Meeting of the Parliament 07 January 2026
Not yet, as I am just beginning.
Six interest rate cuts have brought the average cost of a mortgage down by £1,500. The average wage is up by £1,800, as the minimum wage is bolstered. The most recent UK budget took £158 off energy bills, with warm home discounts delivering £300 off bills for the most in-need households. Inflation is falling and wages are rising.
Those are very welcome steps, which will ease the pressure on hard-pressed households across the country, but we know that there is still much more to do, not least on the subject of today’s debate: the pressure that the SNP’s tax regime is putting on ordinary Scots. The majority of Scots pay more tax than they would elsewhere in the UK. I believe that the minister, in some form of wording, just tried to make a counterclaim to that, as have Shona Robison and John Swinney. Those spurious claims to the contrary are demonstrably false. As Professor Mairi Spowage of the Fraser of Allander Institute has pointed out in recent days, the SNP ministers’ claim
“has turned out not to be true”
in the past two financial years.
Let us be clear: those in Scotland who are paying more and more tax each year are not those with the broadest shoulders, as the SNP has tried to claim and as the minister has just claimed again today in the Parliament. The bulk of additional tax revenue does not come from the ultra-rich; rather, it comes from those who earn just over £40,000. Those are nurses, teachers and police officers who work hard in our overstretched public services. They are shop managers, information technology workers and salespeople who work hard in hard-pressed businesses.