After being told by the Tories that he has ‘questions to answer’ on the BBC story about HSBC, Ed Balls has decided to tell the Tories that they have ‘questions to answer’ on the story too. The Speaker has just granted Shabana Mahmood an urgent question in the Commons demanding that the Chancellor answer Labour’s questions about the story.
The Shadow Chancellor said that ‘there are very serious questions for George Osborne and David Cameron to answer today’.
His questions are why has there only been one prosecution out of 1,100 individual implicated in allegations about tax evasion and why Stephen Green, former Chairman of HSBC, was appointed a minister after the government was informed of the bank’s activities.
Given David Gauke spent this morning talking about ‘questions to answer’, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that the whole urgent question will consist of each side telling the other that it has ‘questions to answer’, without offering any answers of its own.
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