Tax agenda that will devastate economy

THE needs of the goose are all too easily overlooked by politicians blinded by the glitter of the golden eggs it lays.

There is a clear risk now that the SNP’s over-ambitious Programme for Government contains within it the seeds of a recession.

Taxing hard-working Scots more heavily risks deeply dangerous, unintended circumstances.

The SNP likes to declare it is not about tax cuts for the rich, but the party’s plans will not impact the wealthy so much as ambitious, conscientious Scots.

These people are not oligarchs and so when they are forced to tighten their belts, it is not the casino at Monte Carlo or the superyacht yards of Germany or the caviar firms of the Caspian who lose business.

As the tax-take bites deeper – and Scots workers already pay the highest income tax in the UK – it is local businesses, from newsagents to shops to travel agents to car dealers, who will see less trade.

And make no mistake about taxes rising higher still. Nicola Sturgeon’s talk of ‘progressive taxes’ cannot disguise that very many of us are about to have to pay more of our salaries for SNP largesse.

As Graeme Archer says elsewhere on this page, for all the talk of social justice, ‘this manifesto amounts to tax and spend on a scale that would have made those discredited 1970s Labour governments proud’. Ominous indeed and the alarms are already sounding as some very sober, stable, economic experts issue alerts.

We know business confidence is at a low ebb and that unsentimental companies will not opt to invest in Scotland if the regime here is less advantageous than elsewhere in the UK.

How too are we supposed to attract the bright new blood we are crying out for when they could enjoy more of the fruits of their labours if they stay south of the Border? But the SNP brooks no criticism. Anyone who dares to suggest their plans are anything less than flawless is an implacable enemy making baseless and politically motivated assaults. And this new programme is not the radical agenda of some party newly arrived in government.

The SNP has had fully ten years in charge with little to show for it all. Fortunes have been squandered on hare-brained vanity projects.

While parts of the SNP plans unveiled by Miss Sturgeon look laudable – Frank’s Law to help those with early-onset degenerative diseases, and a Mail-inspired bottle deposit scheme to tackle the plastic blight, for example – others look like the spin doctors have been scrawling on the back on envelopes again.

The transport revolution to forcibly convert us to electric cars by 2032 looks less credible with every passing hour.

And schemes to sweep ‘dirty cars’ out of our cities have more than a whiff of revenuegeneration at their heart.

So the Nationalists will press on with a ruinous tax-and-spend agenda oblivious to the fact that the economy is in a parlous state and that business needs help and not an avaricious SNP circling.