I’m not sure where you get the idea that I want to turn Britain into North Korea; I’m for the free market, not against it.

The best method of amending taxation i believe is by altering the method of taxation for multinational corporations or subsidiaries outside of the UK. If you are solely a UK business with no external interest or shareholders outside of the UK, your average small to medium business you pay tax based on our current system.
If you a multinational corporation or a subsidiary of a multinational company you operate under a different system, in this instance you pay tax on every item you sell in the UK, essentially paying tax on revenue not profit. multinationals in this instance can always increase their purchasing price to for this method of taxation but, in doing so they also have to compete with companies who are solely based in the UK and pay tax based on our net profit system.

The implementation of this system will stop the likes of Starbucks, Apple and others moving profits outside of the UK to pay less tax, it will ensure that companies like Google and Facebook who sell advertising on platforms visible in the UK pay tax on this in the UK.

Next in this process I would make it a requirement for major infrastructure service provision such as Hinckley Point C and NHS New hospital development etc in the UK, must operate on a not for profit basis in order to tendor for contracts. It will stifle foreign investment for sure but, what good is foreign investment if we as tax payers end up paying more for the provision of vital services only to see the proceeds leave the UK.

2) Furthermore, the author refers to the “inadequate constraints on the dissemination of fake news”. That is a very interesting perspective. Is the author encouraging corporate censorship of speech? The news outlets most affected by attacks on “fake news” are left/progressive alternative news sources.

I find it worrying that someone publishing in Open Democracy would not be available of the above two points.

Thank you for your prompt response and for the link which you have supplied.

My point was, as you appear to have accepted in your final paragraph, that the soundbite that ‘governments are not god at picking winners’ is just a soundbite with a tangential relationship with reality.

What you are deploying in the first paragraph is a false dichotomy. You are implying that there are only two options ‘getting everything right’ or ‘getting everything wrong’.

The decisions by the Wilson/Callaghan and Thatcher governments were political ones, probably motivated by a colonialist mindsets. They were also economic ones intended to benefit particular groups in society at the expense of others. In the case of Mrs Thatcher, she was clearly favouring the financial interests of the City and many of these people benefitted not just financially but also in terms of power to force compliance, by the weakening of trade unions. So, for a very large group of people, Mrs Thatcher’s government did NOT pick a winner, but for another not-as-large group she DID pick a winner.

Thank you for your participation.

In your first post and in this you repeat the statement about ‘governments/civil servants not being good at picking winners’. This is one of the privatisers’ slogans which does not stand up to close examination. For example, Ha-Joon Chang’s “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” deals with this. I notice, too, that the Norwegian Sovereign Fund has just had a $131BILLION return in 2017. Just imagine what Scotland’s fund might have been had it not been for the perfidy of the 1970s Labour Governments and Mrs Thatcher’s use of the revenue to destroy trade unions, substantially destroy manufacturing and to tilt the UK economy grossly towards finance and London and the South East.

Competition is not the sole driver of innovation.

The first is the implication, at least I think it’s the implication, that the UK and in fact all countries need to have an independent defence industry. I wonder whether that it either affordable or practicable? Perhaps for China, the US, and Russia (let’s leave North Korea out of the discussion!!), but for the smaller countries of Europe?

Then there’s the issue of just what is strategic. Steel and the railways, power generation, all used to be considered strategic, but now?
Is facebook strategic? Is Android? Cyber attacks seem currently to be more dangerous than nuclear / conventional, asymmetric warfare –
which is why we have GCHQ I imagine. What’s the next major threat going to be?

Governments have not shown themselves to be good at picking winners, nor at managing companies. Competition is a greater spur to cost-effective innovation – although I suppose you could argue that we’re competing with Russia, the US, and China!

Yes, I think we can go further than this, both in continuing this thread and in setting out arguments for more equitable and progressive taxation, in addition to refuting the ‘axioms’ about taxation which are just assertions but treated as similar to the laws of electromagnetism or gravitation. You have done that with your paragraph regarding taxation in Sweden and reductio ad absurdum.

What people in the Nordic countries appear to do is to accept the state provision of high quality public services as a good bargain, both for themselves as individuals but also for society as a whole. They do not see a sharp distinction between individuals and society. In fact, I do not think that they see the distinction as particularly problematic.

Or the scale of folly in trading Czechoslovakia to Germany, when most of the rolled armour steel was being made in Czech factories.

Or to put a more modern twist on this. ..it is why the Sweden raided Thyssan Krup’s offices in Sweden as they rightly feared the recent takeover of their local Submarine business by said was being used to illegally export Swedish Submarine technology to Germany.
And why they have forcebly made Thyssan Krup hand over the yard to SAAB…..

Or say how the French have acted to prevent an Italian company taking over a France shipyard……

At least that would be the conclusion of such a position.
But not actually born out by the facts……

With regard to the independence referendum Better Together (Project Fear) warned continuously, that the kind of people to whom Howard green refers would leave Scotland for other places where they could continue to make money and so those of us remaining (who, by definition are incapable of innovation of creativity, since we have a ‘dependency culture’ and ‘want something for nothing’) would simply moulder. Therefore, we should reject independence and continue to take what trickled down.

The recent Scottish budget introduced a range of income tax rates which vary from those set by the Treasury for the rest of the UK. They introduce, amongst others) a lower rate of 19%. The net effect is that those earning less than £33 000 pay the same of less income tax than people on similar taxable incomes in the rest of the UK. Around 700 000 people on higher incomes pay more income tax. The levels have been pretty well judged and the additional amount is relatively small. But that does not prevent the Tories, amplified by most of the media and the BBC, from claiming that Scotland is the ‘highest taxed part of the UK.’ and so, these people will move to England or take their incomes in other ways. Thus, they continue, Scotland will lose the revenue they contribute and Scotland will face further austerity. So, the 70% of the population who pay the same or less are expected to give up the small gains they make so that the highly paid can retain more of their income. Of course, those earning under £33 000 will spend most of the tax gains and so continue to sustain the economy, whereas those who are high earners tend to save it, especially in ways that takes the money out of the economy. This latter, is what ‘austerity’ actual is – transfer of funds from the lower paid to the much higher paid, who take the money out of the economy.

Since Council Tax in Scotland is much lower than in England and since there are no University fees, those 700 000 higher earners would face a substantial tax hike if they moved to England. A fair number of those 700 000 have no problem with paying a bit more and also have a sense of place and community. So, I think they will stay because this has been a relatively small redistribution.

The spectrum of taxes available to the Scottish Government is limited – AS IT WAS MALICIOUSLY INTENDED TO BE BY WESTMINSTER AND, PARTICULARLY, LABOUR – and so its scope for being creative is limited in the short term and leaves openings for the political attack of ‘punitive’ and ‘destructive’ taxation. Providing the full range of taxes, and developing property and land taxes would enable Scotland to do things differently and in a more distributive way. Of course, assigning oil and gas revenues to the place where it is earned would make a huge difference. But, Westminster prefers these to go substantially to international energy companies.

To seriously misuse Churchill’s bon mot: Private ownership is the worst possible way forward, apart from all the others which have already been tried (such as nationalisation!). Governments have proved themselves poor pickers of winners and poor managers of industry / enterprise.

The piece conflates the principles and the practice of the competitive marketplace we have today. That large multi-nationals take advantage of systems which legally allow them to move taxable profits into low tax jurisdictions, is not per se a criticism of competition or of international ownership. It may however be a criticism of the current rules and their implementations (I note many countries scrambling to adjust their tax regimes).

Nor does the piece take into account the impact technology has had on the workplace. The decline in the number of jobs available is at least as much because of the increasing application of technology as it is because of asset stripping or moving jobs to low cost environments.

The benefits to consumers of much of the change which has been wrought are ignored. If it is more cost effective to make parts of mobile phones in China, assemble them in Thailand, and then ship them to market, then that means consumers gain access to products which they might not otherwise be able or willing to afford, which indeed might not otherwise be possible. And yes, major multi-nationals make a tidy profit too, without which they simply would not produce the goods.

It’s very easy to react emotionally to foreign ownership (noting that we should consider our response to foreign ownership per se, and the possible impacts of foreign ownership on eg work opportunities). It’s hard to see the ownership of British Institutions like Cadburys and ARM falling into foreign hands (does Dairy Milk taste any different?). But that needs to be balanced by an appreciation of British purchases of foreign firms, see http://bit.ly/2DurQx6, and foreign firms building factories in the UK eg Toyota in Derbyshire.

At the end of the day, it makes economic sense to have work done in the location which can do that work with the best price / quality balance. Repatriating work done overseas in such cases will by definition increase costs and hence prices in both the home and the export market, with the inevitable consequences. Each country, perhaps even each region, with have its strengths and weaknesses, it makes sense to exploit the strengths and minimise the impact of the weaknesses. It’s been a long term “complaint” about the UK that it is excellent, world leading, in innovation, but pretty mediocre at the subsequent exploitation of those innovations. Think of Frank Whittle and the jet engine . Which suggests that we need to focus on what we do well, innovation, and find innovative ways of profiting from the exploitation of those innovations, wherever it may happen.

Similarly, the UK has an enviable reputation for University education (which is where a lot of the innovation comes from btw.), but people worry that we train people from other countries who then return home to use the knowledge that has been gained to the benefit of “foreign powers”. If other countries can make a better fist of using the results of UK education than we can, what should we do? Haul up the drawbridge, or find ways (eg by FDI) to benefit in the longer term from the education we have provided?

The fact is that we live in the world, not just in our islands. As a country we have to compete with others, it makes sense to compete in areas where we are world class.

“Who owns Britain” is a call to the emotions, “Make Britain Great Again”, “Take Back Control” even! The issue is far more nuanced than that.