ursaminortaur wrote:As to UK world beating companies there seem to be two major problems.
1) Although UK scientists come up with good ideas it is often easier to get financing for their development into viable businesses in the US rather than in the UK.
2) When the UK does have a successful world beating company such as ARM it usually ends up being sold to a foreign company.
Soft touch gift economy.
Millions migrate to the UK to enjoy medical care that others have spend their lifetimes paying in for.
Any viable business as you say are more inclined to migrate, the UK tax rule book is just too fluid/uncertain, and the UK gifts the winners all to freely (and often inexpensively) to others. Financial services for instance are tending to migrate to Ireland instead of the UK as Ireland provides more certainty/stability, as well as now being better placed to access both UK/other and EU.
Just look at the manifesto that the Tories were voted in for, most of the promises broken, fundamentally due to poor management and wasteful spending inducing unnecessarily high debt expansion.
Used to be a world leader and highly respected in finance, law, accounting, now more just a banana republic, a group of small northerly European islands of increasingly less relevance.
Sunak/Hunt are looking to lower the UK credit card spending type lifestyle instead of addressing a real potential of better stability and good governance. Fundamentally Sunak is just a PM managing a crisis of his own making as Chancellor so clearly not competent enough to provide good management.
When you start having 3 or 4 'budgets'/year then stability has been totally thrown out of the window. Poor management was highly evident during Covid where rules were changed so rapidly that no one could plan/prepare anything, they expected businesses to turn on a pin-head. LT/KK clearly didn't have a clue with regard to stability. Investors/inward investment desires mid/long term stability, at least 5 years out that they can plan to. As-is they'd be lucky to get 5 weeks let along 5 months stability - pretty much uninvestable.