Mr Osborne – there is an easy way to get the economy growing again

Clearly our hopeless Chancellor and his well-paid, useless advisers haven’t a clue about how to get Britain’s economy growing again. So, free of charge, I’ll tell them. The trick is to abolish Corporation Tax completely. Let me explain. Every tax has a limited life because sooner or later those, who should be paying it, find ways of avoiding it. We once had a beard tax – people shaved off their beards. There was a window tax – buildings were built with fewer windows. I think you get the picture. Well, Corporation Tax has also outlived its usefulness. During the Brown boom, Corporation Tax paid by smaller companies went up by about 130%. But tax paid by large companies and banks only went up by about 20%. Why? Because large companies and banks have myriad ways of avoiding this tax. Moreover, Corporation Tax encourages financial speculators to take huge loans to buy up�companies, siphon off their profits and pay virtually no tax by setting off the interest payments against their tax bills.

If our poor excuse for a Chancellor scrapped Corporation Tax completely and replaced it with retaining a part of the VAT refunded to companies, a number of things would happen. Firstly, tax evasion would plummet as the Government would already hold the money. Carousel fraud would also fall. Foreign companies operating in Britain and pretending to make no taxable profits would end up paying their fair share of tax. Schemes used by firms like the Water Companies�to channel profits into offshore tax havens like Jersey and the Cayman Islands would no longer work as they would now be taxed on the level of their operations in the UK. Plus, thousands of foreign firms would set up their HQs in the UK to benefit from�our zero Corporation Tax and this would create hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs and bring money into the economy.

Our worthless politicians tell us about the ‘tough decisions’ and ‘painful choices’ they supposedly have to make. But all this shows is that they have no imagination. Here’s an easy decision that will boost the economy – so why can’t our leaders just do what I propose?