On Friday 14 September Michael Meacher, the Labour MP for Oldham West is tabling a Private Member's Bill into the House of Commons that will, if passed, introduce a General Anti-Tax Avoidance Princip le (GATAP) into UK law for the first time. The Bill is timely: the day before Meacher is leading a three hour back bench debate in the House of Commons on tax avoidance whilst on the same day as Meacher's Bill gets a hearing the government's consultation on its proposed General Anti-Abuse Rule (GAAR) for tax closes to public comments. The contrast between Meacher's Bill and the GATAP it proposes and the government's proposed GAAR is stark. Extraordinarily, the government's economic impact assessment for its proposal suggests it will have no measurable economic impact at all. What this very obviously means is that despite George Osborne's claim in March when delivering his budget that he thought tax avoidance was 'morally repugnant' he is actually intending to do nothing about it. The government proposal for a GAAR makes that clear: it makes it very obvious that they only want to stop the most abusive of tax schemes. There are probably at most a handful a year that will be stopped as a result and since they'll now probably never see the light of day because of the GAAR it is quite possibly true that the government's proposed law might be a massive white elephant in that it might never be used. Some, including ARC, the union representing senior