The nats made many promises to get elected. We'll see how many they keep this time, but among them is a reduced corporation tax to attract overseas investment.
Richard Murphy has an interesting post on his blog, Tax Research UK. It is primarily about the Irish desire to keep low corporaton tax (and the resultant tax-haven status), and the EU's competing requirement that the Irish ditch low tax as part of the deal for a financial bail-out.
As if the Irish financial fiasco, and the collapse of the so-called "Arc of Prosperity", wasn't enough evidence that beggaring your neighbour is a limited strategy, the SNP is still planning (or so they say) to follow the low tax/tax-haven route. So the blog has some relevance, and a warning, for Scotland.
It's not the panacea it seems and the EU won't stand for it..... and it doesn't work anyway.
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I presume then you will be demanding that the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man should be brought to heel then?
ReplyDeleteConsider this, in Jersey in return for low taxation the citizens of the island have to pay for health care, have no right to redundancy pay and until recently no savings protection scheme. The poor like others have to pay sales tax on their food - which is going up by 2% later this year.
As a good unionist, surely it is time to have another Act of Union passed so our fellow Brits on those islands can share the benefits of the British state?
Of course as part of the UK the islands will probably see their economies collapse as all those companies there leave. And their economies will be reduced to tourism and pasture.
Aberdonian, it's not clear: do you want these islands to have tax haven status or not?
ReplyDeleteand, more to the point, do you want Scotland to have tax haven staus, just like Ireland...?
ReplyDeleteIndeed, the race to the bottom that such a policy predicates is not a pretty site. You end up having your tax policy being dictated by foreign (usually american) companies - again just look at Ireland.
ReplyDeleteIf its wrong to have your tax levels set by London, why is it OK to have them set by foreign business?