Even though, as Fraser argued last week, Google has done nothing wrong in agreeing to pay £130 million to settle its UK tax claims, MPs were in a furious mood about the agreement when they discussed it in the Commons this afternoon. John McDonnell asked an urgent question on the deal, and found, unusually, that he had support from across the House.
It wasn’t just Labour MPs who stood up to condemn what they saw as one standard for their constituents, who are hounded by the taxman over relatively small claims, and another for big powerful multinationals like Google. Tory MPs joined in, too, with Steve Baker telling David Gauke that the deal was ‘at once derisory, substantial, lawful and completely unacceptable to the public’. Gauke looked a little weary as his Conservative colleague Matt Warman, a former Telegraph journalist who has covered Google’s tax arrangements over the years, asked him whether any other country had offered Google such a generous deal.
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