I’ve asked the Home Office, and they are looking into it for me. I’ll let you know what they say.

UPDATE AT 5.10PM: I was told the Home Office would send me a formal statement, but it still has not arrived. However I’ve had a partial explanation from a source within the department. He said the press release sent to the Guardian last night was “a draft”. It was sent out quite widely - ie, not just to the Guardian - but it was still being “worked on”. Others got the second version. The source would not say how many people got the first, and how many got the second, or why it was necessary to rewrite the first one. Both versions were accurate, he said. “There was no more to it than error,” he said.

Updated

Doctors of the World, a charity providing healthcare to refugees, says the government should not be excluding unaccompanied child Syrian refugees in camps in France from its announcement today. This is from Leigh Daynes, its executive director.

It’s great more unaccompanied refugee children will be helped across Europe, but actions must include those children stuck in miserable, freezing conditions in Calais and Dunkirk. These children are enduring a horrible winter, their physical and mental health suffering as a result, and they must be included in the government’s new resettlement programme.

According to Citizens UK, which has been campaigning on behalf of the refugees in France, there are an estimated 250 unaccompanied children in the Calais and Dunkirk camps.

My colleague Rowena Mason was at the Number 10 lobby briefing. The prime minister’s spokesman confirmed that Britain would take some unaccompanied child Syrian refugees who are in Greece or Italy if they have family links with the UK.

Here is more detail from the spokeman’s briefing.

On how many children from Syria region

Ultimately, we will be guided by the UNHCR so we are deliberately not putting a figure on it. If you look at what the UNHCR has said on this, broadly they prefer to keep unaccompanied children in the region because that is where they are from and there is a prospect of reaching a peaceful political settlement that means they can return

home. But clearly there are some vulnerable children who the UNHCR will decide it is the best course of action for them to leave the region and those are the children we are looking at.

Why help for children with a family link in Greece and Italy but not French camps?

It is simply because we are looking at those areas where you see a large amount of refugees arriving and we are trying to protect children as much as possible from exploitation and trafficking.

Is it safe to say it will help less than 3,000 kids?

We’re very deliberately not setting a target. It is is about identifying children that most need our help.

Are you excluding France because you feel there would be a pull factor?

We feel it is right to work closely with the Italian and Greek authorities to identify those who most need help.

Here’s Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Home Office minister, on the child refugee announcement.

International Rescue Committee, the American aid agency run by David Miliband, has put out a statement tentatively welcoming the government’s child refugee announcement. This is from Sanj Srikanthan, its director of policy and practice.

Any initiative by the UK government to scale up its commitments and offer protection to a greater number of vulnerable refugees is welcome. We would like to see particular attention paid to the many thousands of unaccompanied young refugee children already in Europe, who have fled their homeland for sanctuary and are in need of immediate assistance.

Government plans to reunite refugee children from within Europe with family in the UK should be expedited, and the government should also ensure that young girls, who are particularly vulnerable when travelling alone, are urgently prioritised for resettlement.

Updated

What the government is saying about resettling unaccompanied Syria child refugees - Details

Here are the key points from the Home Office ministerial statement about resettling unaccompanied child refugees.

1 - Help for unaccompanied child refugees outside Europe

In the written statement James Brokenshire, the Home Office minister, says the government is launching a new move to help child refugees in the refugee camps in countries bordering Syria. He says:

Today I can announce that the UK Government will work with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to lead a new initiative to resettle unaccompanied children from conflict regions. We have asked the UNHCR to make an assessment of the numbers and needs of unaccompanied children in conflict regions and advise on when it is in the best interests of the child to be resettled in the UK and how that process should be managed. The UNHCR has already been clear that these are likely to be exceptional cases.

The written statement does not say how many of these children are expected to come to the UK, although the phrase about “exceptional cases” implies not many.

But in a press notice issued last night the Home Office said that “several hundred” children would come. Referring specifically to this UNHCR initiative, the press notice said:

It is expected this process will identify several hundred children who will be resettled here.

The written statement also says there will be “a roundtable to invite views from a range of NGOs and local authorities, including UNICEF and Save the Children, on how we can provide more support for children in the region, in transit and domestically to prevent children putting themselves at risk and making dangerous journeys on their own.”

2 - Help for unaccompanied child refugees from inside Europe

The written ministerial statement mentions three initiatives to help children in this category. It does not explicitly say that any of these children will come to the UK, although at the Number 10 lobby briefing it was confirmed that some would be admitted.

A £10m fund. The ministerial statement says:

The Department for International Development is creating a new fund of up to £10 million to support the needs of vulnerable refugee and migrant children in Europe. The fund will include targeted support to meet the specific needs of unaccompanied and separated children who face additional risks. The support will include identifying children who are in need, providing safe places for at risk children to stay, data management to help trace children to their families, and services such as counselling and legal advice.

Helping the European Asylum Support Office. The ministerial statement says:

The UK Government will also commit to providing further resources to the European Asylum Support Office to help in “hotspots” such as Greece and Italy to help identify and register children at risk on first arrival in the EU.

Visit by the anti-slavery commissioner. The ministerial statement says:

The Government is committed to combating child trafficking and understands that unaccompanied children, particularly those in transit, are vulnerable to people traffickers. The Home Secretary has asked the Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Kevin Hyland, to visit the hotspots in Italy and Greece to make an assessment and provide advice on what more can be done to ensure unaccompanied children and others are protected from traffickers.

James Brokenshire, the Home Office minister, has been on Sky News talking about the unaccompanied child refugee announcement. This is from Sky’s Zoe Catchpole.

I will post a summary of his interview shortly.

Farron says 'heartless' Cameron's child refugee announcement does not live up to hype

Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, has condemned David Cameron as “heartless”, saying that his announcement about unaccompanied child refugees was simply about “media management”.

In an interview on Sky News, Farron said that the proposals are not as significant as some of the briefing suggested last night.

[The proposals appear] an awful lot less impressive than they were first briefed out as being. We campaigned for many, many months for the British government to accept the Save the Children recommended figure of 3,000 orphaned refugee children from the camps in Europe, and what we are seeing this morning is a promise of £10m of extra funding; that’s good. But it looks like there will be no children taken from the camps in Europe and it’s important to remember why it’s important that the Government should do that.

One in three of the orphans that presented as refugees, not economic migrants, refugees in Europe in the last two years, one third have gone missing. Trafficked, probably exploited for sexual purposes and other things. This should deeply trouble us as a civilised country and it’s frustrating to say the least that the prime minister, having briefed he was going to do something about this, we find out this morning that he is going to do nothing at all. I think it diminishes him, it diminishes our country, it’s a terrible shame.

Farron said of Cameron: “He is both heartless and and he is foolish.” Cameron was just interested in “media management”, Farron said:

What I wanted to do when I first saw the government press release last night was to welcome it, but the more I look at it the more I realise that it’s just a press release and David Cameron’s reaction to the refugee crisis is just that. It’s about media management, it’s not about solving the crisis.

Updated

The Home Office will be making a written statement soon setting out details of its plans to admit some unaccompanied Syrian child refugees into the UK.

Some information was briefed overnight but, as my colleague Patrick Wintour, the details are still sketchy.

Here’s his story.

And here is how it starts.

The government is under pressure to give more details of a £10m plan to take in more unaccompanied Syrian child refugees and to spell out precisely how many extra children Britain will take from Europe.

Ministers have been under pressure from Save the Children and opposition parties to take 3,000 unaccompanied vulnerable children, in addition to the pre-existing commitment to take 20,000 refugees in the parliament.

Kirsty McNeill, Save the Children campaigns director, welcomed the initiative and said the expected announcement would include “a significant new principle …that they do have a responsibility for children in Europe”.

The Home Office emphasised that the bulk of the children would come from refugee camps on the Syrian border.

But McNeill said on BBC Radio 4 that she understood the government announcement would include a commitment to take some unaccompanied children currently in Italy and Greece if they had a connection with the UK. She claimed there were 26,000 unaccompanied children in Europe.

David Cameron is visiting Aberdeen later today to publicise a new city deal the government has announced for the city. Number 10 says in a news release that it could be worth up to £250m.

George Osborne, the chancellor, has put out this statement about the growth figures. (See 9.38am.)

These figures show Britain continues to grow steadily. Despite turbulence in the global economy, Britain is pushing ahead.

With the risks we see elsewhere in the world, there may be bumpy times ahead – so here in the UK we must stick to the plan that’s cutting the deficit, attracting business investment and creating jobs.

Google defends its tax arrangements

Google has defended its UK tax arrangements. Peter Barron, the company’s European communications chief, has set out his case in a letter to the Financial Times (subscription). Here it is in full.

In all the coverage of Google’s tax settlement, little has been said about the international tax rules and how they work. Corporation tax is paid on profits, not revenue, and is collected where the economic activity that generates those profits takes place. So, if a British pharmaceuticals company sells medicine to Latin America, it is mostly taxed where those products are created, in the UK, rather than where they are consumed. The same applies to Google. As a US company, we pay the bulk of our corporate tax in the US: $3.3bn in the last reported year. What should Google pay in the UK? We pay tax based on the value added by the economic activity of our staff here, at the current standard rate: 20 per cent.

After a six-year audit we are paying the full amount of tax that HM Revenue & Customs agrees we should pay, including £130m in additional back tax. Governments make tax law, the tax authorities independently enforce the law, and Google complies with the law.

The FT has splashed on the story.

Economy grew by 0.5% in final quarter of 2015

Here are the growth figures.

  • The UK economy grew by 0.5% during the fourth quarter of 2015 and by 2.2% over the year.

Here is the Office for National Statistics news summary.

Google investor says firm should pay more tax

The Times is splashing on a story saying one of Google’s biggest British shareholders wants the company to pay “much more” tax in the UK (paywall).

James Anderson, whose investment trust owns £120 million of shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said that it was time for Google and other multinationals such as Facebook voluntarily to pay far higher tax rates in the countries where they operated.

He called on US technology companies to campaign for a “reasonable” rate of global profit tax of 15 to 20 per cent, far higher than the 3 per cent that Google’s critics claim that it pays in the UK.

Mr Anderson, who runs the £3 billion Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and has a formidable reputation among technology investors, is the first British institutional investor in Google to publicly demand that it do more after the settlement with HM Revenue & Customs announced on Friday ...

“My take remains that it is in the longterm interests of Google and others of that ilk to pay decent rates of tax and that they and others would be best served in taking the lead in volunteering this,” Mr Anderson told The Times. That meant paying “much more” UK tax. “They are beneficiaries of state spending at many levels and in return they would get respect,” he said.

Updated

There are two urgent questions in the Commons today.

On the Today programme Dame Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP and former chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said that she also thought the European Commission should investigate the UK’s Google tax deal.

The whole thing here is that we need greater transparency. If we think it is unfair we lose confidence in the integrity of the tax system.

I think the time has come for these very big companies who are quoted on the stock exchange anyway, that they should open up these negotiations that they have with HMRC ... so you see the assets, you see the business that takes place here in the UK, we see the profits they make and then we can all judge that they pay a fair rate of tax.

David Cameron has this morning announced measures to help the north of England recover from the Christmas floods. The government will spent £1m on a PR campaign to encourage people to visit the region during the Easter break. And £2m has been allocated to fix bridges, rebuild walls and restore footpaths in the Lake District National Park. In a statement Cameron said:

From York Minster to Honister Mine, Carlisle Castle to the Leeds Armories, the North has some of the most iconic tourist attractions the UK has to offer. So it is absolutely right that we do everything we can to make sure these businesses feel supported and ready to receive visitors.

The measures we’ve announced today are an important step, showcasing the best the region’s tourist industry has to offer while helping one of its key attractions in the Lake District National Park get back on its feet.

Updated

My colleague Matthew Weaver has written up more details of Margrethe Vestager’s interview with the Today programme here.

And here’s an extract.

Asked whether she would investigate, Vestager said: “If we find that there is something to be concerned about, if someone writes to us and says ‘maybe this is not as it should be’, then we will take a look.”

She added: “We should be in a union where everyone has a fair chance of making it. If you are in a small innovative company … the bigger ones shouldn’t close the market and disable your opportunity to find customers” ....

Vestager has been chairing an inquiry on whether the iPhone-maker Apple should pay hundreds of billions of euro in back taxes it has avoiding by channelling profits through Ireland.

Vestager said it was “way, way too early to conclude on that case”. But she set out the commission’s general stance on tax breaks. “Just as it is illegal to give a selective advantage in the form of a grant, it is as illegal to give a selective benefit by saying ‘you don’t have to pay your taxes’ because two companies may compete door-to-door for the same customers, more or less on the same products on price, quality, service.

“If one company doesn’t pay the taxes then obviously this company has a stronger position in that competition. That’s why we can use state-aid tools to look for more individual companies and more selective advantages being given out in the form of tax rulings.”

George Osborne will be giving interviews about Google today.

On the Today programme this morning Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said that if she received a complaint, she was willing to launch an investigation into the UK’s tax deal with Google. She said that “sweetheart deals” for large multinationals involving tax could count as “illegal state aid”.

Asked if there would be an investigation, she replied:

That is way too early to say because I don’t know the details of the deal. If we find there is something to be concerned about, if someone writes to us and says this is maybe not as it should be, then we will take a look.

Well, she’s not going to have to wait long. There should be at least two letters heading for her inbox soon.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has just announced that he is asking Vestager to look into this. In a statement he said:

I’m asking the European Commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestger, to look into the Google tax deal because, after a week in which George Osborne has hid from our calls for transparency and scrutiny of his tax deal with Google, and given further reports this week of other EU members appearing to claw back more money from big multinationals like Google, then we need to ensure that the deal the chancellor struck was not one that undermines our tax system and is not a deal that fires the gun on a new race to the bottom for corporation tax in Europe.

And the SNP is also asking Vestager to get involved. Stuart Hosie, the SNP’s Treasury spokesman, put out a statement saying:

There is a palpable sense of scepticism amongst the public, experts and even within the Conservative Party, that the tax settlement reached with Google represents value for the taxpayer.

The truth is that we know very little about the settlement reached between the tax authorities and the company. These discussions have taken place in private, little detail has been revealed by the Treasury and the methodologies employed by HMRC are shrouded in secrecy.

The government must restore public confidence that they have acted in the best interests of the public and have secured a good deal for taxpayers across the UK. They must also answer the charges that the methodology used by the HMRC to calculate future liabilities is opaque, and a potential breach of very clear EU regulations on calculating the tax liabilities of large corporations. The only way to put these two issues beyond doubt, is to refer the settlement to the European Commissioner for examination. A commissioner who is independent of the UK Government, and who has a reputation for pursuing tax transparency.

Working people and small and medium businesses do not have the luxury of negotiating down the amount of tax they have to pay – and we must now have independent verification that Google has not been extended that luxury by this government.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Growth figures for the final quarter of 2015 are published.

12.30pm: Stephen Crabb, the Welsh secretary, gives a speech on Europe in Cardiff. He will say that is is in favour of Britain remaining in a reformed EU.

As usual, I will also be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I will post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.

If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on@AndrewSparrow.

I try to monitor the comments BTL but normally I find it impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer direct questions, although sometimes I miss them or don’t have time. Alternatively you could post a question to me on Twitter.

Updated

 

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