It promised the earth but Shona Robison’s threadbare Budget delivered nothing of substance. Boosting the NHS and the economy – and wiping out child poverty – were supposedly the central objectives.
Yet when the details were outlined, such as they were, it was more of a damp squib than a Christmas cracker.
The iniquitous cross-Border tax gap remains – despite an increase in the amount that can be earned before the basic rate of income tax applies.
Scots earning more than £30,318 will still be paying more income tax than someone on the same salary in England, while those who earn less than that will be a meagre 50p a week better off.
An opportunity to end this damaging disparity was missed, meaning that more businesses and young professionals will give Scotland a wide berth.
Tens of thousands of people will be dragged into paying higher taxes after the higher, advanced and top-rate thresholds were frozen at their current levels.
Astonishingly, the stratospheric benefits bill is set to soar by £800million, bringing the total ploughed into devolved benefits to nearly £7billion a year.
It makes a mockery of SNP boasts about growing the economy – something that can never be achieved by ramping up handouts.
Yet the additional revenue raised by income tax policies is forecast to be only around £50million in 2025-26.
The gain simply isn’t worth the pain for middle-class Scots who are desperate for some respite from unrelenting SNP tax-grabs.
Adding insult to injury are the eye-watering sums set to be spent on public sector pay hikes – equating to an inflation-busting 9 per cent over three years.
On council tax, there was an appalling fudge, with the Finance Secretary saying only that the SNP government would ‘engage closely’ with local authorities.
She asserted that there was ‘no reason for big increases’ but her failure to continue the freeze is a green light for town halls to hit householders with swingeing hikes of up to 17 per cent.
Ms Robison’s Budget also betrays a monumental misunderstanding of basic economic principles – no surprise from a party that was in league with the Marxist Greens until earlier this year.
Now it has to build bridges with its political opponents to secure approval for its spending plans, and failure to do so could trigger an election.
The stakes are high but the SNP has served up a jumble of reheated pledges and wish-list proposals with zero credibility.
Chief among them is the pledge to eliminate the two-child benefit cap – which is nothing more than the stuff of fantasy. It was framed in the vaguest of terms and depends on Westminster ‘co-operation’.
The Budget documents state that the UK Government ‘should not be the barrier to us [the SNP] successfully offsetting [the cap] in Scotland’.
Many strings are attached to this commitment, which smacks of the SNP getting in early excuses for failing to live up to it – resorting to its time-worn tactic of trying to shift the blame to Westminster.
Why Labour should help to undermine a policy that it supports, however grudgingly, is anyone’s guess – but then this was not a Budget rooted in reality.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said it would cost up to £300million a year to mitigate the impact of the cap, and ‘would likely require cuts to some other areas of spending’ – or tax rises.
It concludes that there is ‘little [in the Budget] by way of concrete proposals or sense of what destination the Scottish Government is aiming for’.
Cuts to cash for housing have been reversed in a humiliating U-turn – but few voters will give the SNP any credit merely for rectifying its own mistakes.
There was only minimal support for hard-pressed publicans, and the business rates relief offered will not be enough to prevent ‘massive’ closures and job losses, according to the Scottish Licensed Trade Association.
Some 2,600 Scottish hospitality businesses will not be eligible for relief, which the sector warns will ‘seriously threaten their ability to support jobs’. In its damning analysis, the Fraser of Allander Institute at the University of Strathclyde warned there was no plan to fully fund the hike in employers’ NationaI Insurance contributions for public sector bodies.
It has been left asking ‘whether any lessons have been learned from going into a new year without fully setting aside budget cover for… known costs’.
After the SNP’s catastrophic result in July’s general election, it’s little wonder that independence isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Budget – but it is a deeply telling omission.
By contrast, growth is cited dozens of times – although the SNP plainly has no idea how to kick-start the moribund economy.
On the NHS, Ms Robison’s promise that by March 2026 no one will wait longer than 12 months for a new outpatient appointment, inpatient treatment or day-case treatment is a retread of a previous commitment made in 2022.
Back then, the SNP government said its waiting time pledge would be in place by September this year, but it didn’t materialise – so why should anyone believe patients won’t be let down again?
This sleight of hand, clumsy as it was, is entirely typical of a party that has long prized shameless spin over tangible delivery.
Earlier this week, an official report by the public spending watchdog found ‘fundamental change’ was needed in the NHS, and it warned some services may have to be cut.
Yet there is nothing in the Budget to indicate that the SNP has anything resembling a reform plan.
Instead it will continue to channel more cash into a cherished institution that has been badly mismanaged by the Nationalists for nearly 20 years.
Proposals for a real-terms cut to alcohol and drug harm prevention funding make no sense, given the SNP’s ‘national mission’ to tackle Scotland’s drug death toll – the highest in Europe.
There is very little that can be said to be remotely ‘progressive’ about this dog’s breakfast of a Budget.
It is a familiar blend of chicanery and intellectual bankruptcy, with grandstanding and costly virtue-signalling thrown in for good measure.
Ms Robison now faces a period of horse-trading and haggling in order to pass the Budget, relying on help from rivals her party has demonised for years.
Surrounded by enemies, the supplicant SNP is determined to rebuild bridges it destroyed long ago for the sake of its own political survival.
The SNP’s disgraceful hotchpotch of recycled pledges and fag-packet policymaking is further proof that it has been in power for far too long.
Any party backing it in its current form would be facilitating a Budget underpinned by nothing more than wishful thinking and hollow rhetoric.
It was presented as an agenda for hope – but the truth is that it is a blueprint for failure that will take Scotland further down the road to economic ruin.