£36bn in missing taxes
About £36 billion in taxes were not collected, avoided or evaded last financial year, according to a report produced by HM Revenue & Customs. However, the “tax gap” – the difference between…
Chief-Exec.com Originals
Brexiters wrong: Australia has high immigration
There is a paradox about Australia being used by Brexiters as the exemplar of a fit-for-purpose system for reducing immigration. Australia certainly has a prescriptive and, in the case of its humanitarian…
Strange goings on at Russia Today
The UK branch of the TV channel Russia Today (RT) last week received a letter from NatWest, saying its credit facilities were being withdrawn. Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, cast the NatWest move…
Should they stay or should they go?
Editorial Each morning bankers, analysts, manufacturers and their assorted intermediaries will be scratching their heads and sifting through news reports for clues as to what a Brexit outcome might look like. Should…
Middle ground manoeuvers
The major political parties in Western democracies are scrambling to attempt to understand and respond to what appears to be a spreading revolution against mainstream conventional political thinking on many of today’s big…
The political logic of a hard Brexit
PARIS – Little more than three months after the United Kingdom’s decision in June to leave the European Union, Brexit politics are careening out of control in the UK. An almost revolutionary…
The Game of Brexit
In one way it is fortunate that the pre-negotiations on Brexit have staked out the territory. The game has crystallised into two dimensions – controls to reduce unwanted migration into the UK…
EU to profit as banks consider their future
As the UK government seems determined to pursue a hard Brexit, banks in the City are planning to shift some operations and thousands of jobs to other European Union countries to ensure…
Topographia hibernica: Irish ponder feast or famine
The colonial mind-set will employ a cognitive dissonance of superiority before questing after another nation’s natural resources. It was no different between imperial Britain and pastoral Ireland. Giraldus Cambrensis, the Welsh ecclesiastic,…
The end of the beginning of the revolution?
There is ferocity in the way that Brexiters are warning against anything less than hard Brexit which suggests they are fearful of what could be called the “think again” factor. A similar…