That Starmer fella...

Fair enough. I think Keynes would be a-okay with raising taxes (for those able to afford it) to aid recovery, but I'm also certain that wouldn't be the only thing he'd suggest.

All the high-speed railways!

He was writing/working during the Spanish flu so he must have had some thoughts on it. But oddly Google is giving me nothing

To stimulate the economy you want money circulating and being spent on stuff. Raising corporation tax is potentially diverting money from disappearing into rich people's bank accounts where it won't be spent and putting it into public services and projects where it will be.

No idea if Mr Keynes would agree, or whether it would be better to just print more money and worry about inflation later.

A revenue based tax gets rid of all incentives to invest in your business though. Even more incentive to screw all your costs as low as possible.

Corporation tax is currently 19%, which is ridiculously low. If the Conservatives are even thinking about raising CP, Labour should be wholeheartedly behind the idea and pushing for a windfall tax and a wealth tax while they are at it. To not do so is madness

To not do so is madness

OR! Is it genius?

19% is actually high. The issue being no fucker pays 19%. Even more endemic when you thin about big business.

e.g. Google post profit of £1.6B, pay CT of £44m = 2.75%

No, Google posted revenues of 1.6bn, not profits.

Whoops.

Completely agree that big business, especially multi-nationals are paying far less than the sticker price.

However, 19% is a very low CP tax rate among OECD countries:
US - 27%
Germany - 30%
France - 26.5%
Italy 24%
etc

I mean we need to both raise the CT rate and also clamp down on avoidance as well, I suspect the issue is the higher the rate is, the more companies are willing to pay advisors to find loopholes to avoid it.

I run a small company with profits around the £600k mark, and happily pay my 19%. Have been offered services to try and minimise that, but doesn’t interest me in the slightest. It does annoy me that we pay more in tax than lots of really big companies.

Why not put some of that money in to expanding the business? There’s more than one way to pay less CT. Growing the business - employing more people, growing revenue, more expenditure - is what the powers that be want you to do.

Unless you keep doing that already and keep making fat profits year on year almost by accident in which case WHAT IS THE SECRET

We are a niche business, not really any easy way to expand the business! If we employed more people they would just be twiddling their thumbs. We have employed a marketing person to help drum up business, but it’s a slow burn things.

Labour have decided to move the debate on to nuclear weapons, I try and stay out of this thread but wtf is going on in the Labour Party.

It is maddening at the minute. The Tories have clearly learned from the lessons of the past few years (see below from the FT), whereas Labour now have Lisa Nandy on Politics Live parroting the politics of austerity—'The best way to pay down the debt is to make sure that you don’t rack up more debt right now' (see here)

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It’s going to be really hard to hold my nose and vote for them if they carry on down this path.

Nothing says “progressive values wrapped in the flag” like global thermonuclear war.

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Personally I think they were right to get in with this and be pretty unequivocal. It dogged Corbyn throughout his leadership, saying what they've said should stop it constantly cropping up.

Didn't Corbyn end up saying that he would support Trident as that's the official party policy anyway so it was all a huge distraction with no end product.

I’m just unconvinced anyone is going to vote for the Anything Corbyn Said, We Say The Opposite Party.

I pretty much agree with what @grams says about the overall strategy, but yeah Corbyn did also commit to supporting Trident (as to whether anyone believed he was sincere or not in this support is another matter).

It's worth bearing in mind that this is what Nia Griffith, who was shadow defence secretary throughout much of Corbyn's tenure, had to say about NATO (to get a flavour of the foreign policy under Corbyn):

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An interesting take on the corporation tax increases from Ian Dunt
https://www.politics.co.uk/week-in-review/2021/02/26/week-in-review-labour-right-to-resist-a-rise-in-corporation-tax/

tl:dr Saying that CT tax increases are required is the first step to accepting that austerity is required

Maybe not in all situations but the Trident thing was stupid because Corbyn made so many noises about not supporting it and then ended up having to support it. The new stance should hopefully make it a non-issue.

Saying that CT taxes are required is the first step to accepting that austerity is required

I'm not entirely sure I follow. Even if correct (it's all a part of the Tory long game to reintroduce austerity), how does Labour opposing that increase prevent a return of austerity? That is, an increase in CT was progressive and anti-austerity when Starmer came out for it in the past. How have the material realities of that position changed due to a hypothetical ideological plan by the Tories?

I think more importantly, though, if that is indeed the reason for opposition to an increase in CT, why not say it explicitly and clearly? Why be ambiguous and send Nandy out to talk about "businesses in towns like mine" not having the money? Instead, layout the logic of the position.

Dunt is right in saying that raising taxes now, if framed in a certain way, would help reinforce the narrative that 'the pandemic must be paid back' (it doesn't, in the conventional sense), that government spending is like a household budget (it isn't), and that there are constraints on government borrowing (there aren't really at the moment); all of these can be ways to justify austerity.

However, I've seen little from Labour to suggest that their opposition to increases in corporate tax is due to a desire to counteract these narratives. It seems to me rather that the opposition to these CT rises is intended to signal to big business that a future Labour government poses no threat, after the Corbyn years in which the party was perceived to want to confront capital more directly.

These arguments leave to one side the simple fact that our CT far too low and that raising it is unlikely to have a negative impact on demand—both reasons to back these changes.