Among the party’s experts on tax avoidance is a former City lawyer who wrote that ‘taxation is legalised extortion’
In February 2016, the Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge went on the warpath. She tweeted: “I hear Edward Troup to head HMRC … Good news for big biz. Bad news for ordinary taxpayers.” Repeating her criticism to this paper, she described Sir Edward Troup as “a rather anonymous-looking person, but incredibly powerful”. This week, the Labour party created a new panel of experts to help it crack down on tax avoidance. Of its four members, two will be Sir Edward … and Dame Margaret. To use a 2016-era term: awks.
This is no mere clash of personalities. It cuts to the core of where Labour stands on tax. In a distinguished career, Sir Edward has been a corporate lawyer in the City, an adviser to the Treasury and a commentator on tax affairs. In that last role, he wrote in the Financial Times in 1999 that “taxation is legalised extortion”. In 2004, he told MPs on the Treasury select committee: “I would not like to support anything which is perceived as tax avoidance, but you have got to remember that this is money left in the economy and this is not necessarily a bad thing for the economy.”
