SNP sums

Again the old canard that Scotland per head pays more in tax than the rest of the UK has been resurrected by Nicola Sturgeon To which tax does she refer?

A man earning £20,000 in Penge will pay the same tax as one earning £20,000 in Peebles.

Alex Salmond was worried we were a nation of drunks so perhaps it is our fondness for VAT-attracting wine that is the difference. It cannot be corporation tax because individuals do not pay that.

No, it is there on the Scottish Government (archived) webpage. Taxes from North Sea oil were calculated on a geographic basis, presumably giving a proportionately larger share of the pot for a proportionately smaller population.

And then somehow dividing this mythical amount by the population, the number of taxpayers or some other figure (it doesn’t say) and blithely ignoring the fact that individual taxpayers do not pay North Sea oil taxes.

You couldn’t make this nonsense up. At best it is toxic misinformation from the SNP attempting to pretend we are badly done to; at worst it is yet another example that the SNP cannot do its “sums”.

C G Barlow

Clerwood Park

Edinburgh