Meeting of the Parliament 25 November 2025
The Government is asking us to set aside concerns about transparency, legitimacy and competence, and we should not be prepared to do so when such a significant sum of public money is in play.
I have been an MSP for just over four years, but I have been a political journalist since 1996. I have seen my fair share of Scottish National Party incompetence, but this latest fiasco possibly tops it all. Let us explain to the paying public exactly what nationalist ministers are asking us to rush through today under this emergency procedure. In 2020, the SNP Government, backed by the Labour Party, passed legislation to reform business rates. At the time, we said that it would lead to an increased tax burden for businesses, and we were right. However, it turns out that the legislation was even more shoddy than the SNP minister who introduced the bill at the time. That minister was the disgraced Derek Mackay, the same minister who botched the award of the contract for the two ferries.
The bill then fell to Kate Forbes, who completed it in its final stages after Mr Mackay left the Government. The bill was meant to allow SNP ministers to levy business rates on companies that owned unoccupied properties, even if there was a legitimate reason for the property lying empty, such as the building not being fit for purpose or, as is increasingly the case in areas such as Aberdeen, because the loss of jobs in sectors such as oil and gas means that nobody is left to fill the offices and the firms are falling into administration. What ministers did not realise at the time—despite the ever-increasing numbers of civil servants and the army of bureaucrats that support them—was that the legislation was incompetently drafted. It was deficient, like much of what this Government does.