xmiles wrote: wanderlust wrote:
Couldn't have put it better myself. And as it's legal (if it's done properly) we all could do it. I would but I just don't have a spare few million I don't need for a few years.
If HMRC were given the legal basis to stop this we could all pay less tax.
We'd probably end up paying more though because foreign investors who put their money into the UK and use the UK financial system generate a huge proportion of the UK's total income. Despite successive governments offering tax incentives to e.g. open a car plant in the North East, buy a football team or build us a nuclear power plant we still make relative fortunes from and are dependent on foreign investment. If we further increase taxation on our rich individuals and companies, so will they - and as UK employment and infrastructure plummets as a result, so taxes will rise to compensate.
It all goes back to selling off our resources and closing our less profitable industries during the Thatcher years - a trend that was continued in Blair's first tenure - because we have opened our doors to foreign investors and are now dependent on them.
Remember Thatcher's sidekick Keith Joseph's famous speech in which he said:
"Growth Means Change". He argued that British industry was "overmanned" with "too low earnings and too little profit and too little investment". The answer lay in shedding factory workers, which would make industrial companies leaner and free up labour for new businesses.
"This is growth," Joseph said. "Whether the new work is in industry, commerce or services, public or private ... The working population must choose between narrow illusory job security in one place propped up by public funds or the real job security based on a prosperous dynamic economy."
Five years later, the Conservatives encouraged just that process: first came an austerity programme that saw nearly
one in four of all manufacturing jobs disappear within Thatcher's first term. Then followed privatisations and an economic policy geared towards a housing boom and the City. Despite Joseph's assertions, the middle-aged engineers who were laid off didn't go away and become software engineers – they largely landed up in worse jobs or on the scrapheap.
The "vision" that basically bet the farm on Britain becoming the world leader in technology and finance whilst at the same time selling off our natural resources in the North Sea and opening our doors to unprecedented levels of foreign investment has burnt our bridges. We don't lead the world in technology and our financial centres will probably be relocated to the EU after Brexit, so the last thing we need to do is piss off foreign investment and by further taxing our own we are likely to do just that.Currently 13% of private properties in our capital are foreign owned plus a further 36,000 central London properties belong to offshore investors. 
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