“It takes a strong leader to collaborate with others in an effort to bring about real change.” – Germany Kent

(My speech at the 2024 Scottish Labour Spring Conference fringe event on land reform, hosted by REVIVE)

Devolution has meant that Scotland has more responsibility than power. Tax powers as they are have limited scope to effect meaningful change to an unequal society.

Our most powerful devolved tax – income tax – has proven extremely hard to use and eats a lot of political capital – chiefly as it’s too easy for the very rich to avoid and everyone else doesn’t get paid nearly enough.

But income inequality is far outstripped by wealth inequality both in Scotland and in the UK and in a capitalist economy where those with wealth can use it to rent-seek off the backs of the folk who worked to earn it, we have a problem where it matters less who gets paid how much, it’s who hoards it after that.
We need a system of wealth taxes to rebalance our economy, cut down on the dragon’s hordes of the multi-billionaires who could never hope to spend it usefully in a lifetime and to ensure that assets are more efficiently used for the benefit of all of us.

Scotland has a lot of power to do good here if we choose to and while this isn’t the time or the place to discuss what we could do if the Scottish Parliament had more powers, it most certainly is the place to discuss what we can do now.

When we talk about wealth taxes at a UK level, we tend to talk about property and capital gains. If the UK scrapped Capital Gains tax and treated all income as Income, Rishi Sunak would have paid £481k more in tax than he actually did. Keir Starmer would have paid £69k more – that’s two nurse salaries – though the fact that he paid most of his Capital Gains tax as a result of a land sale is something to reflect on as we continue this session.

However, under devolution the latter is a reserved tax and tends to be quite highly mobile or London-based anyway (Scotland no longer has any market stock exchanges, the last closed in the 1970s). Property Tax – Council Tax – is in desperate need of reform and it should be a mark of shame for all progressive parties in Scotland that this hasn’t happened. The lack of an agreed position between the SNP, Labour and the Greens blocked reform in 2008. The SNP have run scared of it ever since. All three parties should get into a room tomorrow and agree a position. If you can’t, then that position should be to agree now, ahead of time, to implement the recommendation of the Citizens Assembly we were promised to sort this out.

Common Weal has an answer ready – a Property Tax based on a percentage of current market value that if set at a “revenue neutral” rate would cut tax for more than half of properties and would fairly tax the rest. Even then though, lower property prices in Scotland compared to the UK limit the use of this as a means of rebalancing wealth. On the market right now there’s a 5 bed flat in London selling for £20 million. For that price you could buy five castles with estates in Scotland.

And this brings us to the greatest untaxed wealth in Scotland. Our land. We all know that stat that fewer than 500 people own more than 50% of Scotland. You may not understand the shift that is happening right now. Where land was once valued primarily in terms of how many grouse and deer could be shot on it, it is increasingly being valued based on how many carbon credits can be harvested from it. People are being priced off the land under their feet – The community of Tayvallich had to settle for a Green Laird because they couldn’t find £10 million for a buyout. The people of Langholm could raise the £3.8 million they needed, but only by mortgaging a substantial chunk of their land to the carbon credit vultures.

We need a land tax that will arrest and reverse the prices inflated by speculation and rent-seeking and will allow communities to buy the land they live on and to run it for their benefit, not for a budget line in an accounting portfolio.

Scotland has almost all of the tools it needs to enact full land reform of the kind our European peers did over a century ago. We can make a huge difference right now that will change Scotland for centuries to come. It’s time for the change that a majority of the people of Scotland already want to see, and there should already be a majority in Parliament ready to make happen.

Tax is an essential tool for the land reform we need. It’s not the only one. We’ll need your support for the rest too. Please back REVIVE’s campaign.