Monthly Archives: April 2008

Over the last two days we have been discussing the Finance Bill in the Commons. It has given me the opportunity to remind the government just how successful Ireland has been by setting low company tax rates. The Irish economy has grown much faster than the UK economy as a result, and has generated more [...]

Banks and oil companies are the corporations many people – and governments – love to hate. In a way it in unfair on them. Both industries find it best to organise through very large companies. Because the companies need to employ huge sums of capital, they will tend to make profits that look large. You [...]

For much of the last twenty years pollsters and pundits alike have told me and anyone else who would listen that people do not want lower taxes. We have been told that whenever asked, people would rather have better public services. Therein lies the problem. For years Labour, the pollsters and others in the political [...]

I have just met a Japanese author writing about the UK’s difficult relaitonship with Europe to help inform his own country’s approach to China. I explained why I thought the positions were very different. It did occur to me during the course of the conversation that a country is partly defined by its history and [...]

The government did not tell us that it was going to be so cold with all this global warming. Nor did they tell us at the last budget they would be charging us more than 70p a litre in tax on unleaded with a pump price of 110p. They did not say that within a [...]