Politicians need to stop moralising – and reform our taxes December 3, 2012 LIKE many people, I loathe the UK tax system. It fails to treat everyone equally and is either extraordinarily punitive or pathetically soft. Scandalously, some big companies pay huge amounts of corporation tax while other similar businesses don’t. The aim must be revolutionary tax reform – all streams of income from labour and capital generated [...]
Osborne must now face up to his fiscal failings December 2, 2012 POLITICS can be like a yo-yo: last week, George Osborne received the best press since he became chancellor, basking in the triumph of appointing Mark Carney as Governor of the Bank of England. This week will be very different, with his Autumn Statement on Wednesday guaranteed to be the political equivalent of trying to square [...]
Why David Cameron was right to stand up for free speech November 29, 2012 YESTERDAY wasn’t quite the tragic day for the freedom of the press that it could have been, for one reason only: at one minute to midnight, David Cameron came riding to the rescue of free speech. By refusing to back the Leveson report’s key demand – a new regulator underpinned by statute and ultimately policed [...]
Britain is becoming an increasingly anti-libertarian society November 28, 2012 WELCOME to Britain, a land where rules, regulation and taxes are one of the few growth industries. In recent days, the government has decided that companies will no longer be allowed to decide freely at which price they can sell alcohol – there will be a minimum price, hurting those who enjoy two-for-one deals. Our [...]
Putting politicians in charge of the press would be a disaster November 27, 2012 WHO would have thought that in 2012, at a time when a technological revolution has allowed anybody to become a publisher, that politicians would seriously be mulling a return to the licensing of newspapers. The practice, last adopted during the English Civil War in 1643 and thankfully abolished in 1695, would be an affront to [...]
An unusually brilliant move by Osborne will give City a huge fillip November 26, 2012 TO my great surprise, George Osborne has just pulled off an amazing hire. Appointing a new governor of the Bank of England was always going to be Osborne’s most important decision. I thought the chancellor would go for the easy choice – I was wrong. His wooing of Mark Carney, who will shake up the [...]
Britain is a country of extremes: We either love or we hate November 25, 2012 A FEW years ago, Britain was ridiculously complacent, blind to everything that was going wrong in the economy, determined not to notice the irrational exuberance, the monetary pump-priming, the fiscal profligacy, the epidemic of stupid decisions and the deliberate malfeasance. We were a nation in the grip of an insane bubble yet anaesthetised by cheap [...]
Technology and human ingenuity will rescue the economy November 22, 2012 IF you think we have it bad in today’s stagnant, mismanaged, low-growth Western economies, think of our ancestors. Their fate was truly hopeless. Global GDP per person grew by 0.04 per cent a year between the years 1000 and 1820, a note from Capital Economics reminds us – in other words, incomes and quality of [...]
Our bureaucratic tax system is destroying jobs and growth November 21, 2012 If you are a glass half full type of person, the news that the UK’s tax system is now the 16th “best” in the world, rather the 18th, might be something to rejoice about. I prefer to despair about the complex and arbitrary nature of our tax code, about the fact that we were 11th [...]
Fresh allegations overshadow welcome cultural shift in City November 20, 2012 LET us hope yesterday won’t eventually be remembered as another disastrous day for the City of London. Hewlett Packard’s inflammatory attack on the accounts of Autonomy, the UK tech giant it now owns, is either a wrong-headed attempt by a struggling US firm to try and justify why it failed to do its due diligence [...]