Tom Harris: Last week, the Prime Minister told me and the House that the Government were investing an extra £900 million to combat tax avoidance. In fact, as Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs will confirm, no such investment is taking place, and HMRC is facing a 15% cut in its budget. So is the Prime Minister guilty of fact avoidance or fact evasion?
Tom Harris: Allow me to present a tale of two companies. The first is Red Hot Comics in my constituency, which employs seven people and pays every penny of the tax that is due, on time. Its main competitor, Amazon UK, brings in revenue of up to £4.5 billion, and yet last year it paid less than £1 million in tax. Will the Prime Minister follow the example of the French Government, who have issued a back...
Tom Harris: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs whether he plans to put in place interim measures to prevent any potential damage to conservation features in the proposed marine conservation zones before those zones are designated.
Tom Harris: May I begin with an apology to those on the Treasury Bench? I have a mild chest infection, so if I cough at any point, I would not want the spores to carry across the debating Chamber and then for me to be blamed in a couple of days’ time if they come down with the dreaded lurgy. May I also say how delighted I am that the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs,...
Tom Harris: May I make a small technical point? The hon. Gentleman just mentioned prevailing winds from the east, but I think that he meant the west.
Tom Harris: Prevailing winds?
Tom Harris: This is certainly the worst crisis that the BBC has faced for at least nine years. Does the Secretary of State agree that if the editorial policy of the BBC is in need of review, then that review must be done by independent professional journalists and not by middle managers or by Government Ministers, and certainly not by Members of the House of Lords?
Tom Harris: May I associate myself and my constituents with the comments made this morning by the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State? As Remembrance Sunday is just around the corner, some of us will remember with horror and sadness the events of 1987 at Enniskillen. Will the Secretary of State reassure us that appropriate security measures have been put in place this...
Tom Harris: My hon. Friend provokes me into one more intervention. She said earlier that where something on the internet is offensive, rude or defamatory there should be processes to resolve that. Offensive and rude are not remotely, and never will be, illegal. Defamatory is illegal. I ask her once again to draw that distinction. Something being offensive does not necessarily mean that anyone has to...
Tom Harris: Don’t look at me!
Tom Harris: An aspect of that has been raised with me. One potential problem with the opt-in system—the hon. Lady will probably be able to answer this—is that there are numerous teenagers who cannot rely on being able to speak to their parents about sensitive sexual health issues. With an opt-in filter when signing up to a new internet service provider, I am told that there would be a danger of...
Tom Harris: Does my hon. Friend not accept that putting “objectionable” in with “illegal” poses a danger to freedom of expression? The two terms mean completely different things. As a party that has generally supported freedom of speech, surely we should protect the right of someone to be offended if they so wish, or to say something offensive, as long as it is not illegal. We should be careful...
Tom Harris: I feared that the debate was heading in that direction. Can we just be absolutely clear that the deaths and injuries throughout the world were not caused by the YouTube video, obnoxious and appalling though it was? They were caused by fanatics who chose to resort to violence against innocent people. No one forced them to do that.
Tom Harris: On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I do not want to try your patience, but I wonder whether you could offer me some advice on the circumstances in which a Minister has made not only a contentious statement but a statement that can be proved absolutely untrue. Taking a random example plucked from the air, a Minister might have said that the Queen’s Speech contained a specific measure, yet it...
Tom Harris: Further to a point of order that I raised in the House yesterday evening, Mr Speaker. Have you received any notification from the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), that he intends to apologise to the House, or at least clarify the comments that he made yesterday in the First Delegated Legislation...
Tom Harris: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many successful appellants against an Atos assessment that deemed them fit for work were subsequently reassessed by Atos within (a) three, (b) six, (c) nine and (d) 12 months.
Tom Harris: I apologise for interrupting the flow of the debate, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I need to raise an important point of order. It will be recorded in tomorrow’s Hansard that the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), told Members that the Government’s commitment to introducing a ban on the use of wild animals in...
Tom Harris: Will the Leader of the House offer a helping hand to Scotland’s First Minister, who recently mislaid some important legal advice on the future of an independent Scotland in the EU? We have searched everywhere for it. It may be under the sofa; the First Minister may have left it on a bus; his dog may have eaten it—we just do not know. It could have been mislaid in the Foreign Office—and...
Tom Harris: The Secretary of State blames the NFU for stopping the cull and the media blame No.10, but either way we can all understand the Secretary of State’s reluctance to take responsibility for this setback. May I ask him, on a scale of one to 100—I know that is a risky prospect, as arithmetic is not his Department’s strongest suit—how likely it is that the cull will go ahead next June?
Tom Harris: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many licences for culling badgers have been applied for under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992 to date.