My Lords, I am going to say something that I do not think I have ever said before: I have really enjoyed this debate. Virtually every noble Lord who has spoken has said, “I support this Bill but …”—and then has proceeded to give a list of reasons why it really is not a very good Bill. My noble friend Lady Bennett suggested that I was going to go into detail but, until this debate started, I thought I was going to follow the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, who has written an excellent 11-page
briefing on the Bill, with three and a half pages that outline all the problems with it. I recommend that the Minister takes my copy afterwards and does something over the weekend to brush the Bill up a little.
The past two weeks have been very stressful, even being on the sidelines of watching a European war, and this seems to be the least we can do to actually fight part of that war for Ukraine. We all know that global capitalism is out of control—at least we really ought to know that by now. The mega-rich have been able to abuse their power and their wealth for far too long through investor visas, complex trusts and corporate structures, political donations—more of that in a moment—private schools, aggressive tax avoidance and legal tax loopholes. The mega-rich are actually able to pick and choose whether they obey the same rules and obligations as the rest of us have to do. It seems to me that we really need to get to grips with this. Governments all around the world allow them to get away with it. Worse, they lay out the red carpet and cut the red tape to try to attract them. We are told that cracking down on such people will just create unintended consequences and force them to flee to other countries. Well, we can hope.
These problems have been obvious for a long time, and this Government have ignored them for their 12 years in office. While I also welcome measures in the Bill and accept that it is urgent—because of course it has been urgent for quite a number of years—the Government have to face the shameful fact that they have dithered and delayed, until they have been forced to act by an illegal war. When a hard-line version of Brexit was pushed through Parliament in 2020—and I voted for Brexit; I did not realise that any Government could mess it up to this extent—we had 14 Ministers in Boris Johnson’s Government who had received donations from individuals or companies linked to Russia. Is that the reason why this economic crime Bill is so late and the measures in it so limited? Do the £3.5 million in Russian donations in the decade following 2010 explain why we have ignored Russian interference in our politics, why our intelligence services were not allowed to dig deep into the network of rich Russians and Conservative Party politicians, and why Parliament failed to push forward with the concerns brought to light by the Russia report?
I asked, I think last week—time goes so strangely here—what Russian donors to the Conservative Party get for their money. This is a question that the whole country would like to know the answer to. Is that money stopping the Government putting sanctions on large numbers of rich people who are close to Putin? Do the donations explain why we have fewer sanctions on Russia than the EU, Canada or even Switzerland? There are only just over 300 UK sanctions against Russia, 35 of which have been introduced since 22 February; and, before that, so few. By comparison, the US has sanctioned almost 1,200 individuals and companies, and a fifth of those sanctions have been introduced in the past two weeks.
So London is still a playground for oligarchs, oil barons and outright financial fraudsters—and, as has been said, it is not just Russians; there are unsavoury elites from almost every country on earth. This new
legislation has to be used against all illegitimate, dubious members of the global elite, not used simply as a political tool against whoever we think our enemies are at that particular point. There has to be a constant tightening of the laws that constrain the mega-rich. The Government cannot be allowed to rest on this singular piece of legislation—or this double piece of legislation—and say, “We did it”. I regret that there is no sort of sunset clause so that we can look beyond this—the Bill definitely needs better writing.
The Bill can only be a starting point. The upcoming Queen’s Speech must include a raft of legislation to take these issues forward further and faster than many Tory voters or Back-Benchers might feel comfortable with. We really have to do more, and the Bill is only the start. The noble Lords who have explained this evening where we should be going really have to be listened to.
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