Meeting of the Parliament 25 February 2026 [Draft]
I wish the cabinet secretary well as she prepares to leave the Parliament. I hope that she will not be leaving her successor a note to say that there is no money left. Perhaps she could leave a note that suggests that her successor does not follow suit by raising taxes on ordinary hard-working Scots. [Interruption.] Mr Swinney is already getting wound up.
Tonight, the Conservative Party will be the only party whose MSPs vote against what is a bad SNP budget. We are the only party with the backbone and the conviction to tell the Scottish ministers to go back to the drawing board and draw up a budget that will give a fair deal to Scottish taxpayers, Scottish public services and businesses such as Scotland’s struggling pubs.
Set against the on-going cost of living crisis, the budget will add to many people’s biggest bill—their tax bill. It also increases tax on businesses, with no action to stop the looming and catastrophic business rates revaluation. The Scottish Conservatives have set out an alternative to the failed left-wing approach that is now shared by all those across the other benches at Holyrood. We would lower bills for hard-working Scottish families and businesses and, in turn, grow the Scottish economy. We would end the doom loop of ever-higher taxes that pay for the SNP’s ever-ballooning benefits bill.
However, that is not the approach taken by the cabinet secretary or John Swinney’s Government. Let us use the final budget debate in the current session of Parliament to look in some detail at some of the central failures in the budget. The minister thought that she was being clever when she unveiled the centrepiece of John Swinney’s pre-election budget—a £32-a-year income tax cut. That was a fiscal stunt that was derided by analysts and commentators as the lowest tax cut in history—a pound-shop policy from a pound-shop Government.
Behind the smoke and mirrors lies a far harsher reality for many Scottish households. By freezing upper-rate thresholds, the Government continues to push more average and middle-income earners into higher rates of tax. By the end of the decade, the SNP Government’s tax regime will look like the modern-day equivalent of state-sponsored highway robbery, but at least Dick Turpin had the sense to wear a mask.
Shona Robison says that she likes facts, so let me give her some real tax facts, not the phony SNP spin that she relies on. In 2016-17, only 12 per cent of workers in Scotland were paying the higher rate of tax or above. By the end of the current decade, that will have risen to a staggering 40 per cent. This year alone, 66,000 Scots have been dragged into the higher rate tax band under the SNP. Before the minister repeats her tired old trope about those with the broadest shoulders, let us ask ourselves who those people really are. They include nurses, teachers, car mechanics, council administrators, heavy goods vehicle drivers and social workers. They are all now classed as high earners in the SNP’s Scotland.