Bad Budget portents
AND so it comes to this. Holyrood, a ‘pretendy parliament’ no more, has real teeth and looks set to use them to take an even bigger bite from family budgets.
Derek Mackay says that he will deliver an ‘inspirational’ Budget later today – but the portents are not good.
The Finance Secretary repeated that you cannot cut taxes and raise spending, showing again how out of touch he truly is.
Scots do not want spending to keep on rising. They want the money already sloshing about spent more wisely – no more vanity projects.
Scots also want serious efforts to reduce waste, not least in the NHS where money is being delivered by the truckload with little evidence of improvements for patients.
Public sector IT projects are a notorious money pit, good money was poured after bad in investments in renewables firms, free prescriptions and concessionary travel schemes swallow a fortune.
Much of the demand for more spending comes from councils and any tax rises announced today are likely to be swallowed up by them – for salaries, not improved frontline services.
Reform is tough, sometimes unpopular, and it is a harder route than Mr Mackay’s well-worn path to the taxpayers’ well.
He steps up today amid a welter of warnings about the fragility of the economy and we report today an ominous spike in unemployment.
If Mr Mackay succumbs to the siren voice of the Greens – Patrick Harvie’s call yesterday to ‘be bold’ on tax should chill every worker in the land – he risks further damage to an economy lagging behind England’s.
It wouldn’t be the SNP if there wasn’t shameless spin. Chancellor Philip Hammond’s Budget pushed an extra £2billion into Scottish Government coffers and no one was fooled by nicola Sturgeon’s plaintive complaint that this was ‘the wrong sort of money’.
Speaking in Holyrood yesterday, Tory MSP adam Tomkins was in excoriating form.
He pointed out that the SNP pledged in its manifesto not to raise tax for basic rate payers. If that is breached, the SNP can never again aim claims of hypocrisy at opponents.
Mr Tomkins added: ‘We need a Budget for growth, not a breach of trust.’ amen to that.
yet there is little to suggest Mr Mackay, who thinks those on £43,000 a year are rich, grasps the damage his avarice and his Government’s profligacy are doing to hard-working Scots.