Budget nightmare before Christmas

HE promised to ‘inspire’ – but Finance Secretary Derek Mackay, in a grating monotone, delivered a Budget that will make hard-working Scots despair.

He has handed 757,000 of us an increased tax bill. Truly, this was the nightmare before Christmas.

Higher and middle-income earners, as ever, bore the brunt; and even the ‘winners’, those on less than £26,000, gain by an underwhelming £20 a year – 38 pence a week – according to the respected Fraser of Allander think tank.

Ominously, those earning £50,000 per year will now pay £655 more in tax than a counterpart in England.

This is the crack that threatens to become a chasm because, as time goes on and a Left-wing tax-and-spend cabal holds sway at Holyrood, that gulf will widen as Scots pay more and more.

Scottish workers and firms doing business here must shoulder an unfair burden, a Tartan Tax disguised as being progressive – when already 50 per cent of the tax take is from only 15 per cent of the population.

It is inescapable that the voices urging Mr Mackay to ‘be bold’ were those of the lumpen Left, the class warriors and those who cannot grasp that the taxpayers’ well of wealth in Scotland is shallow.

Everyone who has ever run a business, employed anyone or who knows their way round a balance sheet roared warnings that too great a burden is being placed on the shoulders of too few people.

Let’s not pretend this Budget is the work of Mr Mackay. He simply read out words – badly – put in front of him.

The hand that authored this Budget is that of Nicola Sturgeon, one of the few people in Britain so wealthy she doesn’t even take her full salary.

Chauffeured around, feather-bedded with a gold-plated pension and generous expenses, she is so steeped in politics that her real-world experience is limited to a couple of years as a solicitor two decades ago. Truly, only such an other-wordly figure could look at Scotland’s sclerotic growth and fragile economy and declare the time right for tax hikes.

What does she – and too many of her Holyrood colleagues – know of what it is like to cling on to a job; to work grinding hours; to fret over an unexpected bill? To struggle to balance the family budget when inflation is robbing your hard-earned cash of value and when pay rises are a distant memory?

Only an insulated and self-obsessed class of professional politicians could defend the tax changes announced yesterday as ‘fairer’ when practically everyone on more than £33,000 is worse off.

The extra tax being taken may be modest to cossetted MSPs, but to households across the land it may mean foregoing a holiday or scrimping to pay for insurance or scrabbling through an MoT.

The SNP is also dancing on the head of a pin over its pledge not to raise the basic rate of income tax. It didn’t promise to divide it into starter, intermediate and basic rates either…

Stripped of spin, this fiddling with the lower tax bands is an underhand diversionary tactic.

Much of the money being ripped from Scots who do the daily hard-lifting that keeps the economy afloat will be handed to the public sector and the NHS.

Both are bywords for waste and profligacy. Without reform, the public are unlikely to see much return on their money by way of improved services.

Meanwhile, the SNP can count on votes galore from a public sector in danger of being turned into a vassal state, beholden to the spendthrift Nationalists.

Yesterday’s Budget punishes hard work and ambition and takes yet more out of people’s pockets, meaning business will see less cash through the books.

Mr Mackay declared yesterday he was proud of his work. Pride usually precedes a fall.