Remember George Osborne? His plan was to cut his way to a ‘budget surplus’, where the government has more money coming in than goes out, by 2015. He dropped that particular plan in 2016, so before Brexit could be blamed for our later and current woes. Ireland has managed it by cutting taxes, and with a little, or a lot of help from the B-word. The only remaining English-speaking country in the EU, with company taxation half that elsewhere, so it was a done-deal for all the big tech companies like Google, Meta and X (I know) to set up their Euro HQs in Dublin. It’s also become home to most of the fund mangers who want to continue to do business in Europe, at the expense of our own once-great City of London. In fact ‘over 1,000 FDI (Foreign Direct Investment, me neither) giants in ICT, Social Media, Pharmaceuticals and Finance have made Ireland the hub of their European operations’. Ireland has to its credit aimed fairly and squarely at big foreign corporates rather than tax-haven individuals. I did say, post-B, that one of our few hopes was to become a tax-haven of sorts. I think, having quite-rightly chucked-out most of the Ruskies (who’ve headed straight for Dubai), that we’ve missed that particular boat in every respect.
