Single European Tax: The new threat to British businesses by Jeffrey Titford MEP 09-05-2007

Single European Tax – The New Threat to British Business
Tuesday, 08 May 2007
East Anglian Daily Times - 7th May 2007

The business community should take heed, for next year the European Commission will unveil proposals for the introduction of a single European business tax, with legislation expected to be in place by 2011.

They haven’t precisely decided how this will all work but that hasn’t stopped a majority of the Commissioners voting to approve a report into creating a common corporate tax system. According to a study by the Said Business School at Oxford University, this would see costs to British business rise by £4 billion a year and EU tax revenues rise by 8 per cent. The Commissioners must be positively salivating at the possibility of getting their hands on such a large income stream to finance their empire building.

The plan is the brainchild of EU tax Commissioner Laszlo Kovacs, who is dressing the whole thing up in the usual smokescreen – empty words about it supposedly making life easier for companies to trade across borders. Do not be taken in. The real reason goes back to that particularly fatuous, oxy moron ‘unfair tax competition’ that was dreamed up some years ago by the EU to attempt to belittle countries, which through their own efforts, have managed to keep corporation and general taxation lower than the EU norm.

It is a taboo in the EU for such situations to exist. To most of us, such competition is perfectly healthy and should be encouraged, not least because it puts the pressure on those countries with much higher rates to bring them down. Alas, the EU doesn’t have much truck with logic like that. No, it is setting about doing precisely the opposite; i.e. doing its best to increase corporation tax rates in those countries where it is lower, to stamp out this beastly competition. It is, of course, no coincidence that France and Germany happen to have higher rates of corporation tax.

Whenever I look at major proposals like this, which dramatically move the integrationist agenda forward and further undermine the sovereignty of national governments, I always think back to the early seventies when we were told we were joining a ‘Common Market’ (1973) and a bit later on, when the referendum on whether to stay came along (1975), that it was all about free trade and cheap wine. Not a single word was said about the creation of a single European state, insulated from the ballot box and with its own tax raising powers.

All of which inexorably leads me to the question: Where on earth do the eurocrats and the misguided politicians who support their empire building think their mandate for such proposals comes from? The answer is that there patently isn’t one. Unfortunately, when our once proud nation set out upon the road to European empire, we did not know it was a one way street.