– BRIAN MONTEITH

This government believes that it can simply raise taxes to cover public spending mismanagement, writes Brian Monteith

The occasion of Derek Mackay’s first budget in the Scottish Parliament last week has revealed a fundamental weakness in the cause of Scottish nationalism that few if any had expected to become apparent quite so quickly, namely that the SNP Government does not have the intellect or the guile to run the country.

In the week preceding the budget, the Scottish Conservatives, revelling in their role of official opposition, issued details of how in 25 out of 30 economic indicators Scotland is in a poorer situation than the rest of the United Kingdom.

It was the first of what were set to be more uncomfortable comparisons that give testimony that the SNP leadership, so fixated with the desire to foment the conditions for a second independence referendum, has not given due care and attention to its first duty, running the country to the benefit of all in Scotland.

Among the 25 poorer outcomes were all of the most important, including higher unemployment, lower employment (two quite different measures), poorer productivity and higher fuel poverty.

By unfortunate happenstance for the SNP Government, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Pisa study came almost immediately after the economic comparisons, this time demonstrating the dereliction of duty by SNP education ministers over the last nine years.

Those ministers had in the past not just sought to reassure the public that they were on top of their job, but said they had reversed a decline in education standards that had started after devolution began, but now the irrefutable evidence had exposed this as either self delusion or deception, or possibly both.

With thanks to the unhelpfully timed publication of “Scotland Performs” the Scottish Government’s own record of its achievements (or failures), the Conservatives have been quick off the mark to point out that 46 out of 67 key indicators have either stagnated or become worse. When two-thirds of the SNP Government’s own performance measures are saying its ministers are failing at the day job, then it is getting into deep water.

It is against this background of mounting failure that Derek Mackay’s budget has to be seen – and what it tells us is that the SNP is willing to put avarice and envy before the public good – and when that leads us to despair it has no answer except more of the same.

The evidence is irrefutable and clear; the largest share of tax revenues from personal taxes is paid by the wealthiest section of earners. This has become even more the case under first the Conservative-liberal Democrat coalition and then secondly the Conservative government, when nearly two million people have been taken out of paying income tax altogether by raising the starting threshold for contributions.

There is also the evidence in modern democracies from the times when US presidents Woodrow Wilson, John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson and Ronald Reagan all cut personal taxes that revenues to the US treasury rose. The same experience was found in the United Kingdom when Nigel Lawson cut taxes and HM Treasury saw the revenue increase.

Then we have the copious examples where a range of taxes have been raised and revenues have almost immediately fallen – a disposition that is even more likely in today’s digital age due to the ease in