Austerity...

Nobody is nicking anything - taxation rates, like pay rates, property taxes and government subsidy are all factors in a competitive environment.

And as much as you dislike it, we live in a competitive environment.

In the spirits of common decency your concerns are noted, but aren't really relevant to the situation.  We need to survive within a global system with a lot of competition.  This is just the way of things right now, so low rates is better than a kick in the nuts.  If the banks stop debanking wonderfully pro-British people then perhaps British business growth can counter it.

Someone mentioned Ireland earlier and its deployment of corporation tax as a predatory weapon. This is certainly the case of Apple, whose Irish subsidiary declares its entire global revenues and profits in Ireland, with the exception of the USA.

This is one of the reasons why Ireland's GDP per capita is so high. Apple, for instance has only 6,000 employees in Ireland but the company's international operations, located in Ireland, reported $69 billion profit in 2022 on $211 billion revenue.

appleinsider.com/articles/23/04/07/apples-irish-subsidiary-rakes-in-693-billion-profit-from-global-operations

The Tories have basically brought on this growth / fiscal crisis themselves - they are to blame

Possibly the worlds leading economist is Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and professor at several world leading institutions including The London School Of Economics and Princeton University.

His assertion that too much austerity defeats the object makes much sense, because if you think about it, you take money and resources OUT of the economy, it is surely going to hit growth, and the greatest weapon against debt and deficit is ... growth.

In 2010, before the general election, this argument was put forward not only by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, but also by Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and many others - however, after the election the Lib Dems who promoted the argument suddenly changed their minds.

The technical name for what the Tories did is PARADOX OF THRIFT - (quote) "Across an economy, one person's spending is another person's income. In other words, if everyone is trying to reduce their spending, the economy can be trapped in what economists call the paradox of thrift, worsening the recession as GDP falls"

Evidence ... In the first quarter of 2010, growth was accelerating after we had come out of recession, then the Tories came to power and shortly after that growth plummeted, and we almost went into a second recession (the double dip).

The higher our growth is - the quicker and lower our deficit becomes as a percentage of GDP, the REAL measure, the measure that counts.

And to think that the Conservatives were once regarded as the best guardians of the economy, how things do change.

There was no doubt that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling intended to cut spending, they had a "Recovery Budget" in the March of 2010, the result of which would have reduced the deficit to £163 billion for the financial year.

The George Osborne budget of June 2010 was forecast to redude the deficit to £149 billion

As stated previously, less cuts, over a longer period of time

EVERY forecast made by George Osborne in his first budget never came true - his forecasts on future growth were way off target, his forecast that his policies would result in a budget surplus by 2015 never came true - he predicted that unless we implemented his policies, the UK would lose its AAA Credit Rating.

The UK lost its AAA Credit Rating in 2013

So you remember the huge black hole left by the International Financial Meltdown. That's pretty good for a Tory.