Ex-Chancellor wants to block a tax loophole by creating another one.

From the BBC:

Former Conservative Chancellor Lord Lawson told the Telegraph: "It is profoundly unsatisfactory that corporation tax has to be collected from large multinational corporations by a series of ad hoc compromise deals, as we have once again seen with the Google affair.

"It is also grossly unfair on smaller businesses, who are unable to shift profits between tax jurisdictions and have to pay the full amount due under UK law."

Google's tax agreement came after years of criticism of it and other multinational firms over their tax arrangements in the UK and across Europe. The payment by Google, praised by Chancellor George Osborne as a "victory" for the government, covered money owed since 2005 and followed a six-year inquiry by HMRC.

Lord Lawson said the arrangement showed corporation tax should be replaced with "a much lesser tax, bolstered by a tax on corporate sales".

Duh.

Google are already actually minimising two separate taxes - VAT (a tax on sales) and corporation tax (a tax on net profits) - by booking the sales and the profits in low- or no-tax countries.

If the UK replaced corporation tax with a tax on corporate sales, they would discover that most of Google's sale to UK customers are from Ireland and have been for years, and that Google would pay even less tax than now.

So either Lawson is far stupider than I gave him credit for; he is working for Google et al; or he is just one of these Homeys/Faux Libs who would like to reduce corporation tax and increase VAT (the worst tax of all) accordingly because that benefits banks and landowners at the expense of the productive economy.

Nigel Lawson on top form

From today's Soaraway Sun:

Recognising that Brits have too much common sense to fall for this, [the taxpayer-funded lobby groups] parade spurious environmental concerns, claiming that fracking will contaminate groundwater and lead to damaging earthquakes.

Both these objections are entirely unfounded. Despite the hundreds of thousands of shale wells drilled in the US, there is not a single, authenticated case of groundwater contamination. This is hardly surprising. Groundwater, as its name implies, is near the earth’s surface. Shale gas is drilled deep, deep, down.

As for earthquakes, while there have been a few instances of minor tremors deep down where the fracking takes place, these have no effect whatsoever on the surface, where we all live.