Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Balls struggles to land punches in tax showdown with George Osborne

Naturally, when George Osborne and Ed Balls squared up in the Commons this afternoon for a showdown on the HSBC tax row, it wasn’t a particularly pretty affair. There was shouting, heckling, yowling – and the backbenchers were pretty aerated, too. Indeed, the Tories had turned up intending to throw the Shadow Chancellor off pace before he’d even started, shouting ‘ANSWER’ at him every time he tried to say a single word.

Balls had clearly turned up thinking that dragging the Chancellor to the Commons to answer his urgent question was victory enough. But an urgent question is only a victory if the minister responding leaves the Chamber thinking that he or she needs to get onto their officials for a more detailed briefing because the row has got bigger. Today’s Urgent Question did not do that. Osborne managed to answer the five questions that Balls had posed on HSBC rather quickly. Here are the questions and the answers:

1. Why has there only been one prosecution out of 1,100 names? Was the “selective prosecution policy” a decision made by Ministers?

Osborne said Gordon Brown set out the approach to prosecuting cases of suspected serious tax fraud in 2002, and again in 2005 when HMRC was created.

2. When were you first made aware of these files, what action did you take and did you discuss it with the prime minister?

Osborne said he read about the files in 2009 as Shadow Chancellor, and could not discuss it with the Prime Minister ‘because I was not on speaking terms with him’.

3. Why did you and David Cameron appoint Lord Green as a Conservative peer and Minister months after the government received these files?

Osborne turned this one back on the Labour party, too, pointing out that they too ‘thought he would do a good job as trade minister’ and that the Labour government had given Green a job as chair of the Prime Minister’s business council.

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