This caught my eye. The Telegraph has quoted Bill Cash MP as saying: "What is lawful is appropriate." Oh dear. Cash has serious questions to answer, David Cameron has said following the disclosure that "he claimed more than £15,000 in taxpayer-funded expenses to pay his daughter rent for her London flat".
There are parallels between the MPs' expenses scandal and the tax avoidance debate. No doubt some of the MPs who have been criticising businesses for acting outside the spirit of the law are now suspected of bending their own rules on expenses.
The BBC News website's City diarists are enjoying "a little peace and quite (sic) as attention is still focused on MPs and their expenses and not on the City". "Anthony" has observed that:
"People in the City approach the expenses issue in a rather pragmatic way. City firms have whole departments dedicated to finding a way of reducing tax liabilities in a legitimate way. They do not question the moral aspect of what they prefer to call tax planning. Applying that logic to MPs' expenses and the view in the City would be that they were acting within the rules and the rules were deliberately lax, which indicated that this was a reasonable way to supplement their income without incurring the voters' wrath about an old fashioned pay rise. In the City morals do not come into it which is probably why so many people outside the City detest the way we operate."
I wonder whether that's a fair assessment, or representative of most City workers' views.
[Update 30 May: See this earlier post on the difference between "tax planning" and "tax avoidance".]
