Mark Gilbert , Columnist

The U.K.'s Threat to Weaponize Tax Is No Bluff

Britain is already cutting corporate taxes. Brexit may mean they head even lower.

January 23, 2017 at 12:46 PM UTC

Corrected

January 24, 2017 at 1:34 PM UTC

Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. A former London bureau chief for Bloomberg News, he is author of “Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable.”

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The U.K. government is threatening to give its post-Brexit economy a shot in the arm by reducing corporate taxes to become a sort of "Singapore-on-Thames," a tax haven on the perimeter of the European Union. EU officials are dismissive of the idea; but they may be whistling past a graveyard.

At a rate of 20 percent, the U.K. currently ranks in the 11 lowest tax bracket in the EU, level with Finland and Estonia, lower than France or Germany but higher than Ireland, Poland and the Czech Republic: