So it looks as though that Ed Miliband has won his battle with Lord Fink. The Tory peer has given an interview to the Evening Standard in which he says he did use ‘vanilla’ tax avoidance measures. He told the newspaper:
‘The expression tax avoidance is so wide that everyone does tax avoidance at some level.’
Fink then says he doesn’t want to sue Miliband for saying that he ‘did ordinary tax avoidance’, but that he ‘took exception to’ the suggestion that he was dodgy and that he had questions to answer.
This means that Miliband can quite easily repeat the specific comment he made about Fink in the Commons yesterday, which was this:
‘Let us talk about the difference between the Prime Minister and me. None of those people has given a penny on my watch, and he is up to his neck in this. Let us take Stanley Fink, who gave £3 million to the Conservative party. The Prime Minister actually appointed him as treasurer of the party and gave him a peerage for good measure. Will he now explain what steps he is going to take about the tax avoidance activities of Lord Fink?’
It was in the next question that Miliband said Cameron was a ‘dodgy Prime Minister surrounded by dodgy donors’.
This was a high-stakes decision by the Labour leader to launch into a pitched battle with Fink, but Fink’s interview has vindicated that decision. Miliband thinks he strengthens his leadership through fights, but had he faced legal action, he would have found party colleagues questioning that strategy. Now we can expect many more of these David-and-Goliath moments.
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