Should SNP really be boasting about ‘guts’ it took to raid our pay packets?

YOU might not be in the habit of checking your payslip these days – particularly if you don’t like bad news.

But it will be worth risking a peek next month, when 1.1million Scots earning £26,000 a year or above will find themselves paying the highest income tax in the UK.

So April is likely to live up to its poetic billing as ‘the cruellest month’ but you can always use what little is left of your salary for a spot of retail therapy.

Well, good luck with that – some of the big high street chains, such as New Look, are planning to axe branches.

Businesses across Scotland will have paid £189million more in tax than they would have if they had been based south of the Border, by the end of the next financial year.

Next week, business rates will rise by 3 per cent, adding a further £15million to retailers’ bills.

A bleak picture but you should take heart from the knowledge that leeching yet more cash out of your pay packet was a courageous move by Nicola Sturgeon, who said this weekend that her tax grab took ‘guts’.

Brave indeed, and if you’re one of the higher rate taxpayers deemed ‘rich’ by Finance Secretary Derek Mackay – a man you wouldn’t trust with the tea round let alone the economy – it’s bound to be a big relief.

After all, had it been a cowardly manoeuvre, using taxation as a weapon of political revenge against a middle class demonised by the independence movement for the 2014 No vote, that would be utterly beyond the pale.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s economic growth is infinitesimal – on course to be the lowest in the developed world.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded its growth forecast for the UK economy this year to 1.5 per cent, compared to 0.7 per cent for Scotland.

It is estimated that more than £300million of income tax will be lost to the Scottish economy over the next five years as people leave the country or act to minimise their bills.

That’s the verdict of the Scottish Government’s own economic forecaster, which has warned of the huge impact caused by people migrating or using ‘complex and convoluted’ avoidance schemes.

Property tycoon Dan Macdonald believes the SNP tax rises are merely ‘twiddling at the knobs’ and that independence should be taken off the table as a goal while the economy is in the doldrums.

Sadly for Miss Sturgeon, he is a member of her flagship taskforce – the Growth Commission – charged with devising a blueprint for the economy of an independent Scotland.

Dawdling

The dawdling commission – launched in September 2016 – is dreaming up plans for the Scottish currency after the break-up of the UK.

There can be no more startling example of the disconnect between the priorities of the political elite and the public it is meant to serve than an expert group trying to boost the economy of an imaginary Scotland.

It may take time but the changes Mr Mackay has made – with the enthusiastic backing of the Greens, the SNP’s de facto backbenchers – will have a real and potentially devastating effect.

Those sky-high business rates are part of a toxic cocktail of factors putting immense strain on business, limiting investment and the possibility of expansion.

David Lonsdale of the Scottish Retail Consortium warns that a higher business tax rate ‘damages the perception of Scotland as the best place to invest’.

Yet among the reforms the SNP is driving forward in a bid to rob private schools of their ability to use charitable status to claim relief on nondomestic rates, costing the sector £5million a year.

As ever, the politics of grievance and class warfare are the primary motivators of economic policy-making.

Then there’s council tax, which is also up across the country – another blow to our pockets and therefore to consumer spending. You can console yourself that at least all the potholes will be filled and the dog waste lifted – or, more likely, more ‘recycling advisers’ and ‘diversity co-ordinators’ will be hired.

From central taxation there will be a little more cash for ‘baby boxes’ (a hare-brained scheme that doubtless also took enormous ‘guts’ to implement).

What doesn’t feature anywhere in the debate, even from the Tories, is the idea of cutting taxes to kick-start the economy.

Holyrood is hardly a crucible of radical innovation: the cutand-paste answer to every serious political question is ‘tax hike’.

Much time has been wasted by our MSPs moralising about how awful Donald Trump is. But the US economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2017 and stock markets are booming.

This success is underpinned by a pro-business stance based on slashing red tape.

Since tax-cutting legislation was passed in December, many bosses have been handing out bonuses to their employees.

But serious analysis of the US economy has no place at Holyrood, where instead many hours have been squandered on the legally dubious gimmickry of the anti-Brexit Continuity Bill.

Other key aims of the SNP Government include reducing the stigma faced by benefit claimants – rather than combating an entrenched welfare culture that has proved a massive drain on productivity.

Does it really take ‘guts’ to ignore the advice of your own advisers and plough ahead with a tax increase that risks fuelling economic decline? Or is it simply evidence of a deeply ingrained intellectual paralysis?

Miss Sturgeon has negligible experience of life beyond the realm of politics, while Mr Mackay is a veteran of local government – elected as leader of Renfrewshire Council in 1999 at the age of 21.

It would be hard to think of backgrounds less conducive to the entrepreneurial ethos urgently needed to turn around the tanker of the Scottish economy.

Dithering

After all, Miss Sturgeon hailed Prestwick Airport as a ‘viable enterprise’ when the Scottish Government bought it for £1 in 2013.

In fact, it has proved a money pit that has cost the public purse £40million – and ministers are now dithering over selling it.

Bridges that were painstakingly built with business in the run-up to 2014 are now fully ablaze (as Mr Macdonald’s broadside demonstrates – and remember, he supports independence).

And where is the meaningful evidence that any effort has been devoted to reining in government waste?

Certainly not in quangoland, which continues to thrive under Nationalist rule – just look at the utterly hopeless and dysfunctional Scottish Police Authority, which has been paying off failed officials with costly ‘golden goodbyes’.

It doesn’t take ‘guts’ to let the economy flatline while punishing the ‘middle earners’ battling to keep it afloat.

What it does take, though, is rank incompetence, a parliament that appears to exist in a parallel dimension and the arrogance of an administration with a mistaken belief in its own infallibility.