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)...

Hs2 costs have mostly risen due to the utterly abysmal construction contracts used. A competent organisation would not agree what are effectively cost plus contracts where the construction firms invoice their costs plus overheads and profit - there is no fixed price or even inflation linked price so wage and overspending is encouraged all the way down the subcontractors and consultants.

Yes, we know. We also know that you don’t even work full time. Maybe you should practise what you preach.

Maybe that's because they pay their fair share of taxes and dont try to weedle out of paying anything they can?
2 way street innit

Why is their "fair share" always a larger % that anyone else is expected to pay

There are fraudsters in all communities and in the grand scale of things wealthier people pay a far higher % in this country than others. It’s not like there’s no lower threshold and everyone pays 20% on everything. You earn more you start paying a higher % on that. You earn less you pay a lower % and for those on less than £12570 you pay nothing! and are entitled to benefits

I don't need to. However if others need to, it's doable.

Very easy to say from the rarified atmosphere of your ivory tower. Try reading the room.

Most of these multi billionaire types only got where they are by paying thousands of people minimum wage.

Do spacex employees get paid minimum wage?

If you have a read around, many are probably paid much less - evidently the pressure to work 60 hours a week is intense, and many employees seem to be paid the equivalent of £35 - £40k equivalent, so not great (and that's for analyst roles, not the cleaning staff), and ridiculously low for someone working a 60 hour week.

What about Amazon - do you think their warehouse staff are paid fairly, considering their toil has put Bezos where he is?

Yup. It's manual labour.

So manual labour is only ever worth minimum wage? Sheesh.

It's all to do with the skills. There's a reason SWEs at Amazon make more than the warehouse operatives. To be a warehouse operative there's no formal education needed. Just need to be physically healthy.

A SWE will need a good computer science degree and need to be able to write good code.

Difference is the warehouse operatives will still have a job in 20 years time. AI will be writing code.

Yeah right. Who do you think maintains AI systems? People who code the AI.

AI is not infallible. At my DS' workplace is generated okay code that needed to be massively revamped and improved by a human.

Sometimes it cns produce absolute garbage.

Nah, the Scandis are just really really good at tax structuring. There are no billionaires in Scandinavia, just people who happen to control large amounts of assets which are not in their name but are completely for their benefit.

🙄
they possibly will... somewhere... in remote corners of this planet

In developed countries though in 20 years time warehouse will be nearly completely human free and operated by robots managed by AI.
The same for retail, possibly excl premium segment.

Currently low paid jobs dealing with people, like care, will stay, but warehouses really truly are the first ones in the queue to be fully automated. And yes, code writing will most likely be done by AI, but AI still will be trained and developed by people. And there still will be plenty of IT jobs

Really? Like Zuckerberg? With Meta being one of the highest paying employer globally? Like Musk? (hate the man, but never heard of his employees being underpaid)? Like Brin, Page? Like Bill Gates?

Maybe google top 10 richest people? All of them are self made (I'm not saying they grew up in poverty, but they created their own businesses from scratch) and apart from Amazon all of their companies are highly paying ones

Depends. It's about skills and experience. Plumber is paid much better than shop floor worker but much less than experienced IT. Unless said plumber develops own business, but it wouldn't be manual labour anymore.

It's all about supply and demand and how many people can do the job. Almost anyone fit enough can stock shelves, very few people can do brain surgery or manage multimillion deals.

It's exactly the same as your buying choice - you pay premium (if you can) for the item which would make some difference to you. When you go to supermarket with mass items you buy the cheapest unless there is a significant difference in quality if it's important to you. Wine - possibly premium. White vinegar - the cheapest. Businesses aren't any different.

You see, it's all in mindset - rich people only got rich because of exploitation, because of privilege, all rich people and nasty and greedy.

All poor people are poor because of some bad luck or whatever else.

Never ever in human history there was a better time to climb to the top if you have talents and drive. Yes, it is much harder for some, but still absolutely possible.
But it's much better for self esteemed to believe in obstacles and believe that it's not your fault that you failed in life

The problem is that these huge IT companies are monopolies in their field - they just buy up any new development or idea - no one apart from the Chinese to compete.
V sad - so the rest of the western world is beholden to them. They should have been forced to break up ages ago. (Like happened to Exxon in the oil industry)

Lord Sugar was council estate to billionaire.

Charlie Mullins (Pimlico Plumbers) is a son of a factory worker and a cleaner, grew up on council estate in Lon and left school at 15 with no GCSEs. I believe (but didn't google it properly) he sold Pimlico Plumbers for over £140m.

And left UK because of all the reasons we discussed on this thread.

It’s in its infancy. It will be unrecognisable in 20 years.

Sunak could have walked straight out again.... did he not hear the noise from the room before entering?

Sunak was Chancellor, then PM for over 2 years, sickness benefit claims went through the roof during his tenure.

Same with HS2, if planning rules have caused the costs issue, why didn't he change them?
Why did he allow the project to spiral out of control, to over 28 billion, then cancelled it? money down the drain.

Since when should fraudsters get away Scott free because of investigative costs??

Should we apply this to all criminal cases? 'billions written off....

Sunak believes in himself, his own well being, thats all, he never cared whether people worked or not, he did nothing to reform welfare, he didn't even try.