No Budget talks without tax rise pledge: Greens

Party adamant as SNP aim to get Budget passed

The Greens are refusing to enter formal budget negotiations with the Scottish Government unless ministers consider new tax rises.

The party have an effective veto on the £36 billion package after the Lib Dems walked away from talks over the SNP’s refusal to shelve its independence campaign.

The minority SNP administration needs another party to vote for its Budget, a draft of which is presented to MSPs on Wednesday, or it faces collapse.

It is highly unlikely the Tories, Labour or Lib Dems will back it in next year’s Holyrood vote, leaving the Greens in a strong negotiating position. The price of their support has been named as an overhaul of local taxation, likely to mean rises for Tayside and Fife’s better off.

Finance Secretary Derek Mackay is due to unveil his tax and spending plans for 2019-20 in a statement to MSPs at Holyrood on December 12.

Scottish Greens co-convener Patrick Harvie said: “As MSPs we have been given a clear instruction from our party members that we can only enter formal budget negotiations if there is meaningful progress on local tax reform to make a fairer system that protects services and cuts inequality.”

Mr Harvie said formal talks cannot take place if the government is “not ready to change its position”.

They want reform to “ditch a system of taxation that asks poorer households to pay proportionally more, to adopt a fairer system of land and property taxation, to empower local decisionmaking, and to shift tax from income to wealth where inequalities are greater”.