Philip Green is a sharp businessman who turned round the Arcadia chain when they were closing shops and made them profitable. He turned Top Shop from a fading also ran into an international brand with cheap chic credibility. In doing all that he secured thousands of high street jobs, boosted profitability and made a billion.

He bought Arcadia via an offshore company, perfectly legally and paid that famous billion pound dividend perfectly legally. He did it the way he did it because this country punishes entrepreneurs and risk takers with capital gains taxes on top of income taxes. Double taxing those who create and produce.

Arcadia pays hundreds of millions in taxes every year, VAT, carbon taxes, stamp duty, business rates, National Insurance, employee’s income taxes and the myriad of other taxes that penalise enterprise and entrepreneurs. That isn’t enough for the type of parasites and political activists the great novelist Ayn Rand correctly identified as “looters”.

The looters are killing this country because, in their humanitarian noble-minded, public-spirited contempt for entrepreneurs, they forget how much they rely on entrepreneurs. With each new restrictive regulation designed to enhance equality and “justice” they make it harder for the remaining entrepreneurs to create the Vodafone-supplied iPhones from which they tweet their bleatings about “fighting the cuts”. Self-styled “Anarchists” calling for higher taxes to fund a bigger state are no anarchists.

Philip Green deserves his billions, he is a self made man who left school at fifteen, worked hard, took risks, clearly enjoys himself and defends his just rewards from the rapacious grasp of the tax man.  If only we had one hundred more Philip Greens…