The Great SNP Piggy Bank Raid of 2017, unpopular Nicola Sturgeon hits a million Scots with higher bills to make Scotland the highest tax place in the UK, the cash grab budget is weak as the SNP use an old rehashed 1970’s policy to attempt to shore up their failure to government Scotland properly

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