Larry Elliott has a piece in the Guardian this morning in which he considers the possibility that the UK will exploit Ireland’s current misfortunes. As he puts it:
UK membership of monetary union is a dead issue, leaving the more interesting question of whether the British government will exploit attempts to neutralise Ireland's corporate tax regime. There is nothing George Osborne would like more than to market the UK as an English-speaking economy that is open to business. Ireland's plight might provide just the opening he wants.
As I have already noted this morning, Osborne shares the same failed philosophy that has driven the Irish economy to the brink of failure. No doubt replicating they in the UK will appeal to him. But it will be a disaster for the rest of us.
This is the last moment when we need to become a corporate tax haven: the policy is destroying Ireland and it would destroy us in turn.
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Of course they won’t. Osborne may prefer low taxes, but he knows that the UK is too large to practice the predadtory pricing that Ireland undertook to the disadvantage of other countries. For a long time the Irish believed that they could only maintain their preferential tax rates for their Shannon and Dublin Docks special tax jones leavng the rest of the country to pay tax on their company profits at 50%. It was only when the EU made that split tax pricing illegal that they switched to a low universal tax rate.
The UK is too big to give up the revenues of £50 billion or more from corporation tax in order to win a few billion of extra company treasury business from Ireland, but they might well be minded to reduce the corporation tax burden slightly to stimulate what is left of the UK private sector.
You ignore the fact that gideon and his narrow constituency has no interest in the wider economy. They are an asset stripping operation and nothing more.
Or…it could be the ultra low interest rates and massive credit boom which has caused Ireland’s collapse, and little to do with it’s tax rates.