Ministers hope this announcement is a reasonable basis for carrying on with negotiations over a trade deal that could lead to them falling or being dropped entirely.
Ministers hope this announcement is a reasonable basis for carrying on with negotiations over a trade deal that could lead to them falling or being dropped entirely.
Personally, not having the Digital Service Tax on the table - Big Web should be paying more, not less, and tax breaks for billionaires looks bad when you are cutting money to the old and disabled.
I feel the government know they’re between a rock and a hard place. There’s no leverage we have to use against these multinational companies.
If only the Labour government would see the benefits of being in a larger trading bloc on our doorstep? 🤔 Sadly I think this just confirms to Starmer that being out with 10% tarrifs is better than being in with 20%.
No leverage?
Pay your fair share of tax, or lose access to this market you’re making millions from. That seems like leverage enough to me, am I missing something?
Britain is a service economy. We go after foreign tech, they go after our finance, outsourcing, management, legal and creative arts sectors. We can’t compete on cheap manufacturing. Expensive manufacturing doesn’t employ many people.
Leverage would be saying to these companies “pay your fair share of tax or we will use this other provider / service / company that does and you won’t make any money”. The problem is in a lot of cases we don’t have alternatives that work either in the same way or as cheaply or at a large enough scale to be drip on replacements. These companies are also often large employers so you have to think about where and how you’re going to transfer the jobs.
Oh, because we’d be at a great loss here if Amazon suddenly disappeared. What with their poverty wages the government has to top up, and the avoiding paying tax, and their exploitation of, well everything.
Look, I’m not against shifting Amazon. But what is the viable UK alternative? Any alternative needs to be at the same price and convenience otherwise it will simply fail in the market. Like it or not there’s a reason why Amazon is Amazon.
Building datacenters is expensive but it is not like it is a misterious endeavour. Why governments are not putting projects out to build these, now critical, infrastuctures evades me.
I have a few datacenters in my country and supposedly more are on the way to being built. One of the first to be built is currently underway to be sold, as the telecom company that originally built and operated it appears to be going through rouh times.
I live in a 10000 people municipality. What would be the cost for the municipality to build a small datacenter and run it, perhaps even having a separare company run it and sell services from it?
The “too big to fail” argument sounds more and more indefensible and unsustainable.
Oh 100% agree with this. Short sighted spineless bureaucracy.
I’m repeatedly told “The market abhors a vacuum”, that is to say; I really don’t care, that’s not my problem.
To consumers, Amazon sells cheap shit people can live without, or stuff that can be had elsewhere already.
To business, Amazon rents server capacity and infrastructure, alternatives to which exist in droves.
Amazon is Amazon because they use every anticompetitive edge they can to squeeze out alternatives to themselves. Fuck 'em, they’re a cancer.
The trade bloc point is tricky though.
Any rational brain can see that the benefits of being in the EU massively outweigh the drawbacks.
At the same time, we can see from our voting history that a huge chunk of us do not think rationally when it comes to politics. We’re all guilty of it. But some of us at a minimum can reflect on our knee jerk reaction and allow our calmer heads to prevail.
Unfortunately, it seems many of us have a knee jerk reaction that is never re-evaluated until we’re faced with the hardship it causes.
I feel like, because of the above, there’s still a small appetite for rejoining the bloc. Those who voted to leave and are being hit hard by leaving have no way to say we should rejoin whilst saving face.
Labour haven’t been elected to rejoin the EU, and it’s likely that any longstanding improvement to our country they can make will take more than one term. If they start looking at rejoining the reactive right will ensure they don’t get that second term and we’ll be stuck back where we were with the Tories.