Timing is everything in politics.
For two decades, since the development of zero-10, Charles Parkinson has argued for a more normal company tax regime. One in which businesses owned off-island would pay some tax, or more tax, to fund our community’s essential public services.
Year after year after year, he has been told that his ideas are essentially correct but his timing is wrong.
But he was right when he opposed the belief, fashionable for a time, that the island’s structural deficit of tens of millions of pounds would be plugged by economic growth and spending cuts.
Then came Pillar II. Standing almost alone, Deputy Parkinson said repeatedly that it would generate tens of millions of pounds more each year than the best minds in the States had calculated. Until they recalculated and accepted his figures.
Most of all, he has long understood the ‘fairness gap’, with under-funded public services paid for by higher taxes and charges on households, at a time of sluggish growth in wages, while resentment builds towards the contribution not made in quite the same way any longer by parts of the corporate sector.
That ‘fairness gap’ is a big picture issue which election candidates must address, and in that sense at least the time has come for ideas which have been avoided for too long.
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