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)...

UK is highly desirable place to invest, 2nd behind the USA but this does inc off-shore Islands.
But the $ is a reserve currency, the £ is not and the Tories made a lot of changes to the City of London which has made it a worse place to list... this needs un-doing.

Which Reeves is going to do but why did the Cons allow this to happen???

We seem to be going the other way. Which is expected but still.

Maybe after next GE

If Labour continue doing what they're doing now there will be nothing left to tax by next GE

Thankfully not all rich people feel the same
patrioticmillionaires.uk

Really? We have the highest growth in the G7 (in Europe) behind the US and Canada.

All people like you do is focus on the negatives, ignoring the simple fact that the Tories - who i assume you support - have left the country in an utter mess.

The latest is the Justice System.... along with Blood & PO Scandals, Roads, Health, Social Care, Education....

Maybe look at who you've been backing......

Isn't all this bollocks proof that the current economic system is absolutely fucked ? Like people are held accountable to actually contribute and they're like "nah"

Can't believe thousands of years of human existence and this is where we are.

Of course.

Patriotic Millionaires have about 60 members.
Total number of liquid millionaires in the UK is estimated to be 600,000

PO scandal was during Blair's rule? Blood victims were supported by Rishi?

Sunak might have “supported” victims of the blood scandal but making the payments was another of the little messes his government left behind for its successor. Words are cheap.

Much as I dislike the far right, the Left will drive this country into the ground if allowed to!

Latest polls show that the majority of people now think Labour are handling things worse than the Tories. 😳

That’s more true. I know anecdotally that more multi millionaires are talking about leaving than used to (but less than when Jeremy Corbyn was a threat), but for reasons more broad than tax - they often see better chances for their kids and lifestyle abroad (instead of tax being the main driver that it used to be).

Can you link to the poll that shows that?

If this is Keir, or Rachel Reeves asking for advice, I think we all know the country is f**ked.

I used to work (until last Christmas) with a lot of very wealthy people, all in senior corporate roles.

A lot of them either left in the last 12 months or are preparing to leave soon. Yes, it is a combination of many factors, it's a general societal attitude against them, and it's not going to get any better, and taxes are definitely one of the factors.

We got a sort of lucky break thanks to Trump, US used to be the top destination, not anymore, so people are reassessing their options, but they are not staying here anymore.
Which is a real shame - the ones I'm talking about are good people, very generous charity-wise, and they paid a huge amount of taxes here.

Will Guardian do?

The charts that show just how worried Labour should be about the polls | Labour | The Guardian

Analysis by the Guardian found Labour’s drop in the opinion polls in its first 10 months of power is the largest of any newly elected UK government in 40 years.

If these folk are so supportive of paying more, why are they waiting until they are legally compelled to pay extra tax? They can pay as much extra tax as they want right now voluntarily.

I can’t get over op calling nvidia invidia like the largest GPU producer on the planet isn’t a relatively known brand (most every PC/Laptop with a discrete graphics card is made by nvidia these days- something like a 90% market share)

Not really. It doesn’t show the previous government doing any better than this one which is what the pp purported. We all know what the polls say about voting intention and all of us with an atom of sense know they’re meaningless four years out from an election.

One from January and one from four days ago. So seems a fairly enduring opinion unfortunately.

Labour's First Year In Power Seen As Worse Than Tory Predecessors

www.politicshome.com/news/article/labour-first-year-seen-as-worse-than-tory-predecessors-poll-finds

Voters believe Labour is doing worse than Tories on delivering pledges, poll finds

labourlist.org/2025/01/news-voters-believe-labour-worse-than-tories-delivering-promises/

And when asked who would make the best government for the UK right now, Labour led by Starmer was preferred over both a Reform government led by Nigel Farage (55 per cent vs 45 per cent) and a Conservative government led by Kemi Badenoch (52 per cent vs 48 per cent).

Doesn't America make Americans pay taxes wherever you are?

Yes.

The best thing the UK could do is rejoin the EU

Good luck with that one.

Yes, I'm gutted too. I live on the continent and need a fucking ETA = like an ESTA - just to visit friends and family in UK.

Go back to being a manufacturing-based economy. You know like make stuff that people want and use.

Then any investors can flock to the gates wherever they are from.

A possibly naive outlook but the 'finance' industry just serves only a few very well and doesn't actually 'make' anything useful at all.

Be more attractive to companies.

MNCs can set up in Ireland - 12.5% corporation tax, access to EU market

Or set up in the UK - 25% corporation tax, no comparable free access to EU market,

Which would you go for?