Ross Clark

What are the chances of the G7’s agreement on a minimum rate of corporation tax actually coming into effect? While it was presented as a done deal last weekend, things are not going too well. Firstly, the G20 will have to agree — which is far from guaranteed given that smaller countries have less to gain from the proposal than the US. It is a tax designed to help countries with a large number of multinational companies who currently operate through subsidiaries in countries with lower corporation tax rates. While no G20 country currently has a rate below the agreed 15 per cent, (and the biggest loser, Ireland, with its 12.

In the middle of last year the US economy was something of a marvel: an economy which was creating jobs at an unprecedented rate, as other economies around the world remained in the deep freeze. Having shed jobs by the million in March, by May it looked as if the jobs market would be back to its pre-Covid position in months. But what has happened? Bureau of Labor figures published today show that once again, job creation for the month of May came in lower than expectations — with an extra 559,000 people on non-farm payrolls. It was better than April, when 278,000 new jobs were created — which was little more than half what many people had expected. Unemployment, at 5.8 per cent, remains far above the 3.5 per cent rate measured in February 2020, just before the pandemic.

Time is, I fear, running out. Running out, that is, to avoid handing to a small number of multinational corporations our right to buy and sell things. Running out to prevent governments and central banks helping themselves to our savings, by means of negative interest rates. The payments industry is closing in on its target of driving cash out of circulation and instigating cashless payments as the only way of doing business. That, at least, is the conclusion one might reach from reading a report by Worldpay: the Global Payments Report 2021. It claims that cash payments in UK shops in 2020 made up 13.4 per cent of total payments, down from 27.4 per cent in 2019. By 2024, it predicts, they will be down to just 6.9 per cent. By the same year it will be down to just 0.

Biden’s America, of course, is all about re-engaging with the world after four years of isolationism. But if you are the Irish finance minister, perhaps the new administration isn’t looking quite so cuddly at the moment.  Biden’s first big achievement in international cooperation looks like being a global minimum corporate tax rate. It seems that G7 nations are about to announce they have agreed on such a tax, set at 15 per cent. It will mean corporations paying a minimum of 15 per cent tax on their profits regardless of where they are based in the world, where they do business and where they pretend to do business.

Politically it must have seemed an easy promise for Theresa May to make in the dying days of her premiership: to commit Britain to a legally-binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, rather than the 80 per cent reduction previously stipulated in the Climate Change Act. It was the summer of 2019 and Extinction Rebellion protests had taken place with surprisingly little counter-protest. David Attenborough’s TV documentary was received warmly by the press, and polls indicated that the public appeared to supported action on climate change – according to a YouGov poll in December 2018 two thirds of the population stated they did not believe the risks of climate change were being exaggerated.

Amid the panic over the Indian variant this week it would have been easy to miss news that the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) more than doubled in a month, from 0.7 per cent in March to 1.5 per cent in April. That is still below the Bank of England’s 2.0 per cent target, but could this be just the beginning? The signs from this month’s Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) – a survey of businesses carried out by IHS Markit – suggests strong inflationary pressures. Its index for inflation expectations has soared to 58 this month – with anything above 50 indicating that businesses expect inflation to rise. It is higher than the 57 reached in 2008 – when, within months, CPI hit five per cent.

The government says it is ending a quarter of a century of the ‘fragmentation’ of the railways by gathering all mainline services into an entity called Great British Railways. That will please some critics of privatisation, but has the government actually renationalised the railways, as the unions, the Labour party and – to judge by some opinion polls – the public want? No, but it might superficially look like it. Gone will be the plethora of liveries, along with names such as Arriva, Great Western Railway and East Coast. The familiar old British Rail symbol of an arrow pointing in two directions will return. But anyone calling for the common ownership of the means of production will be left disappointed.