What's so great about Switzerland?

You can buy triangular chocolate anywhere and their watches are hardly any less extortionate in Geneva than Guildford.

No, what makes the famously neutral landlocked home of the yodel so enticing to wealthy folk like Jim Ratcliffe, majority owner of Ineos, is an almost obsessively benign tax regime.

Just by shifting his headquarters and 20 staff out of Lyndhurst, across the Alps and onto the shores of Lake Geneva – virtually the full extent of the change necessary - he can shave £100m A YEAR off the tax bill.

If you could save the equivalent of your own income tax simply by upping sticks to a place which consistently tops global quality of life tables, chances are you’d be off before you could say Nazi gold – just look at Lewis Hamilton.

Ratcliffe is far from alone in his sudden fondness for the land of fondue and Federer over the New Forest – a recent survey showed the majority of the FTSE 100 had actively considered moving their base out of the UK, most to Ireland or Switzerland.

From Dettol maker Reckitt Benckiser to Holiday Inn owner Continental Hotels, chief executives are forced to consider whether staying in the UK is the best service to the shareholders whose interests they’re legally obliged to look after.

Hampshire has already seen one of its biggest corporate names, drug-maker Shire, succumb to the lure of a low tax regime and quit the county that was its home in favour of Dublin. It still employs hundreds of people in Basingstoke, but a vastly smaller slice of its earnings now go the Treasury to spend and schools and hospitals and suchlike.

Far from pondering the appeal of Switzerland, companies are asking what’s so great about Britain that they should pay £100m a year more for the privilege of having their headquarters here?

Such a whacking great bill makes home comforts uncomfortably expensive.

This is, of course, a classic example of the Government struggling to catch up with the implications of a shrinking globe.

No longer can a Chancellor tax in isolation, confident he has business by the short and curlies.

An ever more mobile international business community is increasingly free to pick and choose the tax regime of its choice. Governments are having to wake up to the fact that today they compete in a cutthroat global marketplace, where sentimental attachment increasingly loses out to shareholder avarice.

Despite its Hampshire base, Ineos generates the vast majority of its revenues in far off lands and the percentage is only going one way, yet they are confronted with a Government looking for an everbigger slice of the pie.

Regardless of whether they decide to stay or go, and right now it looks likely they’ll go, Ineos is just the thin end of the wedge.

It’s a warning from the front line of British business that the solution to the nation’s debt mountain does not lie in simply ratcheting up the tax take.

As UK business ambassador Lord Digby Jones put it at the recent Business Southampton Annual Conference: “All the row is about how to spend it, I don’t hear anyone talking about how to make it.”

Ineos’ readiness to quit these shores shows us the only way out of the red ink for Britain is to back business with a tax regime that encourages investment and growth rather than try to take ever more of a dwindling pot.