Keep on like this Boris and we will have a labour prime minister.

What the government has done, as part of an OECD-wide commitment, is takle base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). The result of this is to increase the tax base as companies are find it ever more difficult to shift profits offshore. Certainly a good thing.

Also there is the benefit (in CT terms) of the return to profits of many of the banks. Also in this years stats the government has changed the point at which receipts are included in the stats which has effectively massaged the figures. Excluding the past year the corporation tax take has only gone up marginally.

One of the related issues is that companies are now more willing to declare tax in the UK/less able not to, but the retained profits post tax are then sitting on balance sheets underutilised, which is incredibly inefficient and you have a savings glut. A major reason for this is a lack of aggregate demand in the economy which has been brought about largely due to austerity. There are tax breaks for business investment but business investment fell last year, which also helped tax take.

The tax take from the bank levy has gone down though as the government slashed the rate.

If the tax take was going up as rates go down and this was purely down to growth then why have wages been stagnant? Average real weekly earnings have not increased since 2010 and have actually fallen slightly.

Corporation tax take and wage growth are not related.

The reality is that under the Tories the amount taken off corporations has increased. Yet we are constantly told by Labour that increasing taxes on corporations is a policy that will work....They cite it for many of their spending commitments.

I'm not interested in ideology on this point I'm only interested in what is effective.

As far as I can see when this is done the opposite happens.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

You miss my point. If tax take goes up while rates go down that must mean more profits are taxed. If companies make higher profits what are they doing with them? If you want to claim that tax take has gone up due to increased company profits then I would certainly expect there to be some sort of positive correlation between real wages and corporate profits and hence corporate taxes.

Usually if there is economic growth you'd expect real wages to increase. If companies are making more money you'd expect that to be reflected in rising wages. If you don't expect that then why not? Surely that would be a sign of a system where incentives aren't aligned?

My point was that perhaps the tax take from CT going up isn't in fact a simple case of increased profits more than compensating for decreased tax rates.

My points on Corporation Tax weren't party political. The entire tax system is not fit for purpose. It's been allowed to grow out of all proportion over time and is so complex and often lacks common sense and is often far too regressive. Often governments will make tax laws which grab headlines but give no thought to how they can be practically implemented or the actual benefit of those laws.

What is certainly true though is that our rate of CT is very low compared with other developed countries and I'd say unjustifiably so. We shouldn't need to have such a high margin of "competitiveness" in our tax rate given the make up of our economy and workforce. Within recent changes in the taxable base and the added difficulty of diverting profits offshore I see no reason why increasing CT rates wouldn't result in improved tax take.

Let's see your evidence for this. Also please put in context of the 18 preceding years (when inequality did increase sharply).

My understanding is inequality went up marginally between 1997 and 2010 and has since remained broadly constant.

Having just had a quick look at ONS website bottom 20% disposable real income grew by 2.7% per annum on average under the last labour government. Since 2010 the equivalent figure is just under 1% per annum. ONS would seem a fairly credible source.

If you were working age without children and found it hard to get a reasonable job you were buggered under Labour. If you had kids or were a pensioner, not so much.

[Link]

To quote from the conclusion on page 54.

'Income inequality, on most measures, is now
higher than when Labour came to power
and at its highest level since the start of our comparable time series in 1961'.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)