Dear All
Christmas is a time of giving, goodwill to all men and women
and turkey, well it seems that unpopular Nicola Sturgeon has decided to hit a
million Scots with higher tax bills, it seems that ‘taking’ is the order of the
day. You could also add that ‘goodwill has gone right out the window as Derek
MacKay has delivered a ‘turkey’ of a budget.
So, what is this SNP budget about?
Basically Scots are being asked to pay for SNP incompetence,
we are paying for failure; money is being sucked into paying for a broken
system of government which isn’t being reformed. Like a ship which is leaking
below the water line, the SNP solution is to buy more buckets.
We are now in a financially failed State as the widening tax
gap with England proves
beyond a shadow of a doubt, higher bills for one million Scots and in return
lesser services, poor services and a budget which doesn’t help progress Scotland
forward. Finance Secretary Derek Mackay has trebled the number of Scots who
will pay more tax than people other people in the rest of the UK in 2018/19.
We are paying for failure to govern, failure to manage and generally
failure to produce, and what we get in return is gimmicks, if the 2021 election
for Holyrood was important, this budget just ramped that election up.
Broken SNP promises are nothing new as Scots already know, but
to break the SNP 2016 manifesto promise to freeze the basic rate of income tax
shows as I have said in the past, there is an issue of trust. If you want to
know how painful Scottish independence would be for Scotland, then Nicola Sturgeon just
served up a ‘starter’, the main course would ‘burst your bank account’. The SNP
made a big deal about how good they were to manage Scotland’s finances, this
was done by under spending and failing to provide for the vulnerable, that myth
is now gone!
A new “intermediate” tax band of 21p will apply to those
earning more than £24,000, while the higher rate will be raised from 40p to 41p
and the top rate from 45p to 46p. If you think back to the 70’s, the SNP ran
with a policy of a penny for Scotland, 2017, we have a new version of a
rehashed policy from a party devoid of new ideas and stuck in the mindset of
recycling old ones as to ‘justify’ a time when being in the SNP was to be
effectively unelectable.
The changes are said to raise an extra £164m but the real question,
the elephant in the room is what is Scotland’s budget being spent on?
We have depressed revenues caused by a faltering and
stagnant economy which is hamstrung by low productivity, the SNP have made Scotland
an unattractive place to do business, without reform of government and local
authority, the budget is just a stop gap.
Mackay says his Budget would build a fairer Scotland,
support business, and protect services despite the most challenging economic
backdrop since devolution began in 1999.
This begs the questions, but the prime one is, all that this
takes is a penny in the pound?
As normal SNP MSPs decided to applaud the decision to raise
taxes, in the past when other parties did this, they didn’t applaud presumably
they we were attempting to ‘fairer Scotland, support business, and protect
services’, but your average SNP MSP is just a drone, they have to applaud
because in reality if they didn’t no one else would and the deafening silence
round the chamber would be unbearable for the ‘civic nationalist’.
In attempting to sound convincing about this failed budget,
Mackay said:
"Scotland
is not just the fairest taxed part of the UK
but, for the majority of taxpayers, the lowest taxed part of the UK.,
But guess what, the devil in the detail shows any benefit
would just be £20, or 38p a week, at best, if you wait three weeks you can go
buy a 2 litre carton of milk for the tea or the cereal, in the cold weather,
you might even go porridge.
Tory finance spokesman Murdo Fraser said:
“This Nat tax will hit nearly half of Scottish workers in
the pocket. That is a tax on aspiration, a punishment for daring to work hard,
and a direct breach of the promise made by the SNP in its election manifesto. Today,
every single SNP member of the Scottish Government has broken that
promise to the Scottish people”.
He added:
“That will not escape the notice of voters, who will never
believe a word the Nationalists say again. The message from this budget is
clear: don’t be ambitious, don’t be hard working, and don’t be successful in
the SNP’s Scotland.
If you are, the SNP will penalise you for its own failure to grow the economy.”
Of course in any budget, we get to hear from some interested
parties such as John Dickie of the Child Poverty Action Group, he said:
“With over one four children growing up in poverty in a
country as wealthy as Scotland it is a welcome step forward that the draft
Budget makes the case for use of tax powers to harness that wealth to prevent
poverty.”
Do you feel that Scotland is wealthy?
Have you seen the soup kitchens in this country, have you
noticed the foodbanks, have you seen the decline of the health service right
across the board, the lack of real change to infrastructure, the lack of a
manufacturing base and how Scotland has become unattractive to business because
of the constant mismanagement and threat of continual independence referendums.
Finally, if you read the blog a lot you will have noticed
that generally I really don’t blog on budgets whether Westminster or Holyrood to any great degree,
this is because the budgets don’t address the real problems in how government,
national or local operates, it is about a cash grab.
This budget is just a failed opportunity, it is weak, it
just tinkers, we were already paying through the nose for poor services, now we
are paying more and those services are getting cut, we aren’t living in a
wealthy country.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
