A rotten windfall

It’s strange that, even now, the Brexit vote is routinely referred to as an expression of anger or frustration — as if the most easily baffled half of the population had voted in response to forces they could not understand. In fact, the result of the 23 June referendum seems to look wiser with every week that has passed.

Of course, leaving has its risks. But 52 per cent of voters judged that a greater one lay in staying in a European Union that is changing all the time — and invariably for the worse. The British vision of the world — of free trade, friendly competition and respect for sovereignty — clashed with the EU, which seeks to build a wall around a continent and which is alarmed by the notion of competition, particularly when nation states vie to host the world’s most successful companies.

For years, Ireland has sought to attract global businesses with the most competitive corporation tax on the continent — at 12.5 per cent. For years, the EU has tried to stop this, but the pressure from Brussels has been matched by the Irish determination to resist. Having lost this battle, the EU has now found a new line of attack: to declare Irish tax breaks to be somehow illegal and to punish Apple for its decision (dating back to the 1980s) to register its European sales at an Irish bureau.

This retrospective tax raid is nothing short of astonishing. Paul Ryan, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, had it right when he said that slapping a company with a giant tax bill, decades after the agreement was first struck, sends the wrong message to job creators on both sides of the Atlantic. As he put it, this is ‘precisely the kind of unpredictable and heavy-handed taxation that kills jobs and opportunity’.