Crackdown on tax claim

A TAX crackdown on millionaire politicians and businessmen could spare poorer people from some of the worst of the UK Government's spending cuts, Lothians MSP and Labour peer George Foulkes has claimed.

He pointed to Chancellor George Osborne's claim that those with the broadest shoulders should bear the greatest burden and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's remark that tax avoidance, as opposed to evasion, was legal but morally unacceptable.

Lord Foulkes said: "If we clamped down on the multi-millionaires, including those in the Cabinet and the Prime Minister's new business advisory committee, we could raise enough to mean we didn't have to do some of the awful things in welfare which will make poor people worse off."