I’ve changed my mind about tax. When I heard that Amazon, Starbucks and others were paying minimal tax, my knee-jerk response was to dump Amazon and do my Christmas shopping elsewhere. I couldn’t dump Starbucks because I prefer Costa and Nero.
The Christmas presents arrived, but not quite as quickly, or as well-packaged as Amazon do. So why was I punishing Amazon for being cleverer? The Government doesn’t do what it does as well as Amazon does retail
The successful international companies operate above individual governments.
Starbucks and Amazon show what can be achieved by looking at the global picture rather than saying: in England we work this way, in France cette mode and so on.
Successful companies constantly review how they do what they do. If they stand still, some bright spark in Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai or Shanghai will disrupt their market faster than a speeding bullet.
Governments are concerned only with their country, their voters and are hamstrung by special interest groups who threaten to vote for the other lot if anything changes. We in Britain are the best example of this. Join forces with Europe? Not likely. Improve the way we run the Health Service, the BBC, our local councils? Heaven forbid.
If politicians want international companies to pay more tax, they must become cleverer.
Simplify the tax system. Look at how the world works, not simply how we in Britain work.
Work out how to attract international companies and see the benefit of having them here in terms of jobs and business, not just tax.
Europe has more success with international companies than we do because it is more beneficial for a company to deal with Europe than with individual governments.
Whipping up anger about international companies not paying tax doesn’t achieve anything. Working out how to keep pace with the cleverest companies in the world would.
Monday, 31 December 2012
Friday, 28 December 2012
Driving skill
London has great public transport. Trains, tubes, buses get millions of people where they want to go every day.
On Boxing Day we saw the best and worst of this.
The worst were the ASLEF train drivers who went on strike because the generous wages they get are not enough to get them out of bed on a bank holiday.
The best were the bus drivers who packed in as many of us as possible and got us to and from our sales, our football matches and our tourist sites.
Driving a Tube train is easy - so easy it can be automated. Driverless trains are operating now and will be the norm in a few years.
Driving a bus is difficult. You share the road with car drivers who don’t know which lane to be in, cyclists who wear black at night and come up the inside and pedestrians who get drunk and wander into the road.
The men and women who drive buses are, like the people who drive big trucks, skillful, calm and courteous. They are better drivers than the rest of us.
The Association of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen are not engineers or firemen. They are the skills we needed when steam trains ran. We don’t need those skills today.
Nor do we need the union belief of the 1970s that going on strike forces employers to pay higher wages.
It should be clear by now to even the locomotive engineers and firemen that going on strike forces employers to work out how to use technology to replace you.
On Boxing Day we saw the best and worst of this.
The worst were the ASLEF train drivers who went on strike because the generous wages they get are not enough to get them out of bed on a bank holiday.
The best were the bus drivers who packed in as many of us as possible and got us to and from our sales, our football matches and our tourist sites.
Driving a Tube train is easy - so easy it can be automated. Driverless trains are operating now and will be the norm in a few years.
Driving a bus is difficult. You share the road with car drivers who don’t know which lane to be in, cyclists who wear black at night and come up the inside and pedestrians who get drunk and wander into the road.
The men and women who drive buses are, like the people who drive big trucks, skillful, calm and courteous. They are better drivers than the rest of us.
The Association of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen are not engineers or firemen. They are the skills we needed when steam trains ran. We don’t need those skills today.
Nor do we need the union belief of the 1970s that going on strike forces employers to pay higher wages.
It should be clear by now to even the locomotive engineers and firemen that going on strike forces employers to work out how to use technology to replace you.
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