Ritz Hotel has paid no corporation tax for 17 years...

Maybe if all small businesses withheld their corporation tax payments until everyone was brought into line on a level playing field, HMRC might start to act. They came calling on me only the other week for

The more of these stories that surface, the angrier it makes you feel! It's about time HMRC publicly got it's house in order and started rebuilding some confidence.

They say small business will be the saviour of the economy and be a bigger combined recruiter than corporates, so time to start giving us all some respect and stop the overseas corporates dictate policy via blackmail and threats to relocate...

I'd be inclined to blow it all now, if this Mayan prophecy is to be believed and worry about the taxman later, should you be lucky to survive that is...

This just makes me wonder where the tax man was for all this time. Do such acts amount to corruption?

I always used to go to less well off countries then us and think how corrupt their MP's are etc. I now completely believe that are MP's are completely corrupt and they are probably taking indirect bribes. They are probably on many levels worse than those MP's in third world countries. There are so many huge corporations that pay nil tax in the UK. MP's choose to create a loophole for them. MP's CHOOSE to NOT do anything about it. This has been going on for decades. No big company will leave the UK because of a little bit of corporation tax.

I also believe the UK government, regardless of who is in power, attacks the small guy rather then big companies who can line their pockets. The amount of tax we pay in the UK is a joke. And the number of taxes created really causes resentment. Here is an example, recently the London Borough of Newham decided to extort more money out of landlords by making it compulsory for landlords to have a registration scheme which costs

Its

There are loads of people who are genuinely poor through no fault of their own, and live in very bad conditions. And there is what I call the 70% who in my opinion, have a question mark against them.

There is also that 20% of the population, that pays close to 50% tax, works hard, and takes very little from the system. Most small business oweners probably fall in that category. Taxing is one thing, but people want to see something for it. It's like paying road tax every year, then every single road around you is full of pot holes year after year. Then you begin to wonder where the money is going. In my opinion, local councils and government create new taxes as a way of generating money. The cause is not often what benefits. They know people have not choice and will pay. It is the lower income bracket who will cover the cost of law like this. I am using that law as one example. In my opinion the whole system is corrupt. I used to believe we lived in one of few countries in the world where corruption was so small it was negligible. Since the MP's expenses, various police corruption big cases in the media, and media itself being shown to be the most corrupt, I now believe we live in country/society that has serious corruption issues. I was probably a bit too naive.