flat rate tax system on ALL companies operating within the UK, regardless of size, @20% of gross. (VAT @20%)
same as VAT, if VAT drops or increases then corporate gross tax revenue drops or increases to the level of VAT.

end of game ...

flat rate tax system on ALL companies operating within the UK, regardless of size, @20% of gross.

Is that before or after any expenses? I’m just thinking of that great coffee nation Switzerland that seems to be able to milk Starbucks in this country absolutely dry, thus avoiding paying any UK corporation tax.

Mind you, they did decide to volunteer some small payment to HMRC, so maybe we should all just tell the government how much we’d be happy to pay instead, rather than a fixed percentage.

Have a unitary tax for multinationals with taxes companies based on their world wide profits. It is the big companies that are avoiding their taxes not the small domestic ones. Just aim your taxes at that group and you will improve tax income.

But that sort of idea could easily see 3 thousand direct jobs go in a flash plus a spend in the uk economy of a couple of billion.

You want to tax a multinational on world wide profits even if they pay taxes in the countries where they made that profit.

I've no wish to see anyone lose their job, but the bare fact is neither of those numbers means anything worth a damn on the scale of the national economy.

You want to tax a multinational on world wide profits even if they pay taxes in the countries where they made that profit. How quickly do you want the total destruction of the tax base?
The company I work for basically made no profit in the UK but made all its profits overseas, where it pays the taxes the governments of those countries says it has too. But that sort of idea could easily see 3 thousand direct jobs go in a flash plus a spend in the uk economy of a couple of billion.

Individually they mean nothing but when that's replicated by all the big companies then the knock on becomes ever larger. As well as the ancillary jobs that go from suppliers etc. Its a simple idea that falls apart even under a cursory inspection

It is called a unitary tax. If they made 25% of their sales here and group profits worldwide were $4 billion but somehow "profits" here were zero, then they would pay 23% taxes on that 25% of profits that could have been made here.

That would make the UK as attractive for investment as the westboro Baptist church doing a picket at mecca.

Anything that would diversify the UK economy a bit would be a good thing IMO. We're too dependent upon the large corporations which gives them too much power.

As to the Starbucks thing, I remember a story I read a while ago. There was a long standing independent coffee shop and then a Starbucks opened on the same street. Everyone assumed the custom would just go to Starbucks - more marketing, familiarity with the product range etc - and the little guy would go out of business. In the end it didn't happen. In the end, he actually got more business. The reasons were complex but there definitely was a factor that being different from the kind of 'all the same, everywhere' was something people actually preferred.

OK, you're not going to be able to just wander in and make a fortune. Without Starbucks back end systems you're going to have to find a supplier for raw materials, you're going to have start up costs, you're going to have to do your own promotion and marketing etc. But if Starbucks pulled out of the UK, people wouldn't stop wanting coffee. The demand would still be there and a savvy business man would find a way to profit from that. I suspect a large portion of that demand would be met by expansion of the other chains like Costa but there would be an opportunity for independent owners to spring up. Would there be as many coffee shops overall? Possibly no, possibly some fewer. Would every Starbucks employee in the UK end up on the dole? Almost certainly not.