Letter: Change the system

Lorna Gray (Letters, 15 October) suggests that increasing taxation of the super-rich would allay the range of social inequalities in Scotland that concern her.

I am old enough to remember the days when the 7:84 theatre company first took to the road with their titular message of how wealth was divided proportionately amongst the people of Scotland. No doubt the figures may have changed slightly, but despite both Labour and SNP governments being in power in the past ten years, the raw truth is the giant chasm between the rich and the poor in Scotland still remains.

This gaping void will not be filled by taxation on the very rich, because they, unlike the poor, can afford the fees charged by the "tax avoidance industry".

Banging on about the relative influence of capital and labour won't help either, because the real root problem is the much more fundamental one of land monopoly and the hijacking of billions of pounds in publicly created land rental values by a cabal of private vested interests. Far from increasing income tax, we need to reduce or, indeed, replace it altogether with the 100 per cent collection of annual land rental values. Then watch Scotland boom and blossom.

RON GREER

Armoury House

Blair Atholl, Perthshire