What should we do to turn around Britain?

 Britain is far from Great anymore.

The economy seems incapable of growing. Productivity is stagnant and Britain isnt keeping pace with our competitors eg the USA.  We are getting relatively poorer.

Our leaders are weak and feeble.  Rishi comes across as an accountant auditor. Starmer the lawyer that does know how to run a business. At least our leaders are under retirement age and not about to drop dead from old age.

So what can we do to change the fortunes of the country?

Historically the City of London was the power house of the economy.  That's far from true anymore.  The Stock Market is a shadow of it's former self. There are very few new listings.  Increasingly companies are moving into private ownership.  When there is an opportunity for new listings, companies elect to be listed elsewhere eg Nasdaq because the UK stock market is seen as boring and low growth. For example the UK based tech company ARM listed on Nasdaq rather than the LSE in order to massively increase it's valuation.

What would I do to turn this around?

- Scrap stamp duty on share purchases.  The government makes money out of you if the shares rise price through capital gains tax.  Stamp duty is a barrier to purchasing high quality British stocks.  If I purchase Amamzon, Google etc I dont have to pay stamp duty but I do if I want to purchase BP. Britain is one of the few countries in the world with share stamp duty so lets scrap it.  By creating a level playing field - trading volumes on the stock market should rise.

-  Cut the level of regulation.  Companies are increasingly in private ownership rather than listed because the compliance and reporting overhead for public companies is higher. Absolutely there need to be transparency but a lots of the regulation doesnt help so I'd cut it.

- Similarly Banking regulation has got out of hand.  I remember having a discussion with a CTO of a large bank and he stated that they have armies of people (4,000 people) reading all the rules and regulations to assess the impact on the business processes and IT systems.  This wasnt even to implement all the rules and regulations - simply to understand them.  That's a lot of people adding zero value to the business - compliance and regulation is an overhead.  This needs to be trimmed with a chainsaw.  The regulations arent really reducing risk.  Scrap all legislation/red-tape that doesnt reduce significantly reduce risk of banking failure.  

- Pension funds are forced to hold bonds.  OK there is some benefit in having a diverse pension portfolio to reduce risks but why does everyone have to follow the same rules?  If I am aged 21, I would opt for higher risk shares with a higher reward - not bonds. If I am aged 70 then I would want security so might prefer bonds.  The point is that pension funds have to tie up funds on dead capital regardless - allow them to have more freedom if the person they are investing on behalf of is willing to accept more risk.  I've decided to manage my pension myself with a SIPP.  Guess what.  I don't hold any bonds - just blue chip high dividend stocks.

- Non dom taxes.  The Chancellor is scrapping Non Dom status so many wealthy billionaires are now abandoning the UK in favour of more tax advantagous countries like Italy, Switzerland etc.  I would undo this.  There's value in keeping rich people here.  Rich people buy expensive things creating jobs in the UK.  Rather than scrapping it, I would raise the flat rate tax band.  Currently non doms pay either £30k or £60k in tax. Both these numbers seem rather low given how much tax I have to pay and I'm far from being in the super rich category.   Rather than scrapping Non Dom status, it would be better to raise the tax rates to £200k and £400k.  The mega rich would happily pay this and stay. For the not so rich they can either pay taxes in the same way as the rest of us if it's less than these numbers.

- Scrap government civil servant pensions.  Currently there's a massive £2.4 Trillion black hole of funding for civil servant pensions.  Unfortunately the number of civil servants continues to grow unabated and therefore future liabilities keep getting bigger.  Productivity of civil servants hasnt improved - it's deteriorated.  Probably we need to stack 50% of all civil servants but in the meantime an easy option would be to close the final salary schemes and make all contributions going forward be on a defined benefit pension scheme.  The scheme needs to be run but a private pension company rather than the government.  Governments love a Ponzi scheme so by making the funds be ring fenced in private hands ensures that the pension liability is quantified going forward.  This would also ensure everyone knows what the overall package for employment is - currently people think they are badly paid when in reality they have gold plated pensions which are a massive component of their package.

- Reverse the corporation tax rise.  The increase in corporation tax results in margin rates of 26.5% for many small businesses whilst mega corporations pay 25%.   Why are we taxing the small guys?  it discourages investment unless you allow full year 1 capital allowances. 

Well that's some of the things I would do.  I've yet to hear any politicans being so specific.  

Governments can either :  ban,  tax, mandate or subsidise

Right now our Nanny State likes to ban things (eg smoking), tax things (Energy windfall tax).   Governments are very light on mandating eg supporting business.

I personally would try and scrap as much "banning" and "taxing" as possible.   Governments tend to create bubbles through their own incompetence.  Let's have a bonfire of this Government stupidity. 

Take CBD/Cannabis - rather than focusing on banning (which hasnt worked), then why not mandate it in order to regulate it. This will eliminate the crime element and create taxable revenues.