There you go again, your powers of comprehension really are limited aren't they?



I suggested that if the likes of Tesco want to offshore the administrative parts of their business in order to avoid paying tax on the productive parts of their business, then they should offshore the whole operation and leave the UK totally.







Do you seriously think that there will suddenly be a £2bn (your figures keep creeping ever upward, without any evidence of such), hole in the economy? Do you believe that the people who currently shop at Tesco will just sit at home and starve?

There is actually an EU initiative to do more or less this. It is called the Common Corporate Tax Rate and what it boils down to is companies are taxed on their earnings in the country they make those earnings in regardless of where their HQ is.



Amazon has its HQ in Ireland because the Irish have a low corporation tax. They will do far more business in the UK than they do in Ireland but at the moment the Irish govt gets their corporation tax and we get nothing. So unless our government wants to engage in a race to the bottom and undercut the Irish this will not change. The Irish rate is 12.5% and ours which is not dissimilar to the rest of the EU is 23%.



This is very unpopular with the French and Germans and I think pressure is being put on the Irish given the bailout but I do not think anything has come of it so far.



However there are I believe only two states opposed to adopting the common corporate tax rate and that is the Irish (surprise, surprise) and wait for it........the UK. You may recall Osborne's admiration for the Irish economy before it went belly up and maybe it stems from that but it is certainly true that the Tories are opposed to this idea. Its probably some stupid free market principle that says even though we are shafted by what is going on here it's a result of market forces so it must be right!



You might also have seen articles about a deal the government did with Switzerland over tax on monies in Swiss bank accounts but that simply meant people and companies could move their money to a different country where there was no agreement. The UK govt did this in preference to supporting the common corporate tax rate despite the fact this deal is easy to get around whereas the common corporate tax rate is not.



I also think what the Irish do shows you quite clearly how a small country can easily afford to be a tax haven (low infrastructure costs, small to non-existent armed services, small population etc) whereas here if we tried to undercut the Irish corporate tax rate the burden would have to switch to the people via income tax (and if there is high unemployment then there is less of that anyway).



I think it is clear the common corporate tax rate idea is one of the best ideas to come out of the EU and it is shameful our idiotic government does not back it.



It is even good for small to medium sized companies who currently can't "do an Amazon" and shift their HQ to Ireland so have to pay the full rate of UK corporation tax yet compete with multi-nationals who are getting this tax break.

When my power become as limited as yours I will start to worry.



On the 2bn - 864m in corporation tax 1bn in employers NI and the tax on the dividend, which I think is taxed at source? - easily 2bn and that is excluding the employees tax which they effectively provide? I don't know but I would hazard a guess that the taxation revenues derived from the Tescos entity is between 3-4bn a year.

'Did you tell us to stop buying bananas?'

Yes you keep telling us that, yet in Tesco's annual accounts, they list £864 millions as their total group tax, including those taxes paid to non-UK countries. I did highlight that a while ago but you obviously failed to comprehend. And please don't even attapempt to bring up Tesco employees' tax & NI, like VAT, it's not Tesco's money, they're just acting as a conduit. What next, will you be including fuel duties too?

Come on Coddy, if Tesco cease trading tomorrow no one would ever step into their place, none of the customers would shop else where and all the staff would be out of work for good.

Exactly what I keep saying when a new supermarket gets built and the TV news says something like "creating 400 retail jobs".

Supermarkets do not create retail jobs, they merely (at best) move them to a different location or (at worst) employ fewer.

They also reduce local GDP by shifting the cash from the local area into the national or global economy.

Totnes is a model of how it should be done.



There is a Morrison's in the town centre and they have thus far resisted granting planning permission to any out of town stores. Although there were initial objections to Morrison's, the local, independent traders and those who have supported them, now look upon it as a symbiotic relationship.



Long may it remain so.



On the subject of job creation, the only figures that should be quoted are Full-Time Equivalent, not just an absolute of 400 or whatever jobs, 300 of which may well be part-time

Morrisons have quite a lot of town centre stores, many of which are part of the fabric of the actual High Street, I'm not sure where the deal is for them because they are difficult for their supply chain to service and there are always restrictions on signage/advertising to comply with, the store fronts are often much reduced to just a double shop width and they pay top whack for the land on which to position car parks which are then invariably used by shoppers to the other High Street outlets.



Not to mention the fact that they tend to be smaller stores with all of the associated economies of scale - but there is obviously money to be made from those outlets because as I say, I've been to a good many of them.

If it's anything like what is detailed in 'The Wal-Mart Effect' by Charles Fishman, then supermarkets moving into a town actually raises poverty.

Up to the last ten years or so, Morrisons grew by acquiring smaller supermarket chains or even single stores, they rarely built from scratch. The Totnes one was built on a brownfield site but there wasn't enough room for a filling station, so that's on an adjacent site. As I said, it works well down there and I know the ratepayers are backing the council in resisting any new out-of-town developments, how long that can last is anyone's guess, especially if an application gets called-in.



It does make you wonder why other towns don't follow suit. We have many town & city centres that are literally dying on their ar[is[/ies because of out of town developments. IIRC the Totnes car park is pay & display and is patrolled by ex-Stasi agents, stay over two hours and you're clamped, for bona fide shoppers, they discount the car park from your bill at the checkout

My dad started doing business with Ken Morrison when they owned four stores





I joined his (my dads) company in '84 when Morrisons had around 50 stores, all in Yorks/Lancs and we serviced them all and actually they built most of those from the ground up rather than take over existing buildings, the very first ones in Bradford and the warehouses were existing buildings but most of them were self-builds and you can tell which architect they used by the style of each one, he was a canny old bugger and would use the same design and layout on every site for years, even now I can look at the outside of a Morrisons and tell you where the Personnel and Visitor office is





Stores like Wetherby, Ripon, Stamford, Horsforth, Yeadon, Nelson and dozens upon dozens of others that I could point to if I had the full list of outlets in front of me were all built from foundations up on town centre sites and those that I named being actually on the High Street of those towns with very narrow frontages, those stores didn't come with a standard design because of the individual site layouts and I'd guess that they'd break Kens heart at having to pay an architect to do a set of plans that he could only use the once.



When they started to move down south in the 90s is when they started to buy existing chains and rebadge them, a regional Co-op sale gave them their first foothold in London and it was shortly after that that they started to look for a distribution outlet in Northampton culminating in the one at Burton Latimer which is the biggest warehouse that I've ever walked through.



The Safeways takeover changed the company beyond all recognition, Safeways actually had more outlets than Morrisons at the time so you can imagine the culture shock, the Head Office was moved out of its old location and afterwards was once used as a location for a retro 1970s TV programme without having to dress the place up so you can imagine just how much money Ken had spent on it since the day it was built