{"id":19515,"date":"2013-03-11T08:39:49","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T08:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=19515"},"modified":"2013-03-11T08:39:49","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T08:39:49","slug":"george-osborne-is-delivering-on-his-2006-promise-to-the-city-of-light-tax-and-light-regulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/03\/11\/george-osborne-is-delivering-on-his-2006-promise-to-the-city-of-light-tax-and-light-regulation\/","title":{"rendered":"George Osborne is delivering on his 2006 promise to the City of light tax and light regulation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 2006 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/finance\/2940311\/Personal-view-We-promise-simpler-taxation-the-right-regulations-and-good-infrastructure.html\" target=\"_blank\">George Osborne wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A party that aspires to be the next government and wants to prepare Britain for the challenges of the next century has got to understand the City's priorities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nothing\u00a0could\u00a0have been clearer about what he saw his\u00a0priority\u00a0to be:\u00a0keeping\u00a0his friends in the City happy was his task.<\/p>\n<p>His first objective in fulfilling that goal was, he said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Where once we had one of the most competitive corporation tax regimes in the world, now we have one of the least. ... [O]ver the long term we want to move toward lower taxes in order to restore Britain's economic competitiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That's why the government <a title=\"The British government speaks with a forked tongue on corporate tax abuse when it\u2019s real goal is to make the UK a tax haven\" href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/03\/10\/the-british-government-speaks-with-a-forked-tongue-on-corporate-tax-abuse-when-its-real-goal-is-to-make-the-uk-a-tax-haven\/\">now praises itself on becoming tax haven UK<\/a> -\u00a0outdoing\u00a0Switzerland, the Netherlands\u00a0and\u00a0Ireland in offering low and no taxes.<\/p>\n<p>His second object was:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[W]e have to get regulation right - domestic and European. ...\u00a0I fear that much of this [current] regulation has been burdensome, complex and makes cross-border market penetration more difficult. This is exactly the wrong direction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To put it\u00a0another\u00a0way, what he was very clearly saying was that labour was over-regulating the City and that its 'light touch' regime was harmful. And so we learn today <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/de013b86-89a5-11e2-ad3f-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2NDXG53X8\" target=\"_blank\">from the FT that<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00a0According to the influential\u00a0Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, elements of the government\u2019s proposed new banking legislation are \u201cextremely weak\u201d and must be urgently toughened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Osborne's sticking to his word. Light tax and light regulation was the promise, and that's exactly what he's delivering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2006 George Osborne wrote: A party that aspires to be the next government and wants to prepare Britain for the challenges of the next<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/03\/11\/george-osborne-is-delivering-on-his-2006-promise-to-the-city-of-light-tax-and-light-regulation\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,96,64,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-city-of-london","category-conservatives","category-corporation-tax","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}