David Davis
MP for Goole and Pocklington · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on putting a Bill in front of the House that has support from literally everybody in the Chamber?”
“The Post Office Horizon scandal highlighted the institutional instinct to find a convenient scapegoat. Innocent people paid the price, while the institution sought to protect itself. If the Thirlwall inquiry asks too narrow a set of questions, systemic NHS failures will go unexamined.”
“Last month’s sentencing of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband exposed the real reasons behind the Scottish Government’s persecution of Alex Salmond. From 2010 to 2022, Peter Murrell abused his position to embezzle almost £500,000 from the SNP to buy luxury items. He used SNP money to buy a £33,000 Volkswagen Golf.”
“The consultants also reported that in the two months since the change infants have been sick but recovered as expected.” The report highlighted deficiencies in staffing levels, leadership and communication, but, in the trial, it was not shown to the jury—they knew nothing of it.”
“One of the nurses let go later described it as “the decimation of the Nursing and Midwifery service”, adding that “eight registered nurses...were replaced with nursery nurses...unqualified staff are replacing qualified staff”.”
“There was little space, cots and incubators were stored in corridors, and mothers struggled to find somewhere to breastfeed their babies. Susan Gilby, the hospital’s chief executive between 2018 and 2022, later described the unit as “dark, dingy and cramped”, providing a “less than ideal” environment to work in.”
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“My hon. Friend and I have fought together in other battles, not least Brexit, with one thing being that we viewed Britain as rather distinctive. Does he, as I do, see it as shameful that the one thing we are distinctive on in this case is that we are the only country in Europe that allows the indefinite detention of people in our country?”
“Austria, at Vienna airport, manages to carry out tests in two to three hours, from test to result. Will the Leader of the House consider instituting that here? Every morning between 8 am and 9.30 am, and perhaps if we start late until 12.30, every person who comes into the Chamber could be tested and then we would not need the 2 m rule anymore. Then we can suddenly have back the Parliament that was, and is, the envy of the world.”
“It must be the easiest thing in the world—I have done this a few times—to come to the Dispatch Box and deal with this House as it currently stands. A large part of that arises because of the 2 m rule, and the fact that we can have only 50 people in the Chamber. The atmosphere, drive, ferocity and the mood of the House just do not exist. We have to think about how we get back to normal, and how quickly we can do that. Clearly, we have to do it in a safe way, both for ourselves and as an example to our constituents and the country. I can think of only one way that could be done. According to Government numbers, we currently have a surplus of 80,000 tests a day. So we are not short of tests anymore. We may not be exercising them all, but we have that surplus.”
“If the Leader of the House wants to see how that is not working properly, an example was given earlier: the six-person limit on gatherings, which has not been enforced of course, and truthfully cannot be enforced in a democracy. That would never have happened had the measure had to go through the proper procedures of this House. Similarly, the daft quarantine regulations we now have would never have survived the normal procedures of the House. Democracy is critical to good government, and that is not what we are seeing here today. I know it has always been an ambition of the Leader of the House to make the European Parliament look great. Well, he has succeeded today. I have one controversial point to make, which comes down to this: this House has no life. It does not challenge Ministers properly.”
“I will start by saying that I agreed wholeheartedly, and almost entirely, with the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), who opened the debate, and with every word of the remarks by my right hon. Friends the Members for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) and for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper). I agreed with the Leader of the House when he said that democracy is not an optional extra, or words to that effect, but the operation of democracy today, as we observe it in the House, is more enfeebled than I have seen it in 33 years here. That is a tragedy of the Government’s making, and one that we need to fix as soon as possible. The aim of the House is to hold the Government to account, but also to drive the direction of policy.”
“So, I will vote for this motion today, if we have the opportunity, but only in the expectation that we will be back here in nine months’ time to do all this again.”
“In short, they are ‘zero-rights employees’”. That is, zero-rights employees effectively created by the state. The Lords recommended that the Government adopt the Taylor review proposals, which we as a Government promised to do years ago, as they offer the best long-term alternative solution to the off-payroll rules and provide an opportunity to consider tax, rights and risk together, as they should be. Despite what the Financial Secretary said, however, the Treasury has neither the time nor the capacity for a wholesale review right now. Therefore, the only sensible course of action is to pause these reforms and take the time to properly review the impact they will have on the self-employed.”
“In that light, they were studied by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee in a report referred to by the shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury. The report stated that the rules “have never worked satisfactorily, throughout the whole of their 20-year history. We therefore conclude that this framework is flawed.” The report found a system riddled with unfairness and unintended consequences and called for a wide-scale independent review—not just a few research reports, Financial Secretary—focused on how the reforms would affect the wider labour market and the costs that would be forced on businesses. The Lords Committee said that IR35 had the effect of reducing contractors to “an undesirable ‘halfway house’: they do not enjoy the rights that come with employment, yet they are considerably employees for tax purposes.”
“In the light of the impact that coronavirus is having across all sectors of the economy, the Government have rightly committed, in the motion, to postponing the planned reforms to IR35, but only until next April. The effects of the pandemic are going to be felt for considerably longer than one year. On this basis, in April next year self-employed contractors will be hit with unnecessary costs, confusion and uncertainty, just as many of them are getting back on their feet after the coronavirus has wreaked havoc across the economy. It is the self-employed and small businesses that make up the beating heart of our economy, and they will power the recovery of our economy out of this crisis. The IR35 rules, as the Minister said, have long applied to the public sector. This is about applying them across the private sector.”
“In September this year, we will be in the middle of the recession that we are about to face. Given the hundreds of billions of pounds that the Treasury has already committed to supporting business to get us out of this recession, it would take a relatively trivial amount to write off the damaging loan charge policy. Originally, the Treasury forecast that it would raise £3.2 billion from the policy, and less than £2.5 billion from employees. What does the Minister estimate he will now raise?”
“Conditions and a time for release should be set. That is why I intend to table amendments limiting migrant detention to 28 days and providing robust judicial oversight. This was backed before, at the last turn of this Bill, by a cross-party group of MPs, as well as by the Select Committee on Home Affairs and the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I will finish by saying this simple thing: the UK has a proud tradition of civil liberties and the rule of law, and it is time to honour that by bringing an end to this damaging and unjust policy.”
“She had fled her home in China after her husband was sentenced to death for drug offences. She was told that she was being taken elsewhere in China. After days of travel, when the doors of her vehicle finally opened, she was not in China, but in rural Britain, where she was forced into prostitution and several years of unpaid work—slavery by another name—under threat of being reported to the immigration authorities. She was then arrested during a raid, taken to Yarl’s Wood and held indefinitely. Anna’s story is not an isolated case; as a country, we detain about 25,000 individuals each year for immigration purposes. Any situation in which the state strips people of their liberty requires the highest possible level of scrutiny and accountability. The purpose of any incarceration should be clear.”
“Detention is meant to facilitate deportation, but we routinely detain people for extraordinary lengths of time without deporting them. By the end of 2019, the individual detained for the longest period had been in a holding centre for 1,002 days —nearly three years. These people are detained without trial or due process, without oversight and without basic freedom, and they are carrying the destabilising psychological burden of having no idea when they will be released. This flies in the face of centuries of British civil liberties and the rule of law. For the most part, these detainees are not hardened criminals—they are frequently the victims of human trafficking, sexual assault and torture—yet we treat them as criminals, with little compassion at all. Let me tell one story, that of Anna, a Chinese woman who speaks no English.”
“It is always a privilege to follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, and I will pick up on one or two of the things she said. The core purpose of the Bill is to deliver on the 2016 mandate of taking back control of our borders, so it is no surprise that I wholeheartedly approve of that policy, although I say to those on both Front Benches that I have always presumed that control of our own borders allows us to create policies that protect the interests of sectors such as care homes and their dedicated workers, and I trust we will do that. The House should also use this opportunity to put right some deep and long-standing injustices at the heart of our immigration system. As it stands, illegal migrants can be held and detained indefinitely in psychologically inhumane conditions.”
“I finish by coming back to the point made by the Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee. The best way to protect both the NHS and the lives of our citizens is the approach taken by other countries, and that is to use testing, tracking and tracing to isolate the illness as well as to bring it down. The Prime Minister talked about the R number; that is just an average. The R number in my constituency, a rural area, is lower than that for a care home. We must put all the resources—”
“We can see it in the excess mortality rates. Indeed, Britain holds the highest place in Europe, equal with Spain I am afraid, for the highest excess mortality over this period, so the combined effect of these strategies has to be looked at very carefully indeed. Bear in mind that throughout this time our intensive care unit capacity was used only to 81%. That is normal for this time of year. The Nightingale hospitals stood almost empty, and now only 30% of ICU capacity is being taken up by covid-19 patients. Did we get this balance wrong? Did we, at the cost of lives, just give ourselves empty beds, rather than doing the best thing for the patients the NHS is there to look after? That is not the fault of the staff of the NHS; it is a question of whether the strategy was the wrong one to pursue once we were where we were.”
“The second question is: we applied triage on the basis of the so-called frailty index so that people who got a poor score on the frailty index were simply put on palliative care, again partly to protect intensive care unit capacity, so did that strategy cost lives? Two Members—my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith)—have already raised the question of care homes. We discharged patients from hospital early, when some of them still had this disease, into care homes, with the consequences that we have heard in graphic terms already. Did that strategy cost lives? The final thing we did to protect capacity was that we cancelled operations for other illnesses—cancer and other illnesses—and that almost undoubtedly cost lives.”
“My question for the Minister when she winds up is: did the strategy we pursued in good faith to protect the national health service exacerbate, in some respects, the death rate? In addition to the lockdown, we did four things to protect the NHS and to protect it from being overwhelmed by the pressure on it. First off, we asked people with the illness to self-isolate at home and come to hospital only when the symptoms got really bad. When they did exactly this—exactly the same thing—in New York City, some of the doctors noticed that the patients were arriving in emergency too late, frankly, to be rescued. Their disease had advanced too fast, although they could have been cured earlier. My first question is: did that strategy cost lives?”
“For example, Greece, perhaps surprisingly, has controlled it much better than many of the others. It has about 15 deaths per million of the population versus us at about 477 at the moment. Those mistakes have cost thousands, if not tens of thousands of lives. A primary mistake, as pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells, was the failure to test, track, trace and contain from the very beginning. I would like to speak, in the brief time I have, about what we did once the disease took hold, because I think there are also potential mistakes there. The Government adopted a slogan—“protect the NHS, save lives”—which we all, including myself, took to enthusiastically and enthusiastically signed up to.”
“It is always a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). May I commend in the strongest possible terms the speech that has just been made by the Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), who has given the best analysis I have heard today of the mistakes we have made? While I am at it, I also commend the Chairman of the Health and Social Care Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), who made a similarly incisive speech earlier. We should be honest: most of the western nations have handled this crisis badly. They have made mistakes, mostly in being late to control the virus—not all of them; some are different.”
“I commend the Secretary of State for his heroic efforts in our defence so far. Given that the proscription on travel is now legal and not simply a recommendation, will he give us some clarification on what is meant by the care exemption, and confirm that it does not apply just to professional carers? At the moment, and since special schools have been closed in the last week, a great deal of support has been given from one family to another, for example in providing respite care for special needs children. That is very important and the people doing it are often being very responsible about self-isolation, which they are already applying to their families. Will that continue to be possible, and will my right hon. Friend enable it in future?”
“We probably have more than half a million undocumented migrants in this country—people who, if they fall ill with coronavirus, might be afraid to declare themselves to the health authorities for fear of deportation. The Irish Government, who have the same issue in Ireland, have firewalled their national health service data from other parts of government. I do not know whether that is the right answer, but will the Secretary of State look at the issue and find a similar resolution?”
“I commend the Secretary of State for accepting the six-month review that he has just announced, but in the event that the House decides that one element of the Bill is working badly, will we be able to amend or strike out that element, or will we have to take the whole thing or reject it at that six-month point?”
“We need to think forward, and I say that because we have seen in Europe—between Germany, Italy and Spain—very similar policy actions but with completely different outcomes. I suspect that it is because of a different approach taken by the German Government and society from that taken by the Italians or the Spanish, and we have to think about that as we go into the next stage.”
“I commend the hon. Gentleman for the stance he is taking in this debate. The whole House will respect him for it. The series of interventions that he has just taken demonstrates a wider point: the need for the Government, sadly—I did not think I would ever say this in this House—to get into intrusive levels of planning that we have never seen before, because every time we have a change in the level of ferocity or intensity of our dictating what the state and society should do, we run into a new set of problems, whether that is crowding on tube trains overwhelming our desire for social distancing, or young mothers with children at home finding it very difficult to get to supermarkets and therefore literally running out of food, which is even more fundamental than running out of money.”
“That was precisely why I asked the Secretary of State whether, when we get to the six-month review and renewal of this legislation, we will be able to amend it. If there is oppressive behaviour in one part or another of it while the rest is all very important to the survival of our people, what stance will the Labour party take?”
“The right hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. As he knows, I have an amendment in Committee to change two years to one year. I asked the Health Secretary whether we would be able to amend or delete an element of the legislation at the six-month review; otherwise, we will perhaps be faced with eight good bits of legislation and one or two bits that are doing badly, and we will be forced to vote the whole thing through, rendering it a rubber stamp. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that either my amendment or a variant of the amendment tabled by the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), which would allow us to change the Act, would be a better way forward?”
“The hon. Gentleman may be coming to this, but there is one other element: putting this in primary legislation rather than secondary takes it out of the purview of the courts, so here we have one of the heaviest-duty Acts we have seen post war prevented from undergoing judicial review in the interests of citizens.”
“He said: “The 2004 Act (which I wrote), including the powers to make emergency provision under Part 2, is clearly capable of being applied to take measures in relation to coronavirus.” The man who wrote the Act, the most authoritative source in this House, Mr Speaker’s Counsel, who is completely impartial, says that the Government are wrong, and they could have used the Civil Contingencies Act.”
“I am not a lawyer, but a number of public lawyers of my acquaintance think the Government are wrong. Most importantly—my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) alluded to this—we can call on an even greater authority. After business questions last week, I made a point of order to ask Mr Speaker if we could get the opinion of his counsel, Mr Daniel Greenberg. I will read the relevant paragraph to the House—it is only a couple of lines.”
“It was amended later, I think in 2008, to make it even more specific. The 1984 Act contains the vast majority of measures the Government need. As the hon. Gentleman said, it has been used already for the closure of pubs, restaurants and so on through secondary legislation. The other Act is the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. As the hon. Gentleman said, the Government could have used that. The Government have argued, most recently last week at business questions, that this is the wrong sort of emergency—sort of like the wrong kind of snow —to fall under the remit of the Civil Contingencies Act. I have to tell the Government that they are plain wrong. I was here for the debates on the Civil Contingencies Act. I remember the arguments about what it would and would not apply to, and this is specifically the case. It is not just me.”
“I rise to speak specifically to amendment 6, in my name and those of others, and to the relevant Government amendment. The Secretary of State himself said that the Bill has an astonishing range of powers: from forced quarantine to cancelling elections; and from allowing single doctors to section people to reducing parliamentary oversight of intelligence gathering. That is just a taster, but there is much, much more. The Opposition Health spokesman described it as having a draconian impact on many basic freedoms. As the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) has just said, many, if not all, of those powers are actually to be found in two pre-existing Acts. The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984—the year 1984 is ironic—was designed for exactly the position we are in now: dealing with pandemics and epidemics.”
“That is why Labour Members—if they will forgive me for giving them advice—should be pressing for an amendable approval at six months.”
“Do not get me wrong: coronavirus is a real threat. I have made these arguments over the years when the House has considered similar legislation relating to terrorism. We are facing 10 to 100 times the death rate in one year than the death rate from terrorism in 10 years. Of course there is a real threat, but we will be put in a position of saying either we take the whole Bill—three quarters vital and one quarter horrible—or we strike down something that is vital for protecting the public. That is the position that this House has been in over the 30 years—I am looking straight at the Leader of the Opposition now, because he and I were in the same Lobby time and again—when counter-terrorism regulations were put through on a rubber stamp precisely to protect the public.”
“The requirements are all in there, including it having to be cleared in seven days, us having to be recalled in five days if we are in recess and it having to be done through secondary legislation, which makes it capable of judicial review. I know that the Government do not like judicial review, but nowhere is it more important than when the Government exercise powers at the expense of citizens and the courts have to step in. As the hon. Member for Rhondda said, the six-monthly review that the Government have conceded is an important concession, but only if the House can amend or strike out. Anything else puts the House in the position of having to vote for a Bill that might be horrific in one part because the other three parts are essential—not likeable, not pleasant, not beneficial, but essential—for fighting this real threat.”
“I am glad to get my hon. Friend’s support. He has always been assiduous in these matters and he is right on that point. A reasonable person might say, “Well, the logical argument surely is that if all the powers are identical to ones that exist already, what are you complaining about?” That is a reasonable question. The reason is that the Bill loses many of the checks and balances in the preceding emergency legislation. I was not quite here for the 1984 legislation, but I was for the later ones, and those of us who put these things through the House fought hard and long to get the proper restrictions on Government power and the proper requirements to bring the legislation back to the House so that the House could approve it.”
“Good, excellent. I am glad Opposition Members are learning. Having an amendable approval at six months makes things completely different, because it means the House can say, “We need to prune this. We need to reduce the size of this legislation.””
“The Bill is guaranteed to have flaws, even with the best draftsmen in the world. Amendment 6 therefore proposes that instead of the sunset being two years, which anyway is too long, it would be one year. We invite the Government to write a new Bill in nine months. If they think the Bill is perfect in nine months, put it back again and we will put it through again, but this time, with three months for the House to consider it. Remember, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 took a whole year to go through both Houses, so with three months we would have proper democratic approval of the process.”
“I am now glad that I teased the hon. Gentleman, because it got something very useful on the record. If I may pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), it is why I tabled amendment 6, which recognises that the Government need these new powers and that parliamentary counsel have created a 320-page Bill in what sounds like a matter of days—in truth, they did it in an astonishingly short amount of time. They have done it at a time, however, when scientific evidence is, to put it mildly, fragile and likely to change. It has changed already in the past two weeks and is likely to change again as different tests, vaccines and so on become available. Scientific evidence will change. Economic analysis of future outcomes is unbelievably uncertain and the societal effects are completely unknown.”
“This is the conclusion, the last five lines of a five-page report: “We anticipate that the House may well wish to press the Minister for an explanation about why the expiry date was not set at one year, thereby enabling the Government to exercise the powers needed in the immediate future while allowing a further bill to be introduced and subject to parliamentary scrutiny in slower time.” A House of Lords Committee has arrived at exactly the same conclusion on this Bill as my amendment proposes.”
“Finally, I recommend that colleagues read the report on this Bill published at lunchtime today by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee of the House of Lords. That expert Committee considers our legislation and makes recommendations to the other House, and it is led by Lord Blencathra—those who have been here a long time may remember him as David Maclean, a tough, no-nonsense Security Minister at the Home Office. The Committee’s analysis is very clear and very straightforward, and it is not a libertarian fantasy.”
“I agree. I think the Government have done a pretty good job so far in the face of unbelievably difficult judgments and decisions. The Americans talk about drinking from a fire hose, which is how every Minister in this Government must feel because of the information and problems arriving on their desk every day. The right hon. Gentleman is right that there will be changes in the science and in the economics. We will also know, frankly, what worked and what did not work in the previous nine months. If we then allow Parliament three months to scrutinise it, we will get good, solid law that is well supported on both sides of the House. We will have the sort of debate we have had today, which has been one of the better debates I have heard in years because both sides are committed to the same cause.”
“To carry on in the context of the rolling news referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), one thing that we need to provide is good healthcare. The new NICE guidelines have just been published. The new guideline on critical care states that all patients with confirmed covid-19 must be assessed on the basis of “frailty” when healthcare professionals are making decisions about whether to admit a patient in need to critical care. That is being interpreted by a large number of mental health organisations as potentially excluding people with learning disability and so on. Will the hon. Gentleman make the point, on behalf of the Opposition, that we need equality of access to healthcare, as well as equality of access to all the things he has talked about?”
“Let me give the Minister a straightforward, practical example. One element of the Bill allows the delay of the oversight of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. That is the case because we have 15 commissioners, only one of whom is younger than 70—that is the reasoning behind it. Were the Government to do something sensible, such as appoint 15 deputy commissioners, all under 70, this would no longer be required. But we have seen the Government before resisting attempts to improve accountability, and we know that that they may want to keep it in, whereas we may want to take it out. This is a precise example, so why can we not do that?”
“The Opposition have a serious point in terms of the duration of the debate on the emergency legislation, given that it appears that we will debate it only for one day. There is a qualitative difference between a single-day debate on major legislation and even a two-day debate. I know that the upper House has different constitutional arrangements, but can the Leader of the House tell us how much time he expects it to spend considering the legislation, before it sends it back to us?”
“On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. In his response to my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie), the Leader of the House answered, in effect, that the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 was not available for this particular emergency. Knowing my right hon. Friend, I am sure that he was repeating, in absolute good faith, the briefing he had been given, but I was here and lived through the passage of that Act, and that is not my understanding of it. More importantly, it is not how a number of public lawyers understand the Act. So could you, Mr Deputy Speaker, undertake to get the Speaker’s Counsel to give this House an opinion as to whether that Act is applicable before we move the emergency legislation next week?”
“And there could be more. According to the loan charge all-party group, 39% of those affected have had suicidal thoughts. I think the Minister will be hard pushed to think of another Government policy that has caused more than a third of those affected to consider suicide. It is no surprise that it is having that effect on people. Some 68% have suffered depression, 71% face bankruptcy, and 49% could lose their homes. I said in the previous debate on this issue that the power to tax has the power to destroy, and that has never been more clearly demonstrated than here.”
“To give the House a flavour of that—because it does not apply just to those who have committed suicide but to those who are under stress—here is what the family of one loan charge victim told the all-party group about his suicide note: “He wrote about being at the end of his tether with the Loan Charge matter. He wrote such awful things about himself things that just weren’t true, that he clearly thought about himself at the time. He wrote that he did not set out to do such wrongdoings; he wrote about being unable to speak to his GP about his anxiety as he was ashamed, his fear of going to prison, his disgust in himself for getting mixed up in the Loan Charge and his belief that he would now go to hell.” In the case of this individual, the loan charge policy took not just his money, but his self-respect and eventually his life.”
“But actually it is one of the great virtues of our country that no matter what the crisis, whether it is a pandemic or warfare, the House always pays attention to issues of natural justice. We never ignore issues of natural justice, even in times of crisis. As a matter of justice, which this is, it is not a party political issue. In politics and our business, justice is a matter of honour that we deliver to the British people, and that is what we intend to do today. The loan charge is an injustice with very large consequences. We have all met and listened to constituents who are facing utter financial ruin as a result of this policy. It is ruining people’s lives. There have been at least seven suicides caused by the stress, anxiety and financial hardship of this policy.”
“I beg to move, That this House believes that the Loan Charge is an unjust and retrospective tax; notes that the law on the Loan Charge was not settled until 2017; and calls on HMRC to cease action on loans paid before 2017. The motion is in my name and those of the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) and my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), and is supported by some 40 other Members of the House. I start by commending my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for having the courage to beat me to the punch in this particular debate. It may seem strange to outside observers that in the midst of a global pandemic and a huge national crisis we are talking about a tax technicality—at least, that is how it might appear.”