Taxing and regulating the global corporates

I am wholly and utterly committed to low tax and efficient regulation. However, tax and regulation must above all be fair and equitable - that means low tax and light regulation for all. Our complex system has increasingly delivered a system that burdens SMEs, and firms with no significant exports, and favours global corporates. The cost of compliance with EU regulation is a case in point; a multinational can afford an entire department churning out environmental, risk management, human relations and equal opportunities policies, method statements, sustainability assessments and reports on complex systems of internal monitoring. A maker of hand-built sports cars operating out of three small industrial sheds in Suffolk, with one girl on reception and another in the back office, can't hope to churn out the same box files of redundant officiousness. 

Likewise tax. A firm with a plant, a site, skilled workers, resources and substantial investment in the UK will always be at a disadvantage to the tax gypsies - the global corporates - who can pitch up in their generic Richard Rogers corporate HQ, install temporary staff and a few lawyers, and stay just as long as they're not bothered. The EU's senior unelected official was thrown out of office in Luxembourg (a small European nation about the size of Seattle) for encouraging corrupt tax avoidance that allows global corporates to harvest rich profits from one EU nation but pay minimal tax in another. And the scam isn't confined to the EU. 

The advantages enjoyed by the global corporates mean they are crowding out national competition, enjoying supernormal profits and creating global oligopolies. The rest of us, meanwhile, pay taxes to build the transport and communication networks, the courts and legal systems, the schools and universities that they use for free without responsibility or care. 

It may be legal, but it's wrong. And most folk can't console themselves that their pension funds are investing in these rootless and amoral firms and enjoying the profits - and those that can, may care to calculate that the potholed roads, the city centres lost to armed gangs and a generation that can't afford to buy their own homes just aren't worth the return.