LABOUR’S TAX RISE ‘BETRAYAL’
Climbdown by Dugdale over pledge to shield low-paid staff
KEZIA Dugdale’s election campaign was plunged into chaos last night after she was accused of breaking a promise to protect low-paid workers from a proposed tax hike.
The Labour leader made a humiliating climbdown after it emerged poorer families would no longer be offered a £100 rebate through her party’s tax plan – instead relying on George Osborne’s decision to increase the tax-free ‘personal allowance’.
Nicola Sturgeon yesterday accused her rival of a ‘true betrayal of Labour’s roots’.
The First Minister said: ‘This would be a broken promise from Labour of the worst kind. It is bad enough the Labour Party wants to put up taxes on 2.2million basic rate taxpayers, including 500,000 pensioners, but to fail to offer any protection to those on the lowest earnings would be a true betrayal of Labour’s roots.’
Labour wants to put each income tax bracket up by 1p, which would increase the basic rate from 20p to 21p.
In an attempt to avoid punishing poorer families, the party proposed a £100 rebate for those earning £20,000 or less in 2016-17.
It said this would be a temporary one-year measure and it would be able to use new powers coming to Holyrood in 2017 to introduce a better way of ensuring the low-paid are not worse off.
But it has now emerged this mechanism would simply be the Tory Chancellor’s rise in the personal allowance from £11,000 to £11,500.
While someone on a £20,000 salary in England will be £100 better off in 2017-18, in Scotland they would be only £15 better off under Labour.
Miss Dugdale also wants to return the top rate of income tax for people who earn £150,000 or more to 50p, up from 45p. She yesterday claimed that could produce an extra £110million, although Miss Sturgeon has warned it could cost Scotland £30million if only 7 per cent of the 17,000 workers affected move south of the Border.
Miss Dugdale said yesterday: ‘Only Labour is willing to ask the richest 1 per cent to pay their fair share.
‘Voters expect the Tories to argue against those at the top paying more, but what people won’t understand is Nicola Sturgeon making the same case when she supported higher taxes just a few days ago.’
Asked about the impact on lowpaid workers, a party spokesman said: ‘Under our plans, those earning under £20,000 won’t pay a penny more than they pay today because of the recent changes being made to the personal allowance.’
But Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson said: ‘Kezia Dugdale’s plan to tax everyone more, then ask the low paid to queue up a year later for a £100 rebate from the council was so ludicrously ill thought out that even she has now decided to scrap it.’
Miss Davidson was also on the back foot after being accused of plotting ‘hidden’ rises with £8 prescription charges, raising around £60million, and a £6,000 graduate contribution for university tuition.
She has ditched her pledge to directly spend the money from prescription charges on 1,000 new nurses and midwives and said the cash would go to ‘frontline healthcare’. Yesterday she was forced to defend those proposals.
Items such as cough medicine, paracetamol and sun cream have been handed out for free since the charges were axed in 2011.
Children, those on low incomes and patients with certain medical conditions were already exempt from prescription costs before they were abolished by the SNP. That would still be the case under the Tory proposal, with the party willing to look at other conditions such as asthma and cystic fibrosis.
‘I think there are people out there who are working, who are earning a decent wage, who were always prepared to pay towards their painkillers if it meant someone else got cancer drugs, or if it meant there were enough nurses on our wards,’ Miss Davidson said.
‘I just don’t think the First Minister should get her paracetamol for free when there are people out there that are saying it takes an hour to get a bed pan because there are staffing issues at the hospital.’ She added: ‘We don’t believe that the free university tuition that Nicola Sturgeon talks about is free. It’s cost the country 152,000 college places. It’s cost £40million worth of bursaries to our poorest students.
‘We know that, on average, graduates earn £100,000 more over the course of their life than if they don’t have a degree, and we’re asking them to pay a tiny percentage to invest in our further and higher education sector.’
But Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie said: ‘In the 1990s, as John Major’s government collapsed in chaos, the Conservatives hit people with 22 stealth taxes. Now Ruth Davidson wants to do the same in Scotland too. If Ruth wants people to pay more tax, the least she should do is be honest about it.’
Comment – Page 14
‘Broken promise of the worst kind’ ‘Ludicrously ill thought out’