The UK Treasury may not be able to match Ireland’s 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate, but sooner or later it is going to have to make concessions on company taxation to ensure there are companies to tax.

The drip of British businesses re-registering abroad, especially to Dublin, is turning into a steady stream and the more that go, the more acceptable and the easier it is for others to follow. United Business Media and Shire are showing that the brass plaque can be moved offshore while leaving the business and management exactly where it always has been.

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Remember the old woman who ate a spider because she had swallowed a fly? Next she swallowed a bird to deal with the spider – then a cat. The government would do well to study the nursery rhyme as it tries to extricate itself from the mess of the 10p tax band.

Ministers started by wanting to cut the 22p income tax rate. Abolishing the 10p band was the spider to deal with that. Now it is considering invoking a bird in the form of the minimum wage. At some point it must realise that each solution is worse than the problem it is designed to overcome.

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Is British business riddled with corruption? Or is the Office of Fair Trading being overzealous in seeking so much evidence of price fixing? To an outsider – a UK consumer or a foreign enterprise – the impression is that commerce is involved in an anti-competitive conspiracy.

The OFT has publicly investigated alleged cartels in milk, airfares, construction, tobacco sales and now, supermarket grocery prices. Mostly the accusations are unproved, though Britain Airways was heavily fined for agreeing fuel surcharges and some retailers confessed to colluding over the price of milk, even though they thought they were following government policy.

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There is dangerous talk of allowing debtors to default. It has started in the housing market but could spread to business.

The argument is that corporations should not squeeze people who have difficulty meeting their dues. Mortgage lenders are being asked by government to go soft on homeowners with rising mortgage costs rather than repossess their properties. It is suggested the lenders swap their debt for equity rather than evict.

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Forget 200p a share, what exactly is the price of the Royal Bank of Scotland rights issue? Might it be that the regulators have given the bank the capital to rescue its weaker brethren?

There has been much negotiation between the Edinburgh bank, the Bank of England and the regulators to ensure the record £12m share issue gets away smoothly. We know part of the price of the package is the £50bn the Treasury is providing to the Bank to kick-start lending by banks like Royal. We know Royal has made the symbolic gesture of paying its next dividend in paper not cash – and paying less. We may find that heads rolling at Royal follow – but don’t bank on it.

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Instead of getting itself in a tizz about how to control ticket touts, the Government should be asking why it wants controls. Touts – today’s equivalent of the post-war spiv – may not be the sort of people you would invite into your own home, but they are talking risk and providing liquidity in the market for leisure events.

In the City such people are called market-makers: in trade they are called wholesalers.

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Two questions for Royal Bank of Scotland about its much-leaked record share issue: why pay the final dividend, and why underwrite the rights? They are questions that should concern any finance director planning to raise capital this way.

First the dividend. Normally the argument is that the dividend must be maintained to encourage investors to buy the new shares. But why pay cash to shareholders so that they can pay tax on it and then ask them to pay the money back to the company?

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British Airways’ chief executive Willie Walsh publicly accepted responsibility for the Terminal 5 fiasco, but does that mean his head should roll along with the operations director and customer services director?

The opening of the Heathrow terminal is a corporate disaster of the highest order. What should have been a major enhancement to BA’s market position – like the St Pancras terminal for Eurostar - has turned into a liability, both financially and reputationally.

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There have been constant threats to take companies overseas to save tax – from BAT to GlaxoSmithKline – but it has taken a company based in Basingstoke to make the decision to go. And the irony is that Shire will still be based in Basingstoke even though the pharmaceutical company’s brass plaque will be on Jersey and its tax-base in Dublin.

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Oh no, the Government is being asked to buy the banks’ bad loans. Banks that no longer trust each other enough to lend among themselves are hoping the UK government will use the Bank of England to buy the mortgage-backed securities that they cannot sell in the open market.

The theory is that they will re-lend the cash to businesses or homebuyers and get the economy going: our fear should be that they will use it to pay the higher dividends they have promised their shareholders, finance the bonuses of the staff who got them into this mess or, worse still, make more bad loans.

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