The middle classes are enemies in SNP world
IAM middle class. There, I’ve said it. Gosh that feels better, like scratching an itch or finally admitting you quite like Alan Titchmarsh. The thing is, being middle class is not something you can be proud of in Scotland today.
Instead, it’s evolved into a minor public embarrassment, akin to wandering around with your skirt tucked into your tights or eating an entire bag of Haribo Tangfastics in one sitting.
Thanks to our chums in the Scottish Government, the middle classes are now the enemy – only there to be taxed into oblivion, or at least out of any luxuries that make life worth living.
The realisation that Scottish families will soon pay the highest income tax in the UK after a backroom deal between the SNP and the Greens is woeful news for the hard-working squeezed middle.
The people who endeavour to get ahead in life find their earnings being whisked away to pay for free prescriptions or free university tuition or whatever it is the SNP deem our money should be spent on.
I wouldn’t mind so much if these sorts of schemes worked. Yet just this week we learned Scotland now has the lowest percentage of state school pupils and college students going to university in the UK. Meanwhile millions are wasted each year on pointless free prescriptions such as paracetamol and toothpaste. Viva la revolución!
From April, those earning £43,000 will be taxed at 40 per cent, while the higher rate threshold rises to £45,000 in the rest of the UK. Council tax will be hit too, with those in Bands E-H homes having to pay up to £554 more.
Taxes, we are taught from birth, are as inevitable as death. But life – you know, that bit in the middle – is about aspiration, about choosing to do better, about hauling ourselves up by the boot straps and making as decent a life for ourselves and our loved ones as we can. Not in Scotland though. Here, instead of being rewarded for being aspirational we are penalised in a way that no other citizen of the UK is. And if we dare pipe up about it we are sneered at as over-entitled greedy guts. With attitudes like that, who would be Scottish and middle class?
While we’re at it, who would be a middle-class No-voting Remainer? Those poor sods – again I count myself among them – are the ones who now find themselves facing another independence referendum while watching Britain extract itself from Europe and, thanks to those tax increases, find there isn’t enough money left over to buy a decent bottle of malt to take the pain away. Lucky us.
Look, I am happy to pay my taxes. People who work hard generally are. But there’s also a sense of being taken advantage of, as if we are here simply to be plundered like a piggy bank.
The Scottish Government would be well advised to remember that piggy banks eventually run dry. All we want is fair treatment. And what could be more middle class than that?