Gibraltar is a funny old place, and it’s getting stranger all the time. I was there last week to interview the legendary gambling entrepreneur Victor Chandler, the ‘gentleman bookmaker’. He was engaging company, and a long way removed from the wide boy image the industry is traditionally associated with. It should make for an interesting profile, but it won’t make easy reading for the taxman.
Chandler
moved his entire operation to the Rock in 1998 to avoid gambling tax, turning the whole industry inside out in the process, as countless big name firms followed suit, constituting a massive tax loss to the Treasury.
I was struck by his scathing attack on the government’s record on enterprise (more of which in the profile, which you’ll see in our December/January issue) and how little he misses the UK, on both a personal and professional basis.
Gib, as the numerous expats holed up there call it, has enjoyed a boom in recent years and has become a tax haven in its own right. Ten years on from the Chandler inspired exodus, flats and office blocks are still flying up at an incredible rate. Yet the Rock remains as singular and contradictory as ever.
When you fly in, your plane dips its right wing alarmingly close to the water as it banks towards the runway; it’s a notoriously tricky landing, with consistently difficult wind conditions and a runway that doubles as a road. (No, really – mercifully, they close the road if a plane is taking off or landing.)
It’s all curiously anachronistic; dusty and dishevelled streets play host to tourist trap gift shops and shabby office blocks. It’s one of the most densely populated places on earth, but it’s almost impossible to find a taxi. When I needed to get back to the airport, my fruitless hunt for a cab only ended when, close to desperation, I went into the Life on Mars-esque police station and asked a kindly bobby to call one for me.
The expats seem happy enough though; it’s not just the entrepreneurs who have no desire to return to blighty. I’m sure it’s not just the climate and the tax regime that’s keeping enterprise and employees on the rock, and that has worrying implications for the future of enterprise and small business in the UK.
No wonder the Tories are unconvincingly trying to steal a march. Cameron’s calls for a temporary 1% cut in National Insurance for the smallest companies are welcome, as is the plea to allow small businesses to pay VAT up to six months late to help them with cash-flow problems.
But if the Tories really believed in supporting small businesses, the measures wouldn’t be emergency ones, but ambitious plans that would really show how a Conservative government would be supportive of enterprise. As it is, they have no long term plans for tax cuts. See you in Gib.