New Budget: Same as the Old One
by Raphie de Santos 10-02-2011
The SNP’s approved budget which was passed by buying off the Conservatives and the LibDems so that they could gloat over the concessions won for Scotland was virtually the same as the original one proposed by the SNP last year. That is a massive austerity attack on the Scottish people.
The total cut of £1.3 billion to the Scottish budget is broken down into a £900 million cut in day to day spending and £400 million cut in capital spending (investment in education, communities, skills, business, innovation the home office and Justice). The cut in capital spending is much larger than the rest of the UK because of the SNP delaying capital spending cuts from this financial year to next. Adjusted for inflation the cuts are 8.4% of the main departments’ budgets. With further additional cuts of this size coming for each of the following three years after 2011/2012 amounting to a total real cut of 33.5% of Scottish public spending.
The increased spending announced yesterday is a maximum of £44 million or no more than 0.1% of the total budget and is partially aimed at private housing and private industry. There are much more efficient ways of using this money to directly create jobs and the badly needed social housing.
The cuts over four years to local authorities will be 30% in real terms. We can see the immediate effects with the City of Edinburgh likely to make £32 million of cuts in two years with 1200 compulsory redundancies.
Labour may have overseen the mess with their loose regulation of the financial sector and their encouragement of casino capitalism – the £500 billion debt that was run up over the last three years is down to bailing out the banks, subsidising distressed industries and the economy, the sharp fall in tax receipts and increased welfare benefits as millions were made unemployed and the propping up of a weak economy.
The coalition aims to make the less well off in society pay for this massive bailout by imposing massive cuts administered by the SNP and tax rises.
The SNP have frozen council tax for four years to curry favour with the better off. This has cost local authorities £240 million over the last four years.
While we need complete independence with full fiscal autonomy where we can control all our resources from banks to oil and redistribute wealth there are steps that can be taken in the short-term under devolution.
A local progressive income tax to replace the hated council tax would raise £1.6 billion extra a year and protect Scotland from the cuts for two years. This is a tax that we should be demanding be implemented by whoever forms the new Scottish government after the 2011 Holyrood elections. It is step in the direction of the just type of society we need that puts people before the profits of the banks and their bankers’ bonuses.