Hansard

I rise to support Andy Wightman’s amendment and I make it clear that the Scottish Labour Party will be voting for the statutory instrument. As Andy Wightman said, it is a modest movement, but it is nevertheless welcome. That is the view that local authority leaders across Scotland take; any additional funding would be better than none.

A couple of key points need to be made. First, if the council tax was so unfair in 2007—John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon made it clear that it was unfair and Nicola Sturgeon went further and said that tinkering with the bands was not good enough and that the council tax had to go—how is it suddenly fair today? How could Derek Mackay possibly claim that?

Secondly, on the subject of continuing the discussion, the fact is that the Scottish Government set up a commission that everyone in here, apart from the Tories, signed up to. The one broad agreement that we reached was that the council tax was past its sell-by date and had to go. How many more discussions does Derek Mackay want to have before he makes the right decision and gets rid of the unfair council tax? He talks about bringing forward his budget. The fact is that £100 million will be raised through the statutory instrument, which is why we will support it. However, Derek Mackay intends to take £100 million out of the local government grant in order to fund a national priority. He did not have the guts to be honest with the people of Scotland and say that we will fund education directly by increasing taxes. He is going to hide behind local government.

That is unlike the Labour Party, because we were quite clear that we would fund schools with £100 million by increasing the top rate of taxation. The difference is that we were honest with the voters. I say to Derek Mackay that we will support the statutory instrument because we recognise that it is important that the money goes into local government. It is a step in the right direction, but we have to get rid of the SNP council tax and bring in something that will put local government on a fair financial footing.