Dave B wrote:Listening to pre-budget item, on Today, from tge Lodon Gateway.
Imports high, exports low - except for financial etc services and high-end stuff.
One reason for this is the parlous state of the European economy, in contrast to the UK.
Strikes me that those fihacial etc services employ low numbers of highly qualified staff - who seem to do their best not to pay taxes in the UK.
Sorry, Dave, but you are quite simply wrong on this point. UK employees pay UK tax on their UK earnings.
The high end tech industry is not the country's biggest bunch of employers, so not that many high pay tax payers there either. Probably not high volume exports either. So our industrial base withers further. They admitted that we export mainly fresh air from London Gateway in terms of empty, returned containers. And it is intended to make it three times larger.
If we are importing, say, fridges, and exporting, say, computer games, this is inevitable, and not necessarily a bad thing. And our industrial base has been rising all this time. But not in employment terms, because of automation, and not as a proportion of the economy, as other sectors, in which we have a comparative advantage, grow faster.
Meanwhile we import the mundane stuff, mainly from China, so only VAT on that, plus tax on any non-fiddled profits. But since this stuff increasingly imported direct via Amazon et al . . . So no import duty or VAT.
Sorry, Dave, but wrong again. Import duties are generally a bad thing, and buying via Amazon is still subject to VAT.
Low level jobs geing taken by imigrants and foreign workers, seemingly with pressure to keep wages at minimum.
Sounds like a shit economy to me, Thatcher started it and her spawn carry on the same model.
Oh dear. It was Blair's government who opened the floodgates to immigrants, it is the Tories who are raising the minimum wage, and before Thatcher came to power, the economy was so dire that there was a net outflow of migrants from Britain. Sure, the UK faces problems, but compared to many other economies, we are the land of milk and honey.