Brian Keegan: Sunak’s tax hikes should be watched in Ireland

The British Chancellor, faced with an economy that shrank last year by almost 10 per cent, has resorted to austerity-style measures in his attempt to stem the bleeding

Rishi Sunak, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, has heralded very significant increases to UK corporation tax rates, ultimately to 25 per cent or twice the Irish rate. Photo: Getty

When Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson were campaigning for the Brexit vote, did they have it in their script that the first post-Brexit British budget would raise business taxes?

Business tax hikes don’t seem to gel with their vision of a promised land, free from EU shackles. To be fair, neither they nor their political opponents foresaw the impact of a pandemic coinciding with Brexit. Nor for that matter could anyone have envisaged how effective ...