THE editors of the right-wing tabloids have been working themselves up into a raging frenzy these past few days. According to the headlines, Scotland is facing a “Christmas Nightmare”. Our country has been turned into a “Winter Plunderland”. Our middle classes are now staring into the abyss of a lifetime of penury.

All because 30 per cent of the population, who are better off than most, will pay a little bit extra. The mean-spirited, self-centred, tight-fisted, I’m-alright-Jack culture they glorify makes Ebenezer Scrooge look like a happy-go-lucky philanthropist.

To hell with the poor, the frail, the disabled. Our pennies are too precious to be used to keep our emergency services, our hospitals, our schools, our nursing homes, our community centres and our libraries functioning. The society the right wing is striving to create would be grim, callous, heartless and devoid of basic humanity. We live in a democracy and people are entitled to vote for that ugly vision of the future if that’s what rocks their boat. I suspect that most of us want to head out in a different direction. But we will need to deal with lots of misinformation and scaremongering along the way.

“How much will this Budget cost a primary school teacher on £35,000?” demanded one Tory MSP last week in Holyrood. I’m no economist but I think I can help him out with that one. The answer to his question: £20 a year. Or 38p a week, which would otherwise allow the notional primary school teacher to buy a tenth of a pint of beer or a sixth of a cup of cappuccino.

But then, as journalist Kenny Farquharson – not known as a radical left winger nor even as a supporter of the Scottish Government – pointed out in response to one such claim on social media, they will also pay nothing for prescriptions, their parents will get free personal care and their children will get free tuition.

The Tories and their press cheerleaders are now busy painting a doomsday scenario for the Scottish economy with the middle classes fleeing Scotland to escape financial ruin. It really is surreal. The fantasy world of the free market right wing makes Star Wars: The Last Jedi look like a factual documentary.

If their ideas had any grounding in reality, the UK right now would be overrun by Scandinavians. Finnish emigrants would be departing en masse on the ferry between Helsinki and Talinn, less than half the distance between Glasgow and Belfast. There would be permanent queues stretched along the Danish-German border.

I heard the respected psephologist John Curtice on the radio the other morning insisting that the culture in Scotland is radically different to that of Scandinavia. This is a man who eats, sleeps and breathes opinion polls, so he can produce the figures to show that public attitudes here towards taxation are more conservative than in the Nordic countries over the sea.

But figures only paint a limited, partial picture. For a start, they don’t gauge strength of feeling. Pollsters don’t spend a lot of time explaining the ins and outs and the pros and cons of an argument. As a result, statistics on public attitudes towards taxation are always contradictory. People’s knee-jerk reaction is that they don’t like to pay more in taxes. But they do like to protect and improve public services. So, they answer no to higher taxes and no to reduced public spending.

More fundamentally, the arguments for higher taxation to fund better public services have been absent from mainstream politics in Scotland and the UK until very recently.

IN power at Holyrood, the Labour-LibDem coalition never used its limited powers to vary income tax by up to three pence in the pound. Indeed, Labour fiercely attacked the SNP during the first Holyrood election in 1999 for promising a penny increase in income tax for public services.

Richard Leonard has a serious credibility problem when he condemns the SNP for “failing to deliver radical change” by failing to use its tax powers “to the maximum”. Labour in power failed to even use its tax powers to the minimum. Leonard may be genuine in his radicalism, but we may never know that for sure, because there is no evidence that suggests he will achieve the power to put that to the test. And even if he did, there is even less evidence that his own MSPs would support him. In the meantime, most people will understandably suspect that his bombast is yet another case of an opposition politician indulging in the luxury of grandstanding.

As it happens, I’m also sympathetic to a much more radical approach to taxation. But then, like Richard Leonard, I don’t have the responsibilities of power. I don’t face a daily torrent of negativity and downright hostility from most of the Scottish press. I don’t have to worry about bringing the wider public along with me on my journey.

I do hope, however, that even the rather tentative income tax increases announced by Derek Mackay – the very first by a Holyrood government – have at least breached the dam, and broken what was, until recently, a cross-party consensus that only those with a political death wish would raise income tax.

ONE other major limitation of opinion polls is that they can breed inertia. Politicians have a responsibility to challenge and change political attitudes as well as reflect it. In the 1980s, 75 per cent of the UK public supported the death penalty. In 2015, that figure fell, for the first time, below 50 per cent. Still scarily high in my opinion, but the trend is clear.

Who could have imagined at the turn of the millennium – when Scotland’s biggest-selling newspaper the Daily Record led a vitriolic campaign to retain the homophobic Section 2A clause – that gay marriage would be legalised and accepted by the Scottish public.

Yes, we will always have strident right-wing voices screaming blue murder whenever any government proposes an income tax increase. These are the same voices, incidentally, that call for us to

spend countless billions upgrading Trident, and support allocating limitless budgets to fight endless futile wars thousands of miles distant. How we’re supposed to pay for that, they never explain. They need to be faced down, rather than pandered to. Had the SNP and Labour both been making the case since the start of the 21st century for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution, we would be in a different place today. Attitudes in Scotland and Scandinavia would be no different.

At long last, and not before time, we’ve at least made a start. So let’s drive that agenda forward in the future, with a more radical edge, and leave the Tories once again on the wrong side of history – the place they know best.