Readers’ Letters: St Andrew’s Day bank holiday is still not widely recognised

My intention was to make it a national holiday when all the people of Scotland would have the opportunity to celebrate our togetherness, whatever our political or other beliefs.

Unfortunately, the holiday is not widely recognised. Not even the banks are obliged to give their employees the day off and only three out of Scotland’s 32 local authorities have a holiday on or around 30 November.

Scotland remains one of the few countries in the world which does not have a national holiday and we are near the bottom of the league in terms of the number of holidays our workers get. A few days ago even Trumpland celebrated a well established national holiday on Thanksgiving Day

Our governments, our local authorities, our trade unions and our business community should be demanding more united action in this respect. Surely Scotland should have at least one special day in the year when we can all celebrate our patron, our national identity, our cultural diversity and our membership of the international community.

Dennis Canavan, Bannockburn, Stirling

Vote of censure

On Wednesday we witnessed the leak of details of the UK Budget. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) published on its official website the documents describing a number of measures, including £26 billion-worth of tax rises, ahead of Rachel Reeves’ address in the Commons.

Despite the OBR claim it was just a technical error, the leak seems to have been well-staged. I’d rather consider it to be the vote of censure and dissatisfaction on the part of the public officials with a Labour government that has accomplished almost none of its election pledges and made the situation in the country even worse.

Brian Dornan, Bangor, Co Down

Child poverty

I am astonished and ashamed to hear so many derogatory comments from opposition MPs and members of the public regarding the scrapping of the two-child cap on benefits.

Rachel Reeves told the House of Commons that removal of the cap will lift 450,000 children out of poverty – begging the question, why oh why has it taken a Labour government 18 months in power to abolish this draconian policy? A country with an ageing population needs to be encouraging families, not putting barriers up.

Ms Reeves told the House “no child should be penalised because of the family they are born into or the circumstance they find themselves in”. Yet if Labour’s commitment to tackling child poverty is serious, why didn’t Ms Reeves take the opportunity to introduce a ‘Child Payment’ across the country, along the lines of the ‘Scottish Child Payment’?

In Scotland this has been a real game-changer, tackling poverty at source with tangible benefits for families and communities. One recent estimate from the London School of Economics predicted that a UK-wide ‘Child Payment’ would lift 700,000 children out of poverty overnight. So what are your waiting on, Ms Reeves?

Catriona C Clark, Banknock, Falkirk

Fiscal drag

The concept of “fiscal drag” may seem dry and academic, but it has real-world consequences for people on stretched budgets. By imposing what is essentially a fixed-rate levy at the same rate on all basic rate (and all higher rate) taxpayers, it is also one of the most regressive taxes imaginable. English basic rate taxpayers will essentially be paying a fixed-rate levy of £50 each in year one of the freeze, £100 in year two and £150 in year three.

Just how unfair this is can be seen by working out by how much the basic rate would have to increase by in order to pay that extra £150 in income tax, if we assumed that the tax allowance did in fact increase by 2 per cent each year (so without any fiscal drag). The rate for an English taxpayer earning £20,000 would have to increase from 20 per cent to 22.31 per cent, whereas the rate for a taxpayer earning £40,000 would only have to increase to 20.49 per cent. So the less you earn, the more your effective rate of tax goes up: this is deeply, deeply regressive.

The last fixed-rate levy irrespective of income that a government tried to impose was the poll tax. That didn’t end well. One therefore wonders how Scottish Labour expects voters to endorse a party at next year’s electios embracing an approach to tax that, until now, has been the exclusive purview of the ultra-conservative right.

Thomas Roberts, Edinburgh

Cheap renewables

I write in response to the comments made on the cost of renewables by Ian Moir (Letters, 26 November). According to a new report, Power Shift, by Greenpeace UK and international strategy firm Stonehaven, renewables are now the cheapest way to generate electricity. The reason why we are paying such high prices for our energy in the UK is because electricity prices here are pegged to the volatile and extremely high price of gas, set by the big gas companies. While we are struggling to pay our bills, those gas companies are raking in massive profits. Gas only generates 30 per cent of our electricity, yet dictates the price for it 85 per cent of the time.

We should be urging the government to decouple the price of electricity from gas, and allow families and businesses to benefit from clean renewable energy, and lower bills.

Sally Romilly, Newport-on-Tay, Fife

‘Taxed to death’

The oil and gas sector has warned it will be “taxed to death within five years” (your report, 27 November). Chancellor Rachel Reeves said that the Energy Profits Levy will remain in place until 2030. Does she from her Green Ivory Tower not realise the everyday things which are made from fossil fuels?

Will Labour and Green politicians and those from the Green brigade shun everything that is derived from fossil fuels? Lipstick, deodorants, cosmetics, nail polish, perfume, toothpaste, soap, sanitary products, MRI machines, pacemakers, other medical equipment, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, anaesthetics, cars, electrical goods, insecticides, safety helmets, contact lenses, heart valves, surgeons’ scrubs, lubricating oil, food preservatives, sports equipment and of course heat pumps, EVs, solar panels and wind turbines. It is to be hoped that they would avoid going to CO2 intensive sporting and music events and avoid air travel and restrict their meat intake. Now that could make a real difference and reduce the UK share of global emissions from 1 per cent to net zero, provided they persuade the other 69 million people in the UK to agree. The other 8.2 billion people in the world may take a little longer.

Clark Cross, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Road ahead

Amidst the furore over the new EV mileage tax, I am rather surprised that the Government has failed to consider another less problematic option than mileage estimates, MoT station checks etc.

Why not scrap the fuel-duty system entirely and revise the present tax levied by DVLA, such that all vehicles are taxed according to weight and size.

It is the vast increases in size and weight of both private and commercial vehicles that is destroying our roads, additional to which is the congestion caused in our towns and cities, and the dangers of massive HGVs driving on rural roads and through villages.

The money would be fairly raised and go a long way towards increasingly essential road improvements as well as compensating for the removal of fuel duty and avoiding the costs of overseeing EV tax compliance.

Derek Farmer, Anstruther, Fife

Manifesto pledges

Earlier this month, under pressure from MSPs, John Swinney said: “I don’t think what we have done in this parliament is out of kilter with what we said in our 2021 manifesto.”

In the manifesto to which he referred the SNP said unequivocally that they would freeze income tax.

What they did, in fact, was increase the rate in 2023-24 and again in 2024-25. What the First Minister told MSPs was, simply, not true.

Are we beginning to see the arrogant “I’m above scrutiny” attitude of one of his predecessors in office?

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh

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