Two billion reasons to axe tartan tax hike

AT a time when families are watching every penny, it takes an astonishing curmudgeon to complain about being handed £2billion.

Yet with that impressive sum accruing to the Scottish Government after the Budget, Nicola Sturgeon has painted herself into just that corner. For the money is, according to her, of the wrong sort.

Echoing unimpressive Finance Secretary Derek Mackay, who can spot the cloud while overlooking the silver lining, Miss Sturgeon declared the Budget ‘a con.’

£1.1billion of the money is in the form of so-called Financial Transactions and has restrictions on what it may be used for.

This, says the First Minister, makes it illusory. So illusory that her SNP used hundreds of millions of pounds of the same FT money in its latest Budget.

It bankrolled help-to-buy schemes and to tackle fuel poverty, initiatives the Nationalists trumpeted. Are they now mere illusions too, Miss Sturgeon?

Dogmatic party politicking means that the SNP cannot bring itself to welcome anything the Conservatives do.

Ian Blackford, leader of the SNP bloc in the Commons – reduced after a disastrous election fought on a pro-EU, proindependence ticket – proved the point.

SNP pig-headedness lumbered Police Scotland and Scottish Fire & Rescue with VAT bills because of the way the unitary emergency services were constituted.

Mr Blackford could have graciously welcomed Mr Hammond’s lifting of the bill but instead proved himself a lesser man by bemoaning the timing and fulminating impotently about a refund of monies paid.

All this is less looking a gift horse in the mouth than trying to hand it back complaining it will require water.

It suits the SNP to pretend it is fighting the effects of Tory austerity, leaving it no choice but to implement the income tax rises the mercenary Greens are demanding as the price of their support for limping Mr Mackay’s next Holyrood Budget home.

Scots were already paying more tax thanks to Mr Mackay not increasing the threshold for the 40p tax rate. On Wednesday, Philip Hammond further reduced the tax burden for workers everywhere else, meaning many Scots are paying £670 in tax more.

That gulf is set to increase further still when Mr Mackay gets to work and we reveal today that Scots already face a double whammy as National Insurance contributions jump £135 as a result of the skewed taxation regime here.

Workers are not fooled by talk of ‘progressive’ taxation and by broken promises about a ‘social compact’ that holds services are better in Scotland.

Families seeing more being taken by a profligate SNP know the gulf between them and neighbours is growing wider. They know it makes Scotland less attractive for business, damages job prospects and the wider economy – and all so the Greens can press on with their class war.

The case for further tartan tax hikes has been torn to shreds by the Chancellor’s £2billion injection.

There is nothing illusory about that money – or about mounting public anger at the manifest unfairness of SNP tax policy.