The Left can’t wait to pick our pockets

WILL the Left never learn? Their neverending drive to spend money and tax ‘the rich’ seeps into every policy and Margaret Thatcher was absolutely correct when she said: ‘ The trouble with socialism is that you always run out of other people’s money.’

The SNP has caught the tax-and-spend fever too. Alex Salmond, replete with jobs and pensions, airily declared this week: ‘I think there’s a lot of support that taxes for higher-paid people should be a bit higher because things have been unfair in recent years.’

Is that so, Mr Salmond? Are people who have worked hard for every penny – and paid a substantial chunk of it in tax already – really keen to hand yet more to politicians to fritter on fripperies and pet projects, or to be swallowed by the inefficiencies of the state?

The key thing the Left steadfastly ignore about tax is that the vast majority of us earn, through the sweat of our brows, every penny that passes through our hands. Few of us inherit jackpot sums, have trust funds or any other sort of silver spoon in our mouths.

Those rare few who have that sort of wealth can af f ord battalions of accountants to minimise their tax bills (just ask Nationalist MP Phil Boswell, who avoided tax and then spoke against the practice). So the race to make Scots pay the highest taxes in Britain is under way. Labour and the Lib Dems have unveiled plans to put 1p on the 20p, 40p and 45p income tax rates.

The SNP is cuter, stealthily keeping its ‘progressive’ plans for Holyrood’s new tax-varying powers under wraps lest they damage the party’s prospects in May’s Holyrood election.

Given Mr Salmond’s conviction that the country’s workers are desperate to part with more of their salaries, it seems a safe bet the Nats too are planning rises. That leaves the Tories alone as the party which grasps the counter-intuitive truth that lowering taxes can generate more revenue for government.

But already Scots are paying more out of their wages, pulled down by ‘fiscal drag’. This is the phenomenon by which workers who have had pay rises cross thresholds into higher tax bands. By leaving those bands untouched, the Treasury was the beneficiary of an effective stealth tax.

As we report today, there has been an alarming 60 per cent rise in the number of workers paying the 40p level of income tax in the last parliament alone. Chancellor George Osborne is addressing this unfairness, finally raising the salary levels at which the new bands apply – though his adjustments may well be wiped out in Scotland.

Ominously too, the shoulders of the Scottish taxpayer are narrow. Only 17,000 of us pay the top rate of 45p. That is 0.7 per cent of the total number of taxpayers. Across the UK, the figure is 1.1 per cent.

Mr Salmond and his fellow travellers might dream of ‘soaking the rich’ while telling us the targets of their avarice are actually pleased to have government hands thrust deeper into their pockets.

In reality, hard-working Scots are on the cusp of paying a heavy price indeed for the fiscal illiteracy of our politicians.