If an entrepreneur does survive this intrusion into his business affairs, he then will soon have to decide whether he can take a prospective customer to a pleasant, perhaps even sumptuous dinner. Just as businessmen were planning a last round of drinks and dinners with clients and customers at Christmas time, the government announced a new Bribery Act that will make any businessman liable to become a guest of Her Majesty for an extended period if he takes a customer to dinner, the cost of which is not a "sensible and proportionate expenditure on hospitality". That, says Richard Alderman, head of the Serious Fraud Office, is "a model of clarity". Or certainly a model of the degree of clarity that any regulator cares to provide, lest he bind himself to predictable rules. Best wait for more guidance, say business lawyers, the sort whose fees no fledgling entrepreneur can bear. Better still, hope that the government's rethink consigns this bill to the scrap heap of history. 

Greater uncertainty is another way of saying greater risk, which is another way of saying a higher cost of capital, one of the greatest of all growth deterrents. The pity of it all is that by providing certainty the government can lower the cost of capital; increase investment, especially by small businesses; create jobs and otherwise give the economy a boost without spending a single farthing — and it is blowing it. Businesses dislike taxes, but set a firm, understandable tax rate, and they will get on with their business. Businesses dislike regulation, but enact even difficult rules with a clearly defined "OK" and "not OK", and they will adapt and get on with their business. But introduce uncertainty, and they pause before approving a capital expenditure as they try to figure out just what the return might be, or what the tax rate might be, or whether the authorities will some day decide that the venture violated some regulation or, worse still, some badly-written law. 

It is bad enough that the government has decided that the parlous fiscal condition in which the country finds itself requires an increase in the top marginal tax rate to 50 per cent, enacted not to gain new revenue but to reassure everyone that we are all in this together. Or that the Chancellor has moved from promising eventual repeal of this tax to wanting to study just how much revenue it produces or more precisely, how much revenue Treasury experts will estimate it produces. That thrust at the rich is compounded by such gestures as the tax on private jets (justified, but nevertheless a tax increase and a symbol of the government's attitudes toward wealthy entrepreneurs, in this case self-evidently the world's most mobile).

 Most high earners will complain about high taxes but adjust, some in grudging acceptance of the theory that pain at the top makes pain lower down the income ladder more acceptable. Some, most notably leading hedge funds, have mounted their bikes and headed for more benign if socially boring tax jurisdictions, and others will follow. But an even more important although less visible consequence of that higher marginal rate is the effect it will have on businesses that do not leave, but take their next round of expansion elsewhere. To cite only one example, the higher marginal tax reduces the attractiveness of London to younger workers in New York's financial services sector who are offered a transfer.