to ask how you would stop companies and investors leaving the UK?

[LargeDeviation]

AstraZeneca (the UK's most valuable company) has said they are thinking of delisting from the London Stock Exchange with a view to list in America. Other companies like Invidia, TUI, have also delisted. ARM is of course another one that got away.

At the same time, billionaires and centimillionaires are leaving the UK at the greatest rate ever.

Each delisting leads to redundancies or lower future growth. Each billionaire lost needs the equivalent of thousands of median income taxpayers to make up the tax lost.

What would you do to stop the rot? My solutions:

1. Incentivise listings: Allow extremely large bonuses and executive remuneration as long as they are tied to long-term performance. Remove stamp duty on shares. Bring back reduced oversight for AIM etc so small companies can easily list. Actively invest government funds in high-tech incubator companies (as long as it's done by the likes of the Vaccine Taskforce, not by idiot civil servants whose idea of good governance was to try to obstruct the OneWeb investment).

2. Incentivise share ownership in UK companies. Reduce dividend taxes. Revive the idea of the British ISA from Jeremy Hunt. Introduce low long-term capital gains tax rates (as many other countries have) to encourage long-term investing. Simply cutting Cash ISA allowances won't help.

3. Encourage entrepreneurs and the rich to come to Britian rather than leave. Reverse the non-dom changes. Large increases in IHT allowances, cut the top rate of income tax. These tax cuts can be conditional on providing a large number of jobs to British workers to make them politically palatable.

4. Cut corporation tax back to 20%. Sunak made a huge error in increasing corporation tax.

5. Ditch the Rayner changes which makes Britain even more uncompetitive.

Of course Labour won't do any of the above (or even acknowledge that companies/investors leaving the UK is a problem)...

I would have Sunak back in a heartbeat. Goldman Sachs agree.

No they don’t, they have the resources to creatively account to minimise their tax liability to the smallest amount. The government is starting to close those loopholes and they don’t like it.

Of course they do, he’s there as window dressing to enhance their prestige.

Why would he had walked out? Even if my head I see nothing wrong with having some sandwiches for Boris' birthday in a room they are already having a meeting in

I don't know about the specifics but maybe due to the pandemic more people were getting ill.

With HS2 at some points the costs were overrunning and Northern leg needed to be cut.

Sunak did remove the £20 uplift and changed the UC taper rates. He also proposed stricter rules for sickness and disability benefits.

Exactly. Thank you for agreeing with me.

The only major issue I have with Sunak is that he slightly rolled back some green/net zero pledges.

Yes. He (and James Cleverly) also introduced measures which have massively reduced immigration.

I'm not going to say that Sunak or any PM is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes in government but I much preferred the Sunak government

Yep. And I doubt anyone is getting through a pandemic without some errors. This gov are just making bad decisions impacting growth and driving out tax contributors which is the last thing we need.

Fair point. I agreed with him on that too personally. I didn't agree with him on some of the covid measures, such as excluding the self employed from furlough.
It's a shame that the tories were ungovernable by the time he came to office imo.

I think after Partygate and Liz Truss fiasco it was a sinking ship. Things were actually looking up in summer 2021. The economy was unlocking, things were looking up.

Our current PM actually went and complained about the unlocking.

Same. He was right about that imo

A lot of what was aimed at him was media fabricated, the drink in a meeting, his wife, the card thing

The actual policies were better than Labour’s are now.

And he was right about taxes going up, I recall the backlash over that.

What measures? Any stats for that?

I feel that they slowed the increase at least

I remember people having a go at him for paying for someone's petrol for an advert. Like he paid for someone's petrol top up and then people had the audacity to complain.

He went to serve the homeless food and people complained about him asking someone if they wanted to get into finance.

Will the BBC do? There's a guardian article too if you'd prefer?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgx3ekkw1eo

I don’t understand why this is a good thing. Decreasing the number of productive people (those with work visas) and those bringing money into the economy (international students) while presiding over the highest number of asylum seekers on record doesn’t seem particularly sensible to me. Surely it should be the other way round?

Perhaps you should lobby Labour as they have continued with it, and claimed credit when the numbers halved.

Take the politics out of it, do you really think it’s a sensible approach?

Yes I do. Some (not all) were taking the piss, particularly with student visas. My ds studied abroad. That didn't mean that our entire family could go with him. It needed tightening up in many ways. Whatever your views on immigration, the numbers were (and still are) far too high. Something had to give.

I know a few who came over on student visa for sham courses. Overstayed and are now builders.

This thread is a great example of why this country is a mess. The number economically and fiscally illiterate people celebrating that rich people are leaving and how great it is that we are left with people like themselves who will probably never even contribute enough to the tax system to sustain themselves. Scary to think that these people get to vote.

This country will soon only be left with these small island mentality handout takers, looking around wondering why their begging bowl is empty.

Yep. Happens all the time.

So contributing to the economy.

Only if they came alone and reached a high enough salary.