The Telegraph had an interesting report today: Vince Cable has warned that businesses could end up with more regulation rather than less from the Government’s Red Tape Challenge campaign. The Business Secretary said that members of the public and consumer groups were using the Government website to lobby hard for existing regulations to be maintained or
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Good stuff from Tim Horton, research director of the Fabians in the Guardian: There are huge challenges for the left in thinking about the future role of the state. Our ageing society will require more services than can be funded simply out of taxation, requiring tough trade-offs. Meanwhile, markets can provide many services they couldn’t
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You can get the Google tax avoidance story here

From Larry Elliott this morning: The pressures on the so-called “squeezed middle” are now intense. These pressures will not be eased without pro-growth macro-economic policies, activist industrial strategies, stronger unions, higher real incomes across the board, and tougher action against inequality. A return to the Anglo-Saxon model will lead to stagnation, higher unemployment and even
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Sean O’Grady in the Independent has delivered another of his spectacularly wild economic comments in response to my new report on corporation tax for the TUC. My contentions in that report, all backed by evidence are that: a) The UK already has competitive corporation tax rates; b) The UK small companies rate of corporation tax
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The Sunday Times did an expose of Google’s tax affairs today. I’ll declare an interest: they asked me to help the investigation, and I did. The findings? Google has avoided £3 billion of tax worldwide over the last five years. It’s tax rate outside the USA is just 3%. In 2009 if Google had declared
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The Guardian, rightly, sought contrary opinion when reporting my new report for the TUC on corporation tax cuts. The found it from my old foe, Prof Mike Devereux of the Oxford Centre for Business Taxation, which would be better named the Oxford Centre for the Non-Taxation of Business. As the Guardian reports: Mike Devereux, director of the Oxford
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The Guardian and the Herald in Scotland have covered my new report on corporation tax, competition and its relationships with growth and employment published by the TUC. As the Guardian notes: Lower corporate tax rates may not boost economic growth, a new report suggests, taking issue with a key principle at the heart of the Tories’ economic policies. The report, by chartered
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I have the following blog on the TUC’s Touchstone site this morning: At the heart of George Osborne’s economic policy is a deeply perverse belief that if he cuts public spending and services people’s confidence will increase because they will think that they will have more money to spend themselves as a result and so there will
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