A GRUBBY DEAL THAT LED US TO POLL TAX ON WHEELS

WHICHEVER way you look at it, the SNP’s workplace parking levy – forced through Holyrood last night in cosy alliance with the Marxist-Lentillists – is iniquity on stilts. This poll tax on wheels was cooked up in a grubby backroom deal with the Scottish Greens to secure their support for the Scottish budget. And, as Transport Secretary Michael Matheson has conceded, there has been no consultation whatsoever, even with such stakeholders as the Scottish Retail Consortium or the Scottish Association of Social Work.

It is a tax, effectively, on private land – and, indeed, taxing it twice, for companies are already paying business rates on their car park acreage. It is also a wickedly regressive tax: the probationer teacher on some £26,000 a year being bilked equally with the headmaster on £72,000.

The Scottish Government insists unblushingly that it is not, itself, ripping off motorists. The new law merely permits local authorities so to do. The councils in Edinburgh and Glasgow, predictably, enthuse at the prospect, the capital’s city fathers drooling at prospective revenues of between £9million and £15million a year.

But Fife Council ruled out the move completely in March and many other authorities have no plans to impose the parking tax. The poll tax on wheels will, it appears, be a postcode lottery.

Ministers insist, too, that businesses will immediately bear the load of this levy. Not so. As is evident from Nottingham – the only part of Britain where this lunacy has been so far trialled – at least 40 per cent of companies will recoup the money from their employees.

The scheme finally approved by MSPs does exempt some – including all NHS premises, GP surgeries, hospices and designated parking spaces for the disabled.

Except Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, built under terms that allow a private concern to tap everyone – even doctors and nurses – £7.20 a day for the privilege of parking in its sacred precincts.

Oh, and except police stations, schools and social workers. The hit on the biggest players in the private sector will be eyewatering: the Royal Bank of Scotland, with two great offices in Edinburgh, will be done for a yearly £800,000.

But the public sector, grotesquely, will be squeezed too. Parking at the Scottish Police College in Tulliallan, Kincardine, could cost more than £275,000 annually.

And, were the scheme adopted nationally, the total parking bill for the Scottish Government and all of its quangos could amount to £5million a year.

The Scottish Greens have hollered for this wretched measure not, of course, to raise revenue for our schools, refuse collection and libraries – to say nothing of the odd Lord Provost eager to bill the taxpayer for her lingerie – but to change our behaviour.

We should all walk or cycle to work instead, as well as biddably lagging our lofts and knitting our own yogurt. But this is to make two laughable assumptions: that everyone lives within half an hour’s march of their place of work and that Scotland’s public transport network is of peerless efficiency.

In fact, many of us now commute a considerable distance daily, especially younger folk largely priced out of residence in the more pleasant parts of our cities. Thousands thunder daily into Edinburgh from the likes of Kirkcaldy or Falkirk or Linlithgow and very many of them need their car not just to make it to their day job but to do it. Last winter, I made five journeys by train. Something went wrong on four of them: one was blithely cancelled, two broke down in a particularly dull part of Fife and another, for Aberdeen, was so delayed that scheduled stops at Arbroath, Montrose and Stonehaven were abandoned.

FOR most of this week, thanks to Caledonian MacBrayne’s disintegrating shoreside infrastructure, cars could not be carried between Brodick and Ardrossan.

Its important commuter crossing from Dunoon to Gourock has, for the past eight years, been entrusted to two glorified motor launches. Argyll residents can at least come the long way round, by the A83 – on those occasions when much of the Rest and Be Thankful hasn’t collapsed on it.

And even Edinburgh’s usually reliable bus network struggled under the strain of its Festival – No 11 after No 11 rattling by me one afternoon, without stopping, because they were full.

And, as so often in Scottish politics, there is no thought at all for those leading very different lives to besuited men in Edinburgh. The fish farm worker who must drive daily from Kyles Scalpay to Scaladale; the teachers commuting miles to some West Highland school; employees at this or that Highland distillery, most erected in the age of the pony and trap. Not to mention the thousands of rural Scots for whom, even on low wages, their car is their lifeline in those shires where there winds no railway, buses are ill-timed and infrequent, and schools have been traditionally sited between villages rather than in them.

Even the most elementary issues of safety do not seem to have dawned on our rulers. Workers loath to be relieved of some £415 a year for being allowed to park at the office may instead be tempted to leave their car in some mean street two blocks away, nightly braving a mugging or worse.

Oh, and there is another sting in the new legislation – the empowering of councils to decree low-emission zones in our busiest cities, with the right then to ban many diesel vehicles and older cars, though how this might actually be enforced we know not.

What particularly infuriates is that, in not so distant past lives, not a few SNP politicians ridiculed the suggestion of a workplace parking levy.

‘We were never convinced that workplace charging was the way forward,’ declared Bruce Crawford in 2000. Fergus Ewing agreed. MSPs on all sides thought it ‘not appropriate’, and John Swinney feared for the safety of those who might park a considerable distance from the workplace.

And that’s before we start on the woeful state of too many roads – the ramps, bumps and potholes on some thoroughfares would daunt a tank – or how the Nationalists have already raised income tax, council tax and even the price of your evening’s soothing dram.

Not that the First Minister will be in the least inconvenienced. Nicola Sturgeon has never learned to drive and is borne everywhere – at our expense – in a gleaming chauffeured car.