SCOTLAND’S Finance Secretary – SNP MSP Derek Mackay – presented his first draft budget to parliament on Thursday.

Once you cut through the political spin, the budget was not good news for council services and jobs.

The impartial experts at the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) have reported that councils face a real terms (i.e. after allowing for inflation) cut in total government funding of £327m next year.

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) – who have agreed their figures with government civil servants – have advised councils that the core revenue block grant will be cut by £350m in cash terms, despite the Scottish Government receiving an extra £418m from Westminster.

The government has ‘generously’ agreed to return some of this cut to councils – £120m to be precise – but insisted that it must go directly to schools and be spent on additional services and not to substitute for existing funding to schools.

So what does this mean for Inverclyde?

On a like for like basis, the council’s grant from the Scottish Government will be cut by a staggering £6.8m or 4.2 per cent next year. This follows a similar cut in the current financial year.

Mr Mackay is proposing to give us some of this money – just under £2.5m – back to allocate to schools.

This means that other council services – such as libraries and the arts, sports and leisure activities, parks, roads, street cleaning, refuse collection, economic regeneration, employment support, public toilets, community wardens, etc – will bear the brunt of any cuts.

This year the Scottish Government took £250m from councils to give to the new Integrated Joint Boards responsible for community health and social care services.

The ring fencing of funding for schools is further erosion of local democracy.

Rather than democratically-elected councillors deciding what the spending priorities should be for their areas, decisions are increasingly being taken by the government in Edinburgh.

Unfortunately SNP councillors across Scotland – including those here in Inverclyde – are meekly acquiescing in the demise of local government.

For them loyalty to the party and ‘the project’ comes first. They simply cannot be trusted to defend local services and jobs.

They also cannot be trusted on tax.

Mr Mackay has told councils that they will be able to keep the estimated £111m that will be raised across Scotland from increasing council tax charges to households in higher banded properties by up to 22.5 per cent. 

In addition, the finance secretary has decided that he is prepared to let councils put up charges for all households by a further three per cent, raising an additional £70m, to partly offset the cut he has made to their grant.

So after nine years of arguing for a council tax freeze, SNP councillors and MSPs are now insisting that some households can afford to pay 25.5 per cent more from April next year.

This ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion on council tax is because the SNP government has changed its ‘flagship’ tax policy.

No longer are they promising to freeze the council tax for the length of the parliament, but instead they are now making the same promise about the basic rate of income tax.

The ‘hated’ council tax has gone from being a regressive tax, which they promised to abolish, to their tax of choice.

One of Alex Salmond’s former key political advisors, Alex Bell, summed it up nicely in his column in a Sunday newspaper, writing: “The Scottish Government want town halls to increase council tax. Hoping that you and I blame councillors rather than MSPs for the hit to our income.”