SNP could pay highest price of all for tax grab
INCOME tax has been with us since 1799 when Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger unveiled the ‘temporary measure’ to fund our forces in the French Revolutionary War.
It’s still with us, as unpopular now as then.
In 1929, judge Lord Clyde struck a blow for the ordinary man on tax avoidance, the legal means by which we might save a few hard-earned coins from rapacious government.
‘No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his… business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores.’
As a humble hewer of wood and drawer of water, I am on Pay As You Earn – no Paradise Papers for me – but I still fell foul of the taxman.
So complex are the regulations, you need a Philadelphia lawyer to unpick them. Sadly I had only a well-known firm of accountants who got it horribly wrong when I returned after working in Ireland.
First I got a refund cheque. No sooner was it cashed than I got a demand for thousands. This was January when funds are as short as the days.
I spent hours on the Inland Revenue premium-rate helpline, to no avail. ‘Sell an asset’ demanded a stentorian voice.
Oh, that they were so tough on big business!
The issue exploded in 2011 when a whistleblower said HMRC had waived as much as £20million of interest on a £30million tax bill Goldman Sachs owed on bankers’ bonuses.
The Public Accounts Committee also heard claims Vodafone was allowed to ditch £8billion in taxes when the taxman accepted a £1.25billion settlement.
It was later held nothing untoward occurred, but the suspicion of ‘one rule for big corporations and one for us’ lingers.
In ancient Rome, tax was levied at 1 per cent when harvests were good and a whopping 3 per cent when there were barbarians to conquer or walls to build to keep us out. Emperors knew tax rises were perilous.
Enter Derek Mackay, Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘safe pair of hands’ (hard to credit, but there you are) at Finance. He’s set to bump income tax for those of us with the Black Spot S on our tax-code to painful heights.
The cloak-and-dagger trick is that he’ll have Holyrood consensus.
The SNP learned the hard way. John Swinney’s ‘Penny for Scotland’ was as popular as Rome banning overtaking at the Colosseum chariot races.
So now a cabal of fiscally incontinent Green, Labour and Lib Dem MSPs will be suborned into voting to let Derek’s ‘safe hands’ plunge deeper into our wallets so there’s more for public-sector pay and wasteful pet projects.
Superannuated pro-Nat columnists are forever telling us we should be more Scandinavian and embrace the ‘social compact’ meant to link eye-popping tax levels with better services.
I’m with the Norwegians. A voluntary scheme to let those who felt they were underpaying tax top up raised barely £1,000 in a month.
Adam Smith, the Fife godfather of modern economics, established canons of taxation: Taxes should be efficient, easy to pay and low. Mr Mackay probably thinks Smith is in midfield for St Mirren and canons are weapons Nicola wants rid of, like Trident.
Taxation without representation cost us the United States. Taxation without reform and diligent spending could cost the SNP Scotland.