Starbucks runs coffee shops, they are most definitely tied to location. They are most definitely operating a business within the UK and should be subject to UK tax laws.
It makes little sense to me to allow multinationals a huge advantage over local business by letting them whisk away their profits.
These profits are indeed distributed to other people, in other places, not subject to UK taxes. It's not only (IMHO as I said below) immoral, it also distorts the market.
Why question is why do we tax company's incomes at all? Direct taxes on companies such as PAYE (payroll), VAT (sales) and business rates (premises) are easier to enforce and scale fairly.
Instead of taxing corporations' profits, why not tax individuals more and re-coup the taxes from the owners and employees instead of the corporations?
Partially as increasing the taxation rate on employees vs taxing corporate profits could start to slow down economic growth as employees reduce their spending inline with the increases in tax they pay. That's one outcome I've seen bandied about at the very least anyway.
One reason might be that (as we see here) it's easy for the company to make its profits disappear overseas, and the owners may well reside outside of the market in which the company operates.
I agree there are probably easier things to enforce. OTOH a tax on company profits seems inherently reasonable to me - it scales down and is less of a burden on companies that are having a hard time, getting more of a take from the successful firms that can afford it.
To expand on the point, the purpose of income taxes is to force the broadest shoulders to bear the largest burden. Whether you feel it's ethical to do so, for the purpose of the discussion we say it's OK - after all we can point to many cases where things were earned by means other than hard work.
Things like payroll, VAT and business rates are based on some kind of consumption and are independent of the magnitude of your success. Changing the tax on these things will probably control how successful/profitable you are, meaning if you set it too high your revenue drops off from businesses failing - so clearly you can't optimise on consumption taxes alone. Hence the need to also tax success in some way.
Unfortunately, taxing a very direct measure of success (income) doesn't work. What alternatives do we have? This is the key question.
It makes little sense to me to allow multinationals a huge advantage over local business by letting them whisk away their profits.
These profits are indeed distributed to other people, in other places, not subject to UK taxes. It's not only (IMHO as I said below) immoral, it also distorts the market.