David Cameron didn’t spend yesterday wringing his hands in Downing Street about the progress of his gay marriage bill: he was meeting his business advisory group. He allowed Google CEO Eric Schmidt to sneak out via the No 10 back door, a rather awkward metaphor for the company’s tax arrangements.
The Prime Minister is well aware of rising public anger about tax avoidance, and the rise of Margaret Hodge, who has a Calvinist preacher tendency in her role as chair of the Public Accounts Committee. His spokesman yesterday explained that ‘we don’t talk about individual companies’ tax affairs’ (forgetting perhaps that Cameron managed to irritate Starbucks when he told multinationals to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ in his Davos speech), but that he would be taking the business advisory group through his G8 agenda and ‘he certainly is going to raise tax’.
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