AS the legion of Conservative leadership wannabes appear from under the shadow of their post-truth Colossus, the promises of tax cuts for payers of income and corporate tax are fluttering down on us.
In the same week our Scottish Government published its consultation on the Land Reform Bill 2022. The Bill inter alia seeks to include a public interest test in the sale of large-scale rural land holdings as Scotland continues its journey of land reform, whose pace makes manana sound hastily indecent.
Your readers may yet wonder what the coincidence is between these two events.
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It’s quite simple. In the face of Brexit, the cost-of living-crisis, higher interest rates and soaring energy costs, both governments, whether in expectation or the real thing, indulge in the most pathetic fiction.
The Unionists offer illusionary pittances to the Haves and ignore the Have-nots, while the Scottish Government takes us down a path the end of which not one of us living today will reach if the big estates can only be broken up if they come up for sale and fail a public interest test. Where is the financial help for our people now?
Can the Scottish Government, its special advisors and the Land Commission not get it that land reform isn’t really about the democratisation of land ownership if what is proposed can’t be achieved to any significant extent until we are all dead?
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Can they not see that the most effective and quickest way to increase land ownership is to make ownership of land a liability as well as an asset and impose a model of Annual Ground Rent (AGR) on all public and private land? This will force owners to use it productively to pay the AGR charge or give it away.
The nadir of Unionism which we are now enjoying is surely the time for our Scottish Government to act swiftly. Section 80I of the Scotland Act allows it to raise an AGR on all land in Scotland without the consent of the UK Government. There is no reserved power in the same Act which prevents the Scottish Government from introducing a Universal Citizens Income of at least £200 per week now.
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Mitigation of the worst effects of Westminster has run its course. Scottish ministers must now transform lives using these existing powers, otherwise so many of us will soon experience hardship few have endured before. We can’t wait for independence.
Instead of consulting on extending ownership of land on the never-never, our Scottish Government must introduce AGR now. By charging AGR, the Scottish Government can raise so much more public funding than all existing Scottish taxes and income tax on earned income so that everyone in Scotland has money in their pockets to live through the worst that Westminster throws at us while we walk briskly homeward to independence.
Graeme McCormick
Arden, by Loch Lomond
ALL the Tory leadership candidates who were in the Cabinet and voted for tax hikes only a few weeks ago are now saying they want to cut taxes. Do not believe them – the only taxes they will cut will be for the corporations and the bankers.
They claim now to have all the answers – what have they been doing for the last few years?
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Any candidate who was in Johnson’s cabinet was an enabler and allowed him to get away with things no other person would get away with and keep their job.
Andrea Jenkyns should have been fired immediately – it is what would have happened to any public servant, and indeed to anyone in a public-facing job. Her pathetic excuses just won’t wash.
Winifred McCartney
Paisley
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