27 Aug 2015

Scottish Conservatives’ plans to attract wealthy

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‘Scotland must use its new financial powers to attract wealthy English taxpayers, Ruth Davidson has said. The Scottish Tory leader has championed increasing the number of additional rate taxpayers who live in Scotland in order to increase revenues from income tax. Scotland gets the power to vary income tax uniformly across all bands from next April, followed by complete control over the levy’s bands and rates a couple of years later.

Source: The Scotsman, The Daily Telegraph

Putting out the welcome mat for higher-rate taxpayers makes perfect sense to us. But all the time that Scotland allows itself to be dominated by a political party which is incontrovertibly Nationalist and Socialist in its outlook, it is likely to have an uphill struggle to attract anyone who is either wealthy or English, let alone both.