By the time you read this you will have the advantage of me. You will know who won the election. If you don't, it is a desperately close thing - and the stock market will take it badly.

What I know is that the winner will blithely ignore a last-minute plea from people who might have spoken out much earlier for a new taxcutting campaign to restore Britain's competitive position as a tax-attractive place to work and invest.

If you wanted to vote for tax cuts in this election you couldn't - because politicians of all hues knew, or thought they knew, that your fellow citizens didn't want them.

British voters would rather pay up than risk losing various forms of public spending. They really do think that the Government can spend their money better than they can. Anyway, that is what they told the focus groups - and the politicos believed it.

So Michael Howard sacked the luckless Howard Flight before the campaign had started seriously for voicing the heresy that a Conservative Government could cut far more than the tentative £4 billion proposed by Oliver Letwin.

Gordon Brown would never seek a tax-cutting vote. Yes, he did trim 1p off basic rate income tax - then took it back twice over in National Insurance contributions, because employers have to pay it, too.

He pruned the rate of corporation tax, too, but in a way that delivered him untold millions up-front and did not inconvenience him in the least.

For this coming Parliament, the best we can hope from him is that his tax increases won't hurt too much. As to the Lib Dems, they are a tax and spend party and proud of it.

Like it or not, meaningful tax cuts were on nobody's agenda. Then on Wednesday, Sir Christopher Gent, the man who made Vodafone our third most valuable company, came out with an urgently argued piece in the Financial Times.

His case was not the familiar one about Mr Brown's stealthy and not-so-stealthy tax increases, but that other countries are stealing what was once our competitive edge. Britain's 40 per cent top rate for personal income tax used to be among the most merciful in the world. Now, Sir Christopher quotes an OECD study establishing that of 19 developed countries only Australia has both a higher top rate than Britain and a lower starting point for it.

Developed countries have been chopping back their corporation tax rates, too. Now a fashion for "flat" taxes come sweeping across eastern Europe. Poland, for instance, has just announced a flat rate of 18 per cent for income tax, corporation tax and VAT.

That is not the only reason why eastern Europe is winning inward investment that once came to Britain. But it helps.

Yesterday Sir Digby Jones at the CBI and David Frost at the British Chambers of Commerce joined in with a similar message.

They want to block any new taxes on business before the Treasury dreams them up. Wish them well.

The pity is that nobody got round to making the case a year ago.

Then we might have had a chance of voting for it.