The SNP would much rather take a gamble with your cash than try to cut your tax bill

TAX cuts dominate the Tory leadership contest – but for viewers in Scotland it’s a debate that must remain theoretical, for now.

The phrase ‘tax cuts’ is heretical at Holyrood to the extent that it’s only been mentioned 90 times in parliamentary records since 1999 – compared with nearly 30,000 times for ‘independence’.

Even the Scottish Tories tend not to demand them, or not often, though they have condemned the SNP’s tax hikes which were designed to punish the ‘rich’, including, er, nurses, teachers and police officers.

After all, you can’t bankroll a legion of propagandists and quangocrats toting credit cards paid for by the public purse while also cutting the tax burden on ordinary Scots – even in the teeth of a cost of living crisis that each day threatens to become a catastrophe.

Rocket

The cost of building a new computer system for devolved benefits has risen to more than £250million – and bear in mind that we were once told £200million would be the initial price tag for setting up an independent Scotland.

The overall benefits bill is about to rocket by 50 per cent to more than £6billion a year, while Scottish Government coffers are facing a massive £2.1billion budget ‘black hole’, according to documents leaked earlier this year.

This level of waste – now endemic in the public sector – ensures that when the matter of potential tax cuts is raised, and it rarely is, ministers can argue that they haven’t got the latitude, or fiscal headroom, or whatever other euphemism you like, to cut taxes.

And in any event, while taxes are steeper here for people who earn lots of money (more than £27,850 a year) than in England, we have much to be thankful for, in the form of ‘free’ prescriptions and ‘free’ higher education.

That was the argument advanced at the weekend by the SNP’s work and pensions spokesman in the Commons, Kirsty Blackman, when she said these perks were worth the extra taxes, which she insisted affect only the relatively well-off in any event.

Anyone in that category, of course, is unlikely to feel very well off, or rich, particularly as National Insurance was recently hiked (by a chancellor who was committed to tax cuts, albeit not committed enough to introduce any).

‘Free’ higher education sounds great but the cap on student places for Scots, who don’t pay tuition fees to study here, means that a lot of them – more than 14,000 a year according to some estimates miss out.

And ‘free’ prescriptions cost £1.4billion a year – a figure that has risen by 19 per cent in the past decade.

True, the local pharmacy has become a kind of high street medical practice for many of us who struggle to get an inperson GP appointment.

But there’s no real reason why the state should pay for all prescribed medication, including painkillers such as paracetamol, when the patient can afford to buy it.

So you’re required to stump up more out of your monthly bank balance to fund expensive giveaways which – on closer analysis – don’t live up to the SNP’s grandstanding rhetoric.

Your taxes are also being poured into any number of failing public services including schools and the creaking NHS, and a host of botched projects from unfinished ferries to the census shambles.

They were pumped into closing the pupil attainment gap through special funds that were in fact used for ‘campus cops’ and temporary teachers in woefully under-staffed schools – until the SNP admitted the plan had run into the sand and gave up.

Millions are squandered on expensive ‘communications specialists’ at every tier of government and quangocracy, whose primary task is to try to keep you in the dark about how much of your cash has been wasted.

In Scotland, the number of devolved Scottish civil service officials rose by 1,100 (5.2 per cent) to 22,200 between 2020 and 2021 and by nearly 30 per cent in the past decade – up by 5,070 from 2011.

And the total public sector headcount for Scotland increased by 38,500 at the end of the first full year of devolution in 1999 to 589,600 in the final quarter of last year.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to see why tax cuts barely feature on the political agenda in Scotland, and if someone does have the temerity to suggest them, the SNP will point out that the Scottish Government has only limited borrowing powers – more of them would be needed to fund lower taxation.

Rampant

But that argument overlooks the real reasons for the lack of ‘wriggle room’ on taxes as things stand – rampant government waste and an attitude to spending our money that varies between the cavalier and the downright negligent.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are really only debating about when taxes should be reduced, and by how much. Economic modelling by the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) suggests that cutting VAT and income tax, as well as raising the national insurance threshold and scrapping the rise, would increase the UK’s GDP by £56billion by 2029.

Sir Keir Starmer said yesterday that Labour would fight the next general election on economic growth, while the SNP has said that it will be a de facto referendum on Scottish independence (whether voters agree is a slightly different matter).

But would the SNP refuse to duplicate any tax cuts that might be ordered by the next prime minister and his or her chancellor, risking an electoral backlash?

Failure

Past record doesn’t inspire much faith that it would, as to do so would be, in the eyes of the Nationalists, an admission of defeat – they can’t be seen to do anything other than ploughing their own furrow, even if it’s one that ultimately results in failure and possibly mass impoverishment.

That’s because the SNP’s main objective remains what it always has been – the breaking-up of the UK – and some of your hard-earned cash is funding well-paid civil servants dedicated to pushing the separatist case, such as it is.

More of your money will be wasted on a Supreme Court case to establish whether a repeat referendum can take place, even if it’s a complete sham that won’t be legally binding.

The SNP might well find that indulging in fantasy economics – and diverting the Lord Advocate from the more pressing business of rescuing our chaotic courts from a mountainous post-pandemic backlog of delayed trials – won’t go down well with voters, but it’s a desperate gamble the party is willing to take. In the meantime, don’t hold your breath for those tax cuts, or even any talk of them, anytime soon.

Even more of your money will be needed to stuff the maw of an insatiable state that has grown out of control under a spendthrift crew of constitutional obsessives – who frankly couldn’t care less about how you’ll pay your next gas bill.