The detrimental impacts of the Scottish Government’s council tax freeze have been clear since the policy was announced last October – without the prior knowledge of civil servants or council leaders.
17 years after the SNP pledged to scrap the ‘unfair council tax’, the situation is objectively perplexing. Elected local authorities have now been deprived of the right to raise revenue to fund crumbling services by a Scottish Government that protests when they are denied that very right by Westminster.
Too timid to ask wealthier Scots to pay more, the Scottish Government has instead granted them a concession that further erodes the capacity of the local state. While Scottish Government ministers moonlight as social democrats, their policy has locked a fundamentally reactionary model in place and detrimentally impacted working-class Scots. Indeed, even the government’s website admits that Scotland’s council tax rate is higher for lower-value properties and lower for higher-value properties.