Ministers hope this announcement is a reasonable basis for carrying on with negotiations over a trade deal that could lead to them falling or being dropped entirely.
Personally I’d like it if ministers showed some backbone.
What would that entail?
Personally, not having the Digital Service Tax on the table - Big Web should be paying more, not less, and tax breaks for billionaires looks bad when you are cutting money to the old and disabled.
I feel the government know they’re between a rock and a hard place. There’s no leverage we have to use against these multinational companies.
If only the Labour government would see the benefits of being in a larger trading bloc on our doorstep? 🤔 Sadly I think this just confirms to Starmer that being out with 10% tarrifs is better than being in with 20%.
No leverage?
Pay your fair share of tax, or lose access to this market you’re making millions from. That seems like leverage enough to me, am I missing something?
Britain is a service economy. We go after foreign tech, they go after our finance, outsourcing, management, legal and creative arts sectors. We can’t compete on cheap manufacturing. Expensive manufacturing doesn’t employ many people.
Leverage would be saying to these companies “pay your fair share of tax or we will use this other provider / service / company that does and you won’t make any money”. The problem is in a lot of cases we don’t have alternatives that work either in the same way or as cheaply or at a large enough scale to be drip on replacements. These companies are also often large employers so you have to think about where and how you’re going to transfer the jobs.
Oh, because we’d be at a great loss here if Amazon suddenly disappeared. What with their poverty wages the government has to top up, and the avoiding paying tax, and their exploitation of, well everything.
Look, I’m not against shifting Amazon. But what is the viable UK alternative? Any alternative needs to be at the same price and convenience otherwise it will simply fail in the market. Like it or not there’s a reason why Amazon is Amazon.
The trade bloc point is tricky though.
Any rational brain can see that the benefits of being in the EU massively outweigh the drawbacks.
At the same time, we can see from our voting history that a huge chunk of us do not think rationally when it comes to politics. We’re all guilty of it. But some of us at a minimum can reflect on our knee jerk reaction and allow our calmer heads to prevail.
Unfortunately, it seems many of us have a knee jerk reaction that is never re-evaluated until we’re faced with the hardship it causes.
I feel like, because of the above, there’s still a small appetite for rejoining the bloc. Those who voted to leave and are being hit hard by leaving have no way to say we should rejoin whilst saving face.
Labour haven’t been elected to rejoin the EU, and it’s likely that any longstanding improvement to our country they can make will take more than one term. If they start looking at rejoining the reactive right will ensure they don’t get that second term and we’ll be stuck back where we were with the Tories.
Even some small word saying something better than ‘it could have been worse’. It really cements how pathetic our country has become.
This is all my knee jerk reaction however. I’ll l probably say something more sensible tomorrow.
I also concede that we have no other choice. We shot ourselves in the foot with Brexit thinking the US might be reliable and now look where we are.
I’m just annoyed at our whole ridiculous situation right now.
The US wasn’t reliable before Brexit 😄. Even as far back as Obama using the UK as a whipping boy during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and deliberately conflating BP as a British company despite it being half American at the time and the actual spill found to be the fault of a US drilling company. That and casually hacking the German Chancellor’s phone. The US have always been America First. They just didn’t thump their chests (relatively speaking) as much as Trump.
Even some small word saying something better than ‘it could have been worse’. It really cements how pathetic our country has become.
Fair, I feel the same. But I think this reflects where we are as a nation right now.
I have never claimed the US to be reliable, I’m trying to say that ‘trading with the US’ was one of the ideas being touted during the referendum.
Also, they are certainly less reliable now than then.
A guess. But it seems likely trumps change from threatening indevidual nations. To attacking all imports equally. Was the result of some nations backbone so to speak.
It sounds like an attempt to stick to his claims it for the US. While still creating a form of national sales tax.
But its worth remembering. 10% is not going to effect the reasons companies build outside the US. So will not have much effect on increasing US over foreign sales.
So will not do anything but increase costs to his voters.
Lets not cut the rope he is wrapping round his neck.
That’s the end of America right there, folks.
Bahahahha the GST you had to have
