SNP ‘must think hard’ over tax increases, warns its own adviser
THE SNP needs to ‘think hard’ about tax rises in Scotland if it wants to attract people and business, an economic adviser to the party has warned.
Dr David Skilling, who advised the SNP’s Growth Commission, urged ministers to consider ‘the competitive impact’ about raising taxes.
His warning comes after he published a report which found that Scotland’s economy has ‘lagged behind’ those of other advanced small nations.
Meanwhile, two prominent Nationalist MSPs have said the party should stop blaming Brexit and Westminster for Scotland’s economic woes.
From April this year, everyone in Scotland earning more than £26,000 a year now pays more income tax than they would if they were based in other parts of the UK.
Asked about the SNP’s tax policies after a Reform Scotland event in Edinburgh, Mr Skilling said: ‘My point would be that you need to think hard about the competitive impact in terms of how attractive Scotland is to firms and to people.
‘If you look at the range of tax rates across many small economies, it is a very wide range – the Nordics very high, Singapore very low. There’s no magic tax rate above which you become in trouble and below which you’re fine but it’s one of the elements which plays to competitiveness.
‘So if you’re raising the tax rate, you need to have a degree of confidence that you have other things going on that are going to make that feasible and sustainable.’
Mr Skilling added: ‘You do need to be confident about the impact that such decisions have – particularly if you see more of these decisions made into the future – on the competitive position of Scotland.’
He pointed out that people still choose to live in high-tax countries such as Denmark but said ‘you have to be confident that the taxes you are raising are being used efficiently and well’.
At the Reform Scotland event, Nationalist MSP Kate Forbes, who is Finance Secretary Derek Mackay’s parliamentary aide, also admitted that the SNP needs to stop blaming Brexit and Westminster for the economic underperformance.
She admitted that ‘our potential as a country outstrips our performance as a country and there’s a pressing need to improve that’.
She said that sometimes it was far easier for people in her party ‘to stand up and blame Brexit or to blame Westminster or to blame somebody else’.
Meanwhile, former health secretary Alex Neil told Holyrood magazine that the SNP should be ‘toning down the obsessively negative language about Brexit, which is costing us support’.
He said: ‘After 11 years in government it’s not credible to argue that failure to deliver is the fault of our predecessors or that Westminster is to blame.’
‘A pressing need to improve’