Ministers must have the guts to go for growth Crusading against tax avoidance has become a popular - and populist - pastime. David Cameron was at it again at the World Economic Forum in Davos, promising that this would be a key part of Britain's upcoming presidency of the G8. Proclaiming himself "a low-tax Conservative, not a 'companies should pay no tax Conservative" ," he urged the business leaders sitting in front of him to "wake up and smell the coffee." The Prime Minister and his Chancellor have an alarming track record of promoting tax vigilantism: witness the quip about Starbucks. The constant elision of "evasion" and "avoidance" - the suggestion that those who have made legitimate arrangements to minimise their tax bill are somehow crooked - wins few friends in the business world. Hence yesterday's warning by Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs (itself attacked by Mr Cameron for over-efficient accountancy), that letting the mob dictate tax policy would "criminalise every right-thinking person who organises his or her affairs in a sensible way." Yet there is a larger problem. A central plank of Mr Cameron's growth strategy is to woo those same leaders - to convince them, partly by lowering corporation tax, that Britain is a veritable Mo Farah in the "global race." Such an injection of confidence is also vital if firms are to start spending the cash they have hoarded. But what companies most want is certainty: certainty about the regulatory environment, and certainty that Britain is on the mend. As Mr Blankfein says, when "the signposts become so amorphous and so loose and so subject to second-guessing, you're making everything uncertain." This country's real problem is not tax avoidance: it is that there aren't enough people making the money. For this, Mr Cameron and George Osborne can scarcely be blamed. With every day that goes by, the depths of Labour's economic folly become ever more apparent. The International Monetary Fund now estimates that the UK economy was more overheated in 2007 than at any point in recent history. Quantitative easing soothed the pain after the subsequent crash, but it cannot heal the wound. Having inherited an economy burdened both by crippling debt and the eurozone's slow-motion car crash, the Coalition has started the long process of repair. True, GDP fell in the most recent quarter, but new jobs are being created at the fastest pace since 1989. Many of them are going to foreign workers, or being compensated for by lower productivity, but many are not. We have only to look at Spain, where youth unemployment has hit the gruesome level of 60 per cent, to see what we have escaped. The key question, however, is this: is the Coalition doing all that it can to make things actively better, rather than to stop them getting worse? In two months" time, George Osborne will deliver his 2013 Budget: the last that will have a material effect on voters" finances before the 2015 election. Both Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson have called for a renewed focus on infrastructure and capital spending. This has been presented as a retreat from austerity, or an alternative to it. Not necessarily: there is plenty of scope to boost capital spending - to equip Britain for that global race - while at the same time slashing back the entitlements of a grotesquely swollen state. A more radical option would be to cut taxes. Giving those on low and middle incomes more money to spend is arguably the best way to restore confidence - which is why, when tried elsewhere, it has often proved self-financing. Yes, the Coalition has raised tax thresholds, but this has been a drip-drip rather than a big bang, swallowed up by inflation and wage restraint. Mr Osborne would of course be reluctant to risk his reputation for fiscal discipline, especially since any unfunded tax cuts would mean extra borrowing, at least in the short term, with all the perils that entails. Certainly, there is no easy option on the table. Yet desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures - and as Mr Cameron showed over Europe, this Government tends to be best when boldest. For confidence and prosperity to return, ministers need to be unashamed both in their support for wealth creation, and in their willingness to put growth first.