Osborne urges businesses to back tax cut campaign

Chancellor George Osborne has urged British businesses to vocally back cutting the top tax rate to 40p.In the Budget, Osborne announced that the 50p tax rate would be cut to 45p by 2013, adding that he aimed to slash it further to 40p in time for the next election. Speaking at the Times CEO Summit this weekend, he called on businesses to get behind the tax cut campaign."If your voice is not heard then elected politicians are going to find it very difficult to put together pro-business packages because you leave the space open to everyone else," he said.He added, "At the moment we are having a pretty big argument about the size of the State and who should be taxed and what the right levels of taxation are. If we don’t get much voice from the business community then that’s more difficult."Osborne acknowledged that many of the announcements he made in the last Budget, such as the "granny tax" and the now-dropped proposal to cap tax relief for charitable donations, had generated negative press. He also said that he understood that lowering the top tax rate was a contentious issue but is quoted as saying, "There's more of an anti-business sentiment which has spilt over from understandable public anger about what went wrong in the financial system."

http://www.50percenttax.co.uk/index/2012/6/28/osborne-urges-businesses-to-back-tax-cut-campaign.html