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Quite extraordinary. The idea that parliamentary control of taxation should be handed to an unelected "specialist" body and the concept of no taxation without representation holed below the water line. I have no doubt that the members of this committee are highly educated, intelligent and, at one level, thoughtful people. Can they please stop, reflect and think about astonishing suggestion they have made. Have they danced so long to the tune of international capital, and are they so unaware of the threat to democracy that it represents, that they wholly lack a perspective on what they say? I don't disagree with their view of much tax legislation as being poorly thought out. But the fact of the matter is that that legislation is, as David Williams points out, driven by the relentless tax avoidance "industry" of which the City law firms and accountancy firms are such ardent pushers. Cloaking their proposal in the dry and apparently dispassionate terms they do does not disguise the double-speak of their suggestion. When a need for tax legislation emerges who do the Government consult as "specialists in the area" but the City law and accounting firms. Quite why the gamekeepers (of both political hues) have concluded that the answer lies in appointing more poachers is baffling. The effect of this vicious circle is obvious. A small group of professionals has, in practice, exclusive insight to and influence on Government policy across all areas of taxation. Those professionals earn their living from huge organisations one of whose leitmotifs is to avoid the payment of tax wherever and whenever possible. The said professionals then engage in a series of intellectual gymnastics purporting to advise Government, often seconding key poachers into the gamekeeper's office. They then criticise the legislation which emerges and use their knowledge to contrive new avoidance techniques, all the while putting up a barrage of sound and fury, inveighing against the alleged iniquities of the policy and legislation in question. I wonder who might get appointed to this new quango if it were ever to be created.......?