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)...

Is this all you have to say on this topic? that Tory were bad? yes they were.

I still believe the last batch of them with Rishi were substantially better than current lot but we are entitled to our opinions.

Do you have any suggestions on the question OP asked? or do you believe it's non-issue?

I'm not the making incorrect claims & posting links that oppose your pov, & ones you clearly haven't read.. you are.

We are in this mess due to tory incompetence, it did not happen over night, Sunak proved himself incompetent, though less than Truss but thats hardly a vote of confidence.

Numbers of the wealthy leaving the UK shot up after Brexit.

BUT the UK still has huge numbers of the wealthy staying here, still is a highly attractive place to invest, still no 1 in Europe.

Reeves plans some deregulation of the 'City, thats over due but will need to be done with care, Labour also have an industrial strategy or will have & a deal with the US, having an improved one with EU will help FDI.

Sunak was very competent

Agree and more so than Starmer and Reeves.

On Eat out to help out? PPE contracts? Business support loans given out without any checks? fraudulent loans written off?

A failure to bring down Gilt yields, despite 3 years to do so....from the trebling that Truss gave us....

A Technical Recession during his time as PM...

He also oversaw a massive growth in disability benefits & cross channel migration almost zero in 2020, rising to 44k in 2022/23..... still yet to be "beaten"

Stunning!!!

I feel as Chancellor Sunak was top notch. As PM he inherited a sinking ship and wasn't as pro green as I would have liked. He was definitely an honourable man driven to do this best

Eat out to help out did help the restaurant industry for a bit. It needed to be done. We shouldn't have kept the lockdown forever.

PPE was done in an emergency and rushed. The business support loans were also rushed due to the emergency. He saved people with furlough.

Disability benefits going up, mean we are taking care of the less fortunate? France needs to cooperate. He halved inflation and left the country the fasting growing economy in the G7.

I remember job market was white hot in Sunak's time, we were struggling to find people despite huge packages on offer. How quickly this all changed with Labour coming in.

And imagine Sunak suggesting PIP reform like Labour did?

Rwanda deterrent scheme caused outcry, didn't small boats peaked in numbers this year?

ETA: this all is still irrelevant. This thread was about how we can stop investors leaving. Conclusion is we shouldn't try, we don't need them. Labour will sort our lives out.

I understand that, but when infection rates rose again the rhetoric was people had been too quick to go out and mingle. The messaging was we need heavy lockdown because you irresponsible people went crazy with the going out over summer. It was a very confusing time.

He halved inflation?? he oversaw it going to 11% ! Now much of that was out of his hands, just as the falls were, let be honest here, the PM doesn't control the oil price.

He gave away tax payers money with no checks or balances, various reports have backed this up but i agree on furlough

High G7 growth was for one Q only, he also gave us 2 Q's of negative growth.

No idea if he is honourable or not, though he did get fined for breaking the law.....

However, despite all of that, he was head and shoulders above Truss and Bojo and was the best we could have had at the time.

Reverse Brexit. We were warned before what would happen.

Yep agree with this and @Gagcaa

Anyway we are here now with Starmer and Reeves, plus the rest of Labour. They seem to have painted themselves into a corner, we'll see how they deal with negative growth results today and budget in Autumn.

Yes, would be the biggest thing any Govt could do, whether its possible is another matter.

Yet another reason to know Sunak is incompetent, he is a hard core Brexitier.

His 2 fines were BS. For Boris' birthday party in 2020 he happened to walk into a meeting room a bit early and just joined in and had some snacks and drinks in a room they were already having a meeting in.

When he was PM he was fined for not having a seatbelt in the back of a car in a video on social media.

In July 2024 inflation was around 2.2%. back down to normal levels

As for the negative growth and then the growth at the end. We had weathered the storm and had come out stronger thanks to Rishi

Brexit allowed us to treat all immigration fairly. We didn't just prioritise from the EU, we treated the world fairly.

And look where that’s got us.

Well that works if you want to remain American.
I didn’t think you paid tax in Texas…..

Does Texas Have a State Income Tax?
No, Texas does not have a personal or corporate state income tax. This means:

• Individuals do not pay state tax on wages, salaries, or retirement income.
• Businesses do not pay a corporate income tax.

Instead, Texas generates revenue through sales taxes, property taxes, and business taxes

The U.K. needs rich people and rich companies to invest in stock exchange companies - we have few of either. And many of our rich people are Chinese or Middle Eastern or Indian with the freedom to invest anywhere.
Whenever some Cambridge research establishment comes up with anything it’s snapped up by Silicon Valley or similar.
I think we are stuffed but we could be doing more to get non workers working -there seems to be a shortage of tradespeople everywhere but many people on benefits.
And constant new regulations making it harder to employ people.
We need to toughen up and some pips need squeaked but govs are scared to do anything.

For me. I think we should invest a lot in stem education and training. Apart from dysalculia and severe learning disabilities it shouldn't be seen as acceptable just to be "bad at maths".

I've also been thinking 80 hour weeks aren't all that bad.

There are 7*24 = 168 hours in a week

You sleep 8 hours a day that's 112 hours left.

You work 80 hours. You have 32 hours left each week for recreation

When you read on here I think many don’t want it, they want to grow state support instead.

Ha ha He and his party created the storm though didn't they? Truss, uncontrolled spending, corruption, look at HS2 and Sunak writing off £29billion of spending... highest asylum pp spending in the world.... unbelievable really.

So you think his fines were all part of a conspiracy, the authorities out to get him, maybe it was Murdoch because his parents didn't have Sky?

#PoorRishi

Inflation is one of those things govts have little control over, now they cannot even set interest rates.

Nope, i don't want more state support, i want less, people should, when at all possible, stand on their own 2 feet & work, so i don't agree with the wasteful WFA changes, far to generous.

Thank you.

The main reasons the City is in the dire state it is now are:

a) the huge drift of pension funds out of UK equities, some of which is because of government policy, some of which is to do with pension funds' risk aversion, much of it is to do with a negative spiral caused by the damage to stock valuations from Brexit...

b) Brexit itself. I know how these threads always go so shoot me, but it was blindingly obviously at the time that decoupling the London market from continental Europe was going to have a seriously negative impact on our markets. But that, of course, was waved away as "project fear".

One of the many many bitter ironies about Brexit is that many of the people who have benefited most from the historical strength of the City of London (people in the satellite towns in Kent and Essex who were massively enriched by working in the City or industries connected to it) were the people who voted in this massive act of economic self-sabotage in the interests of "taking back control". I know we're not allowed to call them idiots but at the very least its fair to say they weren't thinking straight.

Deep sigh....

Rishi Sunak specifically said that Liz Truss would cause a mess and she did.

HS2 costs have overrun due to the stupid planning laws in this country. The COVID loans were done with minimal vetting due to the extent of the crisis and that they immediately needed to help people. Chasing every single fraudulent claim would have had costs as well.

His fines were just political opportunism. Especially the partygate fine, he did absolutely nothing wrong. He just entered a meeting room too early and happened to walk into an impromptu celebrations.

Rishi Sunak also wanted to end the sick not culture and get more people working. Rishi Sunak believes in work

He also said Labour’s economic plans wouldn’t work and we’re looking at slow anti growth measures impacting rn. Then autumn budget with higher taxes incoming.

The partygate thing was ridiculous, walking into a meeting and having a drink. Nonsense

People wanted Starmer and co so we’ll see how it goes. Not too well going by ratings.