TRAVELLING THROUGH the blue skied sunny hills of Shropshire, on my way to pay some more tax to our masters, the Scot within me has prayed for dreich weather and the Lord has sent a bounty. Ross Greed has gone head-to-head with his nemesis, Malcolm Orrful. No sooner does someone have a yacht when someone else wants a yacht tax – but it did not take long for the other party leaders to chip in, at our expense.
The Four Yorkshiremen of Holyrood have galloped down from Arthur’s Seat with green ink and green eyes to display their trappings of honest poverty. A clapped out rusty Astra, a famished chihuahua, wallpaper made of old Herald pages and auld galoshes resoled with a piece from the porridge drawer.
It’s too much isn’t it? That £114,297 plus pension and expenses for a being a minister without experience? That’s more than a GP or a solicitor on legal aid. More than three times a staff nurse who must go without the decadent luxury of a ministerial chauffeur-driven limousine. It’s a bit much that those who have earned and created wealth are treated with derision by those who work so hard to destroy wealth creation.
I have no interest in how much wealth people have, because it simply isn’t mine. That should not be such an outrageous thing to say. I do have an interest in skills because I feel our government ministers need to be skilled. It is not enough to simply deflect criticism and continue to run the civil service on autopilot for 20 years simply because the vast majority of new SNP and Green candidates are political professionals… that is to say… chancers.
I have not met Malcolm Offord. I don’t need to. The man has run a business and employed people and faced risks and braved highs and lows. That’s enough. Had he been a headteacher, a civil engineer, or an industrial chemist I’d respect him just the same. What is his real skill? He has risk adjusted in his daily work.
The parkin just hit the cat-powered fan. Greens don’t take risk; they offload onto others. Most people are far less well off than MSPs but still pay exorbitant taxes that prevent the accumulation of wealth. Without that wealth, there will be no new business. When owners die, many businesses now have no buyers so they die with them. The butcher’s shop goes, the steel fabrication firm goes, the start-up is sold off to VenCap, the wheel stops turning.
Meanwhile the high street is dead, the factory making cable or biscuits shuts down, and the antiques shop near the harbour now sells vapes. It’s a mystery how it all seems to go. The Four Yorkshiremen of Liberal, Labour, Green and Nationalist flavour becry the cost of living crisis but they fail in their poverty gospel to explain what that is. Why are people who work struggling? Why is a family of four a luxury item? Why are people driving ten year old cars? Why is it cold in the house?
Tax.
We have a cost of tax crisis and worse, have a cost of marginal tax crisis. It runs through every joint of the body in Scotland like lupus… you can almost hear the squeaks and aches. Rent is double what it should be because we grow the population but not the homes to house them. Bills are triple what they are in Finland, because energy rules and taxes are hydraulic. Fuel is 70 per cent tax, and that’s after the tax you’ve paid on your income – if you are so decadent to work outside of politics.
Whatever Offord has done, he has done something that did not involve taking a tax funded salary to sneer at the success of others. The Green team have done nothing. Less than one third of new Nats on parade have done anything. That’s honestly a poor show.
Who ever built a new country this way? In truth, this is the path of post-Soviet republics, not western nations. Even there, economics moved them on sharpish. Within a few years Estonia gave the world Skype, while Belarus belched out cheap tractors. I don’t think the Greens are going to give us the next AI platform somehow, though an absence of intelligence does their thinking.
Whether the Reform leader made his money selling stocks or selling oats doesn’t matter so much as he did something useful, employed people, and lucky for him, made a few bob of it. Of course he stands out like a sore thumb, but only on the hands in Holyrood that are otherwise a stranger to work in the real world. The Four Yorkshiremen of Holyrood would have us all licking the road, than let just one of us drive a car along it.
Wither luxury, I’m off to squeeze and strain this Fairtrade teabag for the 3rd time. Needs must!
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Pictured, the Four Yorkshiremen sketch; Tim Brooke Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman from At last the 1948 Show, Rediffusion, 1967.
