Last week, a gauntlet was thrown at the feet of business leaders who have fulminated about the complexity of Britain’s tax laws and the frequency with which they change. Lord Wallace, a Liberal Democrat peer, warned that corporate chiefs should offer a “constructive response to the erosion of the national tax base, before some populist politician or press campaigner seizes on the issue to use against them”.

The response from Martin Temple, director-general of EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation, was trenchant. He argued that the “most significant threat to the UK's tax base does not come from aggressive corporate tax avoidance but from the revenue lost owing to companies moving abroad in search of greater consistency and certainty from the tax system”.