There seems to be no sense in setting a uniform rate, so that corporation tax is no longer a discriminating factor when a company is considering whether to locate in the south east or in some other part of the country, if it means that in the end central government tax revenues must be transferred from the already over-developed south east to that other part of the country, in order to compensate for the lower per capita GDP.

(Or as the government now prefers, as usual at the behest of the EU, per capita GVA:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/Statbase/Product.asp?vlnk=14650

“Shows economic activity as measured by GVA for English regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland including component totals and industry group totals.

Data are shown using a European classification system called NUTS (Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics) which provides a breakdown of UK regions and countries to give a comparable view of economic activity across the European Union.”)

Which compensation mostly takes the form of increasing public sector employment – hence, the generalised over-reliance on the public sector in the north and west of the UK, a kind of mirror image of the over-development of the private sector in the south east.

Yet when George Osborne was in Edinburgh some time ago, and he was asked whether he would consider varying business taxes across the UK, he immediately rejected that suggestion.

Personally I don’t want more and more development, and people, crammed into my part of the country; nor do I want to pay more and more tax to subsidise lagging parts of the country; and nor do I want the internal stresses to become so severe that the UK breaks up.

I’d much rather that the government adopted a proactive policy of equalising economic development across the whole country, so that all parts were as far as may be feasible standing on their own feet, and the most obvious measure in that direction would be to vary business tax rates inversely with per capita GDP.