Taxonomy

The facts and statements issued by the HMRC are plain and dull: thousands more taxpayers moved to Scotland than left each year in the period after Scottish Income Tax was brought in, an HMRC study has found. Average net migration from within the UK was 4,200 every year from 2017-18 to 2021-22. You can read the study here.

The latest data shows £200 million in additional taxable income was brought into Scotland in 2021-22, increasing economic activity while helping fund public services. More Higher and Top rate taxpayers moved to Scotland than left.

All the right people are raging.

This simple data overturns years of propaganda that’s been amplified by the pliant media, keen to regurgitate a number of very silly propositions. These vary but recurring ones are:

a) the Scottish economy is burdened by lazy lay about sloths who do nothing but be a burden on the state
b) this is one of the reasons why we can’t have independence
c) thankfully a handful of very high earners have popped up from down south to do SOME REALLY IMPORTANT JOBS and get paid loads for it, saving us from ourselves
d) any attempt to vary taxation, even in the most vaguely progressive way will result in these great people fleeing to the safety of the Sunak regime, where everything is going well, and rich people are rightly lauded for their wealth (and charitable works).

There’s a few people who have had a go over the years of denouncing the Scottish Government for any changes in the tax bands – here’s Labour’s Ian Murray …

But at Bella we have our favourite of the genre has always been the shrieks of disdain by Merryn Somerset Webb, (editor of MoneyWeek, contributor to the Sunday Post (Jings!), the FT, Saga and the Spectator) and staunch defender of the Union. Here she is in the FT arguing “Scottish independence: Aren’t you glad the No vote won? If you want to keep your finances intact, don’t move north of the border.”

The best example of Webb’s style was the infamous “Nicola Sturgeon Stole My Skiing Holiday” back in 2017.

This recurring panic kicked off again back in 2023 when the much heralded Income Tax rise (the creation of a new income tax rate at £75,000-£125,000) brought the shrieks of despair and denouncement. As we said back then the meltdown was continued across all of the Unionist commentariat. Andrew Neil claimed that people earning £75k or more were not in fact ‘rich’ at all.

Others predicted a ‘brain drain’.

Rishi Sunak demanded an explanation.

The Daily Record’s Political Editor Paul Hutcheon said: “Shona Robison’s Budget was the most disastrous in the history of devolution.” Others were less positive. Euan McColm said the “SNP had run out of ideas“.

There’s a couple of key arguments tied in to the outrage that tax changes evoke. The first is a sort of ‘how dare you be different’ rage at any discernible change north and south of the border. The second is the one based on the core idea of low-tax economies, that money trickles down from the rich to be liberally sprinkled on the lowly, and that any deviation from this orthodoxy will ruin everything.

The last thing to remember when the howling starts is that Scotland is a playground for the very wealthy, the landed aristocracy and their adjacent cultures of hunting, fishing and shooting. Edinburgh, Perthshire and the Highlands is littered with their houses and play-palaces and much of the Scottish economy is geared around their interests. The idea of a Nationalist Government issuing tax variations is quite simply appalling …