Too little, too late – how the SNP reacts after its blunders
By Graham Grant
THAT distinctive sound you heard when Derek Mackay vowed to save a tyre factory last week was the slamming shut of a stable door.
The other unmistakable sound was the thunder of horses’ hooves – and the Finance Secretary had to strain to make himself heard above the clatter.
More than 800 jobs are at stake after Michelin announced the closure of its Dundee plant, with its entire workforce informed they will be out of work in 18 months.
The obligatory ‘action group’ has been formed and met for the first time yesterday in a bid to salvage the factory, and retain as many of the staff as possible.
Important work, and Mr Mackay has hinted at the kind of package he might have in mind when he said business rates relief could form part of the survival plan.
As we revealed on Saturday, however, the factory has seen its business rates soar by £300,000 as a result of the SNP’s punitive taxation policy – a rise of nearly 40 per cent.
In this context, rates relief appears a little less magnanimous – something of a sticking-plaster for a gaping head wound – and it’s a wound for which Mr Mackay’s government is responsible.
The minister’s spokesman was duly deployed to berate the Tories for condemning the rates hike, arguing that ‘if the Tories actually knew anything about this company they would know that the sole reason for their business rates increase was the multi-million pound expansion of the plant in 2016’.
As a defence, this rather gave the game away: essentially, any business which has the temerity to expand in the SNP’s high-tax Scotland can expect a rates bombshell.
Mr Mackay’s spin-doctor also counselled the Tories that they ‘should spend less time playing politics with people’s jobs’ – though the spokesman’s statement was in itself a political attack, showing that there’s always time for some tribalism, however many jobs are at risk.
The idea of selective rates relief is also likely to prove highly contentious for those smaller firms which are in trouble, perhaps even on the brink of collapse, but are still having to pay their rates in full.
Having engineered the conditions for commercial failure, the SNP is now busily mopping up another mess at least partly of its own creation.
It’s true that taxpayer subsidy has been channelled into Michelin through the top-heavy jobs quango Scottish Enterprise – itself a haven for fat cats on mega-salaries.
But perhaps that level of subsidy wouldn’t be required if Scotland were to re-cast itself as a business-friendly nation, and drop its dogmatic hostility to entrepreneurialism.
This is a government that tramples aspiration to death wherever it materialises, and penalises hard work by stubbornly refusing to pass on the increase in the threshold for higher-rate taxpayers south of the Border to Scots, on supposedly ‘progressive’ grounds.
The Nationalists railed for so many years against their subjugation to malign Whitehall overlords constraining their ability to govern – but now that they have the financial ‘levers’ they craved, they’re using them to force more firms to the wall.
It emerged last week that Scottish business owners had paid over £43million more in rates than their English rivals, because SNP ministers refuse to scrap a controversial ‘supertax’.
The large business supplement forces firms in Scotland to pay double that of their counterparts in England and Wales, and the Scottish Retail Consortium argues – rightly – that this puts Scotland at a competitive disadvantage to the rest of the UK.
Figures published by the Scottish Government show that firms have paid an additional £43.6million since April 2016, when the SNP doubled the large business supplement, which affects one in eight commercial properties. Ministers hiked this from 1.3p in the pound to 2.6p.
Meanwhile, more than 100 shops closed in the first half of this year as eye-watering business rate hikes combined with changing consumer habits hit the high streets hard – with shoe shops, opticians and banks among the worst-affected.
Doubtless high street action groups will be convened as more shops close their doors for the last time – but without a dramatic shift in policy and an overhaul of the hugely destructive rates system, their work will be in vain.
The threat to the Michelin factory, a major Dundee employer for more than 40 years, demonstrates again the modus operandi of the SNP in government – taking action when it’s too late.
Another practitioner of ‘stable door’ government is Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf, who assures us that henceforth violent offenders will be barred from taking part in the Home Detention Curfew (HDC) scheme, after the murder of a young father by a thug who had been freed early on a tag.
For many years, we’d been told criminals with a history of violence weren’t eligible for HDC, but this was clearly a lie, and now we’re expected to see Mr Yousaf as a crusading reformer and fearless custodian of public safety.
Yet his government presided over the use of HDCs to empty prisons with a reckless disregard for the deadly consequences, only launching reviews and promising action when a man was brutally murdered.
Systemic failure was ignored, the public were conned; a family was robbed of a devoted father; and watchdogs were summoned to get to the bottom of what on earth could have gone wrong.
This well-choreographed charade is another example of the sticking-plaster approach which dresses up tardy action as a crackdown, a shake-up, a bold and visionary blueprint for radical change…
A government that has undermined victims’ rights for more than a decade can’t be trusted to oversee alterations to a practice that has made a mockery of the sentences handed down by the courts — a practice that should be scrapped in its entirety.
With both Michelin and HDC, the government either was aware – or should have been aware – that its own policies were proving counterproductive and indeed, in the case of HDC, downright dangerous.
Politics is theoretically about solving people’s problems, even though in practice it frequently adds to them, and sometimes those problems can only be solved when it’s too late.
But it should also be a pre-emptive business, and the most unforgivable errors are those that are perpetrated by government itself – which then attempts to solve them and even, in Mr Yousaf’s case, try and claim credit for having the nous and courage to do so.
In this sense, the SNP’s bid to convince us that the economy would be safe in its hands in the event of independence through the work of its ‘growth commission’ – resulting in a report it now seems the party is all too keen to forget – should also be seen as the closing of yet another stable door.
Most of us know that the constitutional upheaval the Nationalists are constantly plotting would be ruinous to countless livelihoods.
And given the hash he has made of using the ‘levers’ he already has, the last thing the economy needs is for Mr Mackay to be handed control of even more of them.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on November 13, 2018.
