SNP STILL DANCING TO TUNE OF LUNATIC FRINGE
THE SNP’s Budget announcement yesterday was a chance for the Nationalists to listen to the host of experts who have warned about the impact of tax rises. It was the Finance Secretary’s opportunity to correct the wrongs he previously committed when initially outlining Scotland’s Budget for 2018-19.
Derek Mackay could even have sent out a message to the rest of the world that Scotland is a place to do business, a place that welcomes investment and a place where hard work is rewarded.
Instead of listening to organisations such as the Scottish Chambers of Commerce and the Scottish Retail Consortium, or some of the country’s most successful businessmen such as Sir Tom Hunter, the SNP Government took its advice from elsewhere.
It shunned the wisdom of the experts and those who know what they’re talking about, and instead took counsel from Patrick Harvie and his band of ultra Left-wing extremists in the Green Party.
Their Budget deal now seals the fate of 1.1million Scots who will pay higher taxes than if they lived in other parts of the UK. That means the country’s economic outlook isn’t being shaped and dictated by those in the know but the most naïve and radical elements of Scottish political life.
It’s a move that rubs salt in the wounds of hundreds of thousands of workers across Scotland.
In order to appease the Scottish Greens, Mr Mackay did two things.
Miraculously for a government that never stops pleading poverty, he found £115million down the back of the couch in a move highly reminiscent of last year’s Budget negotiations.
And he changed the level at which workers start paying the higher rate. In the SNP’s initial plan, that higher rate threshold would kick in at £44,273. But now the Greens have imparted their wisdom, that level has been brought down to £43,430.
Those workers within that limit will now have to cough up an extra £169 in income tax each year, and in all nearly 400,000 people will have to pay more.
Not only is this bad for workers and bad for the economy, it’s a direct breach of repeated SNP promises. In recent years, party chiefs have said on no fewer than 53 occasions that the basic rate should not be increased. It was even in both the 2016 and 2017 manifestos.
In February 2016, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon told MSPs: ‘I have been very clear that the Government will not increase income tax rates… that would not be the right thing to do.’
Her second-in-command, John Swinney, himself the former finance secretary, was even more explicit, telling Holyrood in the same month: ‘The last thing I am going to do is put up their [teachers and public service workers’] taxes.’
And there was this from his successor, Mr Mackay, last year: ‘I do not think it would be right to increase the basic and higher rates of tax.’
But it’s not just income tax the SNP supposedly didn’t want to increase. Over the past few years we’ve heard repeated demands from the Nationalists to cut corporation tax, reduce air passenger duty, slash business rates and ease off on VAT.
These pledges, made over a number of years and in various environments, show the extent of the SNP’s deception of the people of Scotland.
Before elections, the party could not have been clearer that it thought taxes should be kept low.
But recent decisions show just how seriously the Nationalists take the voters of this country. They have betrayed the people who voted them in to office.
This Budget can be summed up in four words: pay more, get less.
IT’S a Budget that has broken promises to the people of Scotland and nonetheless delivers severe cuts to services across the country. And it didn’t need to be like this because the Westminster block grant is up in real terms compared to the previous year.
That’s according not just to SPICe, the Scottish parliament’s independent information centre, and the highly respected Fraser of Allander Institute, but Mr Mackay himself. He confirmed at the end of last year to the finance committee, albeit through gritted teeth, that the budget was in fact rising.
That undeniable fact puts into context everything the SNP and Labour tell us about austerity.
If the SNP’s tax raid on both people and businesses isn’t depressing enough, what’s perhaps even more worrying is the growth delivered by this Nationalist Government.
The Scottish Fiscal Commission has predicted the economy north of the Border will fail to match UK growth for each of the next five years. In 2018, the SNP-run economy will grow at half the rate of the UK’s as a whole.
And in the next three years, Scotland’s economy is projected to have the worst growth of any major economy in the EU, the G20 or in the OECD.
Failure to match the UK since 2007, and failure to match it until 2022, will mean a growth gap of a staggering £16.5billion in cash terms.
This all brings home the point that less money for the public purse, be it through a smaller tax base or terrible growth, means public services suffer. A poorerperforming economy equates to fewer resources for the NHS, schools, roads and infrastructure.
Having presided over that failure, all the SNP can think to do is recoup some of it from the pockets of hard-working Scots.
If Derek Mackay can’t devise a way to grow the economy, he could at least seek to cut some waste.
More than £130million was spent by the NHS on delayed discharge last year, where patients are physically fit to leave hospital but have nowhere to go – another problem the SNP has made next to no progress on since coming to power.
As a result of dire NHS workforce planning, £170million was splurged on expensive agency and bank workers to fill nursing gaps.
And of course, there was the £180million spent by the SNP on a catastrophic IT system for processing farming payments, which only succeeded in starving rural Scotland of hundreds of millions of pounds.
This Budget was not fit for purpose. It was bad for business, the economy, taxpayers, families and services.
It deserved to be rejected by the Scottish parliament.