Budget puts the SNP stamp on its bread-and-butter tax regime - Sue Webber
As few of us post letters these days, the annual shock of buying a book of stamps is as much a Christmas tradition as the tree and tinsel. Around the country post offices resonated to the sound of customers wailing “87p for a second class stamp?”
But lower-paid working people need worry no more, the SNP has come to your aid. In a gesture of heart-warming generosity, among the other predictably cynical pre-election bribes in finance secretary Shona Robison’s budget statement on Tuesday was a little-noticed measure to help cover the cost of sending Christmas cards.
Of course she didn’t express it as such, but that’s what it amounted to, because her new increased thresholds for the basic and intermediate income tax bands will be worth a princely £32 a year, the equivalent of three books of 12 second class stamps. Well what else are you going to do with a tax break worth 61p a week?
Even a single bread roll in our local shop costs 45p, the same amount as someone on the median income will benefit a week, compared to an English colleague on the same salary. Somehow I can’t see SNP election literature boasting that thanks to their tax policies, the average worker is an unbuttered roll a week better off.
Move up the earnings scale and the SNP’s largesse quickly peters out, and people on £50,000 a year must stump up a couple of quid under £1500 more than if they lived in England.
This is what lies at the heart of the SNP’s claim that more people pay less income tax in Scotland than they do in England, as if a few pence a week will make a blind bit of difference to the cost of living for the low paid, while even modest earners are hammered.
Had the Scottish Conservative plan been followed, workers would have benefitted on average by up to a much more meaningful £718 per year, but of course we knew that was never in the Nationalists’ thinking.
As predicted, SNP spending is built on an ever higher welfare bill, with the child payment increasing to £40 a week for babies under one. It’s true that someone on a low income with a new baby will notice that rise more than they’ll feel any benefit from lower income tax, but with existing benefits it adds to a culture of dependency while those on modest incomes work their socks off to earn the money to generate the taxes for the SNP to give away.
To borrow Shona Robison’s words, the brutal truth is that 45 per cent of Scots are set to pay far more income tax because they live in Scotland and have a Government that is led by the SNP.
In a further disincentive, the SNP was only too happy to go along with the Greens’ demand for a so-called “mansion tax,” with higher council tax bands for properties worth over £1 million, aping Labour’s assault on homes valued at more than £2 million.
In Edinburgh it’s estimated there are over 5000 homes worth more than a million, but before the council gets excited about a windfall, the extra will no doubt be clawed back by the Scottish Government and blown on a ferry that doesn’t sail or some other pet project.
So much for aspiration.