SNP tax and spend monster

NICOLA Sturgeon’s socalled ‘vision’ for Scotland – with its unsubtle hints of higher taxes – has achieved something improbable. As the First Minister listed all her ambitions – no more smacking, barely anyone in prison, electric cars, an end to the pay cap on public sector workers and something vague about schools – I didn’t find myself peering into the future.

Instead the past came racing back to haunt me: specifically Ayrshire, in the 1970s.

Back then, I had an after-school job of sorts. Robertson & Archer’s was a corner shop on Springvale Street in Saltcoats. ‘Robertson’ is my gran, ‘Archer’ my mum. At a table in the back shop, I’d sit down with paper and colouring pens.

My task was to write up the new – higher – prices of bread and milk that the monthly inflation figures made necessary. The cost of nearly everything mum and gran bought from the cash and carry was going up, significantly and frequently, which in turn meant charging their customers more.

Springvale Street is a long way from Edinburgh’s Princes Street or Glasgow’s Buchanan Street. The men and women who came in to buy slices of corned beef and Mother’s Pride rolls weren’t from the high-tax band side of things. The higher prices hurt them and so they spent less.

This eventually led to Robertson & Archer’s being sold. It wasn’t worth the grind of trying to maintain profit in such thankless economic circumstances. (The new supermarket down the road didn’t help either).

Depressing

I hadn’t thought of those grim days for a long while but Nicola Sturgeon and her ‘social contract’ could take us all back to that depressing situation soon enough.

The lesson of the 1970s is that inflation doesn’t happen by accident but is delivered as a direct result of politicians who prattle on about social justice, fairness and equality, and who promise that tax rises will only ever be levied on the undeserving rich – Scotland’s 17,000 highestrate taxpayers – to raise the money for spending on those who need help most. The First Minister promises free elderly care, free prescriptions, free tuition… the list of spending ambitions is long.

She is gambling that you’ll reason like this: if the only people affected negatively are those 17,000, plus the 370,000 higher rate taxpayers, it would be wrong to oppose her.

It’s just a shame – the 1970s lesson again – that the policies designed to deliver all that ‘fairness’ always lead to reduced investment, closed businesses and chronic unemployment.

Oh, and the ‘tiny proportion’ – the 17,000 – who face higher taxes has a tendency to grow until it’s basically ‘everybody’.

You can’t fault the First Minister’s ambition. In her speech, she promised Scotland would become ‘the best place in the world to grow up and be educated, the best place to live, work, visit and do business, the best place to be cared for in times of sickness, need or vulnerability and the best place to grow old’.

A cynic might wonder whether it’s possible for any government, of any persuasion, to deliver this Heaven on Earth. You won’t find many voters who dislike the idea that their country be the ‘best’ in, well, everything. The proportion who believe that a government can create such a utopia will be somewhat smaller. Still, work as though you live in the early days of a better nation and all that.

But it’s not the earliest days for Nicola’s nation. Ten years of SNP government have elapsed. Even were the creation of Miss Sturgeon’s paradise a possibility, it’s not wrong to wonder why she’s waited till now to deliver it. Just how bad did the figures for working-class access to Scottish universities have to get, for example, for the SNP leader to decide that something must be done? (The ‘something’ remains unspecified. She’ll get back to us about her ‘number one ambition’ later, no doubt.)

You might put it like this: just what was it about the loss of half a million votes in the General Election, Miss Sturgeon, that caused you to drop the grievance-mongering over independence and rediscover your Left-wing roots?

The SNP faces an existential threat because if you’re not going to campaign for separatism, what’s the point of a separatist party? So it has decided to spill some clear red water onto the carpets at Holyrood in an attempt to shore up its vote among the former Labour supporters of the Central Belt.

For, stripped of the language of social justice (get ready to become sick of every tax rise being justified on the basis of the ‘social contract’), this manifesto amounts to tax and spend on a scale that would have made those discredited 1970s Labour governments proud.

Scots already pay higher taxes than residents south of the Border because the SNP didn’t pass on the last increase WRITER AND STATISTICIAN in thresholds set by Chancellor Philip Hammond. Now, worryingly, the First Minister says ‘the time is right… to open a discussion about how responsible and progressive use of our tax powers could help build the kind of country we want to be’. Watch your payslips, in other words. The tax-and-spend monster is coming for you.

Impact

The direction of travel is clear: higher land taxes, higher income taxes (and higher council taxes too, soon enough). I wonder if anyone in the SNP ever considers the impact this has on people, other than as a machine to deliver votes?

Emotion – I’m writing this on the south coast of England – would return me to Scotland in an instant. But I’m not irrational and don’t see that I should pay more income tax to live in one part of the country than another. Like the majority of Scots, after all – much though the SNP hates this inconvenient truth – I’m a Unionist. Anywhere in the UK is ‘home’.

The SNP would undoubtedly argue that I’m merely a selfish Tory, one that Scotland is better off without. But it’s not selfish to want to save from my income, look after my family and not be dependent on the state. I’m not unique. Who knows how many Scots have left – and how many will leave – as a result of higher taxes.

Think of the businesses that won’t move to Scotland, and the ones that will up sticks and leave – or just close, like Robertson & Archer’s – because it’s not worth the effort any more. Every decision like that leaves less money to pay Miss Sturgeon’s bills.

Policy actions, in other words, have consequences, and they are not always consequences that help the disadvantaged, even if the action is dressed up in the language of ‘fairness’.

The First Minister grew up just a few miles away from me. We’re the same Ayrshire vintage. They say the early lessons stay with you the most. Certainly, I’ve never forgotten watching my family struggle to cope with keeping a business afloat, or forgiven the Left-wing politicians whose utopian dreams made an economic mess. Utopian dreams, by the way, that came to nothing, other than to increase poverty.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to sell higher spending and it takes time to prove the contradiction at the heart of all Left-wing administrations: that the people hurt the most are those the government claims it wants to help. Squeezing middle-class taxpayers won’t help fund paradise on Scottish earth.

Eventually, socialism always runs out of other people’s money. Nicola Sturgeon’s version of tax and spend is no different to anyone else’s. But the money she’ll run out of will be yours.