Cameron did not comment on the 130 million pound settlement but said he had been genuinely angry over Google’s failure to pay much tax, adding that this largely occurred when Labour was in power from 1997 to 2010.
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Responding to a question on corporate tax from the Labour leader during Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Cameron called his stance “laughable”.
Lord Kinnock – who led Labour from 1983 to 1992, taking the party to two general election defeats – said he agreed with many MPs and trade unionists who say that Mr Corbyn won last year’s leadership contest and must be given “some space”.
“No government, and certainly not the last Labour government”.
“One of the lessons of the Shoah…is that is all too easy to dehumanise other people, to turn them from human beings with lives and needs and hopes into a problem to be repelled”, he said.
David Cameron has warned Londoners they would become the “lab rats” for Jeremy Corbyn’s “disastrous political experiment” if Labour’s Sadiq Khan is elected next Mayor of London.
Cameron made the comment Wednesday during the weekly question and answer session as he was attacking Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has visited camps in northern France where thousands of refugees are living in poor conditions.
Corbyn told the Commons that the £130m to be paid by Google amounted to an effective tax rate of just 3%, but Cameron disputed this figure without saying what the actual rate was.
“Millions of people are this week filling in their tax returns to get them in by the 31st”, he said.
“And I have to say to you, you can if you want criticise HMRC but HMRC’s work is investigated by the National Audit Office and when they did that they found that the settlements that they have reached with companies are fair, that is how it works”.
Mr Cameron’s comments instantly drew fire on Twitter and former home secretary Yvette Cooper immediately raised a point of order calling on the Prime Minister to withdraw his comments.
He asked if the Government has considered “introducing some turnover tax as an alternative to corporation tax, in circumstances where such companies are shuffling their corporation tax to other countries”, arguing that a “turnover tax would be something they could not avoid”. “Call Gordon Brown – apparently you can get him at a Californian bond dealer called Pimco”.
A Labour source rejected the suggestion that the party would “open the doors” to migrants, pointing out that Mr Corbyn had said priority should be given to refugees – particularly children – with links to Britain and that applications should be processed more quickly.
“I think what everybody forgets is that in the heat of things one says things that you might say in a conversation, by way of example, but you wouldn’t necessarily say when it was analysed and picked apart”, she told BBC Radio 4’s World At One.
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“Those are the people to blame for Google not paying their taxes, we’re the ones who got them to pay”.
