Nearly all FTSE 100 companies are global. A big chunk earn a big part of their revenues outside the UK. Why do they stay HQ'd here? What about all the multinationals based in Japan, USA, France, etc?

I must say, I don't recall anyone needing to 'teach' me to use a phone.

Well thats not the same thing as I'm talking about.

Well perhaps that was too much of a generalisation to make a point in that you can still avoid corporation tax and be HQ'd here as well if you have operations abroad. Things like transfer pricing work wherever you are HQ'd. Boots have an operational HQ in Nottingham but the parent company is Swiss. Remember the controversy over Vodafone and its tax deal with HMRC?

In any case it is not just "UK" companies who are avoiding tax. Ikea for example does it, we know Starbucks has done it and so on.

This tax avoidance is a serious problem and while even Amazon pay a small amount of corporation tax the amount they pay is minimised by being incorporated in Ireland.

The idea any of these companies will give up their tax avoidance schemes because we lower our corporation tax rate is as I said naive.



I think you underestimate the political skill of Alex Salmond. The "better together" campaign is being painted as negative and while I think Salmond and the SNP are living in cloud cuckoo land with half the stuff they are promising this bad news on supermarket pricing is thrown back as bullying and a way to point out just why they need to be free of such parasites. I have been following the debate on various on-line sites and whenever anything negative comes up if they can't refute it outright the tactic is to try and frame the debate along the lines of "well we might be worse off but at least we will be in charge of our own destiny". This is going to be as much about the heart as the mind and while polls show a minority in favour of independence there are enough undecided voters to swing it and it is these Salmond and the SNP are targeting with their "Braveheart" tactics.

It is ironic you chose BP as an example. They oppose one of the fundamental accounting reforms that would permit the correct level of corporation tax to be paid. Country-by-country reporting.

Why do you think they oppose it? Because corporation tax rate is too high?

No, because being able to post consolidated accounts that hide intra-group trades is a key way of avoiding the tax and they will want to keep doing that whatever the corporation tax rate is .

They will want to avoid country-by-country reporting whatever the corporate tax rate is because while they no doubt pay some corporation tax here they will, like any international company, be using intra-company trades to minimise it.

It's ironic by the way because the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has led the US government to want to regulate the extraction industry more and one aspect of that was country-by-country reporting so they could tell just what an extraction company operating in the US was earning in the US.



Only on some right wing fantasy Island. It's like the trickle down effect. Pure fantasy.

The idea lowering the corporation tax rate will reduce avoidance is ridiculous. If tax can be avoided it will be whatever the rate.

If you want to argue that lower taxes increase the tax take as we see mentioned by various right wing politicians and economists from time to time that is a different debate than one specially about corporation tax.

I'd also be interested to know what you think about the possibly of an independent Scotland undercutting the rest of the UK's corporation tax rate. It would be very easy for Whitbread who own Costa who do pay corporation tax here (unlile Starbucks) to move north of the border and deny us their corporation tax for example.

Back to the original topic for a moment.

I see Mark Carney has now warned against anyone overstretching themselves on a mortgage. With interest rates at a historic low for so long, he's afraid that many will extend themselves in the hope that house prices will continue rising and when interest rates do rise, there will be sufficient realiseable equity in the property to avoid foreclosure. That is the economics of stupidity, especially given the 'help to buy' scheme. Even without interest rates getting into double digits, a lot of new buyers will struggle with just a 1% increase.

The average price of a house in London is now 16 times the average London wage. That is a completely unsustainable situation.

Instead of building houses that people cannot realistically afford to buy, why aren't we building homes that even the poorest can afford to rent?

The midde-classes don't need teaching. Us working class types who were brought up without a 'phone in the house fond it a daunting experience!

He's doing the correct thing by warning people. IMO the government is cynically and irrationally manipulating the housing market as the aspirations of the young to create a "feel good" factor in the hope of gaining a Tory majority in 2015. As soon as the election is out of the way they won't give two hoots for those same people when they are stuck in negative equity or worse.

Well its then up to HMRC to police the transfer-pricing legislation better. It's also up to legislators to show some urgency in modernising the tax system to cope better with international trade.

That was me in 1974 when I started work, we didn't get a phone in the house until 1979.

On the other hand I also had to be taught in the office how to use an electric calculator (note "electric" rather than "electronic", it was an electro-mechanical calculator) as calculators were banned at our grammar school, we had to do all multiplications on paper or in our heads