The SNP dumped plans for a local income tax during its first Holyrood administration, citing the inability to reach a parliamentary consensus on the issue, but promising to revive it for the current election campaign with a view to legislation in the next parliament. Last week the Telegraph splashed on Alex Salmond's last minute dash to the Court of Session to thwart a freedom of information request from the newspaper regarding official advice on the economic impact of introducing LIT.
Yesterday the Sunday Herald reported on Labour accusations of a 'black hole' in the SNP's local government tax plans, claiming that the Nationalists were unable to say what would happen between the end of the proposed council tax freeze in 2013 and the planned introduction of LIT in 2016.
But today the Scotsman reports that the SNP has abandoned plans to legislate for LIT in the next parliament, meaning that they intend introducing the new tax after the (probable) elections in 2016. The next parliamentary term would be used merely to "build support" for the proposals.
Which effectively means that the SNP now plan to implement LIT from around 2020 at the earliest. But since this was a commitment in their 2007 manifesto, surely if a consensus on the issue was a possibility then something would have emerged by now? If a consensus was possible then why not construct it during the five years of the next parliament and pass the requisite legislation before 2016?
Thus it's probably realistic to say that the SNP has effectively abandoned plans for a local income tax. Of course, there have been numerous opposition claims in the past that the proposals were unworkable, and perhaps the secret advice to ministers contained unpalatable facts in that regard.
All of which merely lends weight to the increasing impression that the next few weeks of the campaign will amount to little more than a de facto presidential election between Alex Salmond and Iain Gray, with policy taking a backseat to a personality contest.
Which of course increasingly seems to be the preferred Nationalist narrative.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
The Local Income Tax is/was symptomatic of the SNP's approach to politics..., i.e. pick on an unpopular policy (Council Tax) attack attack attack, make the policy even more unpopular, get the protest vote lined up, and then pretend you've got an alternative... you don't like Council tax...et voila... le LIT!!!
But the LIT, like abolishing Student debt, abolishing PPP, introducing a Scottish Futures Trust, building schools "brick for brick"...etc. etc. was never thought through (why bother we'll get the protest votes all right, but we'll never get elected...oops!!)...
So no new schools built, no LIT, no aboloition of Student debt or PPP or the Council tax, no SFT....
As for trying to hide the costs of the LIT by spending public money to suppress the information, that's all part of the lax moral standards.....
last bit should read "...all part of the same lax moral standards"
Indeed, Braveheart.
But I suppose the SNP have the excuse that since it's their first term of office then they perhaps didn't realise that while making promises was one thing, delivering on them was another.
Which perhaps helps explains the lack of substantive promises thus far in the campaingn, or at least promises which haven't been, er, 'emulated' by Labour ;0)
Stuart, you're too nice and the same time too dismissive of senior SNP politicians.
They were intelligent and experienced enough to know that a policy has to be thought through properly and supported by as much research a you can, before you put it into practice.
They had no supporting data on the cost of abolishing student debt (they claimed it would be £140million, it turned out to be just under £2billion!!!).
They said PPP would be replaced by a trust.... no such trust has ever been implemented. There is an SFT, but it has no "trust" element, and no real method of financing projects...
That's just two examples... there's more...
THey knew they couldn't deliver, but they harvested the attached votes...
Post a Comment