No one, however long they have held the post, lightly gives up the great office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Certainly I did not.
You do not need to be within the single market to be able to export to the European Union, as we see from the wide range of goods on our shelves every day.
A flat-rate poll tax would be politically unsustainable; even with a rebate scheme, the package would have an unacceptable impact on certain types of household.
I'm sure Mark Carney is a very clever young man, but I think that the government would be mad to move from inflation targeting to money GDP targeting.
We should be forced to give so many exemptions and concessions (inevitably to the benefit of high spending authorities in Inner London) that the flat-rate poll tax would rapidly become a surrogate income tax.
God forbid that the United Kingdom should take a lead and introduce a sensible tax system of its own which would probably comprise a very low level of corporation tax - tax on corporate profits - and perhaps a low level of corporate sales tax, because sales are where they are, and sales in this country are sales here, which we can tax here.
