‘Pay more, get less’ with budget
The SNP Government’s budget for the next financial year, passed in Holyrood last week with the support of the ever-loyal Greens, could be summed up in four words: “pay more, get less”.
At the last Scottish Parliament election in 2016, the SNP manifesto pledged not to increase the basic rate of income tax.
This was a promise repeated by the SNP 53 times in the past two years.
It was a position backed by two-thirds of Scots voters at the last Scottish Parliamentary election, with both SNP and Conservatives pledging no basic rate income tax rises.
But, in the budget that has just been passed, the SNP have broken their promise. A total of1.1m Scots - 45 per cent of taxpayers - will see their taxes higher than if they lived elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in a direct breach of this manifesto pledge. And, at the same time as taxes are going up, people across Scotland are seeing their local services cut.
Councils across the country are looking at service cuts: reducing classroom assistants, scrapping school crossing patrollers, reductions in services for children with disabilities, reduction in older people’s services, reducing waste collections, all because of the choices made by the SNP.
This is against a background of the Westminster block grant to Holyrood going up in real terms compared to the previous year, a point which has been conceded by the SNP’s finance secretary. So any cuts being made, and any tax increases, are purely the result of SNP choices, and no one else’s responsibility.
We hear a lot from the SNP about the priority they make Parliament of broadband, but the budget that has just been passed cuts by more than half the amount being spent on digital connectivity, down some £76m.
The real story of the budget came in the figures from the Scottish Fiscal Commission, predicting that the SNP-run economy in Scotland will fail to match UK growth for each of the next five years, and is projected to have the lowest growth of any major economy, the lowest of any in the EU, in the G20, or in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development].
The failure to match even average UK performance for the period 2007 to 2022 will amount to a growth gap for Scotland worth a staggering £16.5bn in cash terms.
We all want more money to spend on public services. The way to raise that is not to increase the tax burden on those already paying, but to grow the economy and expand the tax base. This budget will do nothing to deliver those objectives, and will simply punish businesses and hard-working families across the country.
A Conservative budget would have cut out the waste, scrapped the vanity projects and the unnecessary programmes, and focused instead on growing the economy.
That is the direction we should be heading in, not this “pay more, get less”budget from the SNP.
• Mr Fraser always welcomes feedback from constituents.
He can be contacted at The Control Tower, Perth Airport, Scone, PH2 6PL, by email on murdo.fraser.msp@ parliament.scot or by telephone on 01738 553676. A discussion on the budget in the Scottish