‘Business must shout louder for the merits of lower taxes or the government will be unable to cut the top rate of income tax to 40p, George Osborne warned yesterday.
‘The Chancellor said that Britain was vulnerable to a return to the “politics of envy” and that anti-business sentiment was on the rise.
‘Mr Osborne accepted that the Budget had caused “lots of bad headlines”, but he chastised bosses for the “near silence” with which they had greeted his politically tough decision to lower the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p. And he urged business leaders to be much more vocal in helping the Conservatives to make the case for a low tax economy and a smaller state. Without such support Chancellors would find it hard to “put their necks on the line” for cuts in the top rate of tax.
‘Mr Osborne told The Times CEO Summit: “If your voice is not heard then elected politicians are going to find it very difficult to put together pro-business packages because you leave the space open to everyone else ... At the moment we are having a pretty big argument about the size of the state and who should be taxed and what the right levels of taxation are. If we don’t get much voice from the business community then that’s more difficult ... There’s more of an anti-business sentiment which has spilled over from understandable public anger about what went wrong in the financial system.”’
‘Business must shout louder for the merits of lower taxes or the government will be unable to cut the top rate of income tax to 40p, George Osborne warned yesterday.
‘The Chancellor said that Britain was vulnerable to a return to the “politics of envy” and that anti-business sentiment was on the rise.
‘Mr Osborne accepted that the Budget had caused “lots of bad headlines”, but he chastised bosses for the “near silence” with which they had greeted his politically tough decision to lower the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p. And he urged business leaders to be much more vocal in helping the Conservatives to make the case for a low tax economy and a smaller state. Without such support Chancellors would find it hard to “put their necks on the line” for cuts in the top rate of tax.
‘Mr Osborne told The Times CEO Summit: “If your voice is not heard then elected politicians are going to find it very difficult to put together pro-business packages because you leave the space open to everyone else ... At the moment we are having a pretty big argument about the size of the state and who should be taxed and what the right levels of taxation are. If we don’t get much voice from the business community then that’s more difficult ... There’s more of an anti-business sentiment which has spilled over from understandable public anger about what went wrong in the financial system.”’
