Ross Greer: the poster boy for all that’s wrong with Holyrood

HOW DUMB must a politician be to advocate, in all seriousness, a tax for the “super-rich” while simultaneously admitting to wanting “fewer” such people in the country?

How can a wealth tax work if its purpose is not really to raise revenues but to shrink the very tax base by demonising the creation of wealth? Yet that’s precisely what wealth taxes do, which is why they are so often expanded to capture more and more people than first suggested – encouraging individuals to leave their tax jurisdiction for another, or to restructure assets into shelters such as trusts and companies that cannot easily be reached.

The lawyers and accountants benefit, so the revenues never deliver their intended munificence, but do drive people away and force all those who are not wealthy to pay higher taxes as a result.

This is precisely why wealth taxes have been abandoned in Ireland (1978), Austria (1994), Denmark (1997), Germany (1997), Finland (2006), Iceland (2006), Luxembourg (2006), Sweden (2007), India (2015) and France (2018).

Yet Greer presents a wealth tax as a panacea for offering up yet more “free stuff” – from making all bus journeys free (even mooting nationalisation of bus companies – one of Scotland’s quieter business success stories over the last forty years) to making dental treatment free – all while the Scottish Parliament’s fiscal incontinence has created a looming black hole of some five billion. There is no more money. Scotland’s finances are broken, yet you wouldn’t know that from the litany of spending promises – on the NHS, welfare benefits, school bags (seriously?), culture vouchers, and the like – from the Holyrood parties.

Ross Greer didn’t just walk into Malcolm Offord’s Elephant Trap; he naïvely dove right into it. Let’s recap what happened on the STV leaders debate (from 48.13):

Malcolm Offord:

“Mr Greer, I was born in a tenement at 33 Bank Street, in Greenock, and back then Scottish education was the best in the UK and I got it all for free – at Ardgowan Primary, and Greenock Academy and Edinburgh University. I went to London forty years ago with £2000 of debt, and full of ambition, I worked hard and was successful.

Today, I own six houses, five cars and six boats, over a forty year career I’ve employed hundreds of thousands of people and have paid £45 million in tax.

I don’t say that to boast but to ask you this question. Mr Greer in your Scotland do you want more people like me or fewer people like me?”

Ross Greer:

​“Fewer people like you.”

That was his instant and spontaneous emotive cry from the heart. Not some careful explanation – such as “I don’t admire your materialism but have no wish to see you leave the country” – that would have presented him as a thoughtful and mature mind. No, he even went on to explain that Malcolm Offord had no need of five of those houses at a time of homelessness. Anyone having more than one house should see the remainder being used to house the homeless.

I wonder if he would say that directly to Roz Foyer, the general secretary of the STUC who owns a £280,000 Glasgow home, a £240,000 Edinburgh flat, a £145,000 Glasgow terrace, a £125,000 Spanish flat, and a £150,000 holiday cottage on the Isle of Jura – plus a plot of land worth £100,000?

It is worth noting that Scotland’s homelessness crisis has not been fuelled by a shortage of properties to buy but by the high cost of rents. It was the politically motivated rent controls introduced by the SNP-Green coalition that ensured new rentals would be more costly – and further rent controls, of the kind Greer advocates, would drive yet more landlords out of the market and push rents higher still.

So let’s just think about Ross Greer and tax policy. The top one per cent of UK earners pay 28.5% of income tax revenues. Even though the top ten per cent of earners receive 35% of UK earnings, they actually pay sixty per cent of income tax receipts. The bottom fifty per cent of earners pay only ten per cent of income tax receipts. Ross Greer thinks that steep progressive bias is not taxing enough.

From Malcolm Offord’s question, we see that people like him not only pay a massive amount of tax but are responsible for employing hundreds of thousands of people – who in turn contribute to the exchequer and wider economic activity. Yet Ross Greer would rather people like Malcolm Offord did not live in Scotland, the land of his birth.

Later, in his second question, Malcolm Offord said:

“In your Scotland, the land of milk and honey, everything is free…”

But talking over Offord, Ross Greer replied:

”That’s because we would tax people like you to pay for everything”.

Ross Greer would rather tax a diminishing return – so how would he fund the widening gap between spending commitments and falling revenues?

It is this level of ignorance that is commonplace in Holyrood. The truth is the UK receives more from its wealthiest taxpayers without having a wealth tax than any country (Norway, Spain and Switzerland) that does (table here). Scotland shouldn’t be looking for more ways to tax wealth; we should be looking at more ways to create and retain it.

we need fewer Ross Greers and more Malcolm Offords

After striving, following a state education, to achieve the best he could and to add value to the community – for which, yes, Malcolm Offord was handsomely rewarded – he has also paid a more than generous contribution towards the public services and welfare that others have benefited from. That £45 million, and more every year, is paying for the public services the SNP and Greens have been running into the sand. Yet Offord – and presumably the Tom Hunters and David Murrays – are not wanted in Ross Greer’s Scotland. I would rather suggest we need fewer Ross Greers and more Malcolm Offords.

Offord asked a polite question, and it caught the green-eyed Greer out, who unwittingly tripped himself up. Across social media, many who had shown little interest in the Holyrood elections suddenly engaged, remarking on the state of contemporary Scottish politics.

That Malcolm Offord returned from the City of London to set up business in Edinburgh is commendable. But Greer would rather there were fewer financially successful people in Scotland. Presumably, everyone would work for the Scottish state, although where the funds to pay public sector employees and their pensions would come from remains a puzzle.

From Greer’s glib answer, the Greens can be seen to be not just on the extreme fringe of Scotland’s left. They are a green-eyed anti-social party that with its other policies would turn Scotland into a wasteland of extreme poverty, high crime and tolerance of depravity.

The truth about Ross Greer – and arguably the Scottish Parliament – is that both are utterly unserious. Holyrood is a superannuated student union for wilful narcissists who are free to virtue signal at taxpayers’ expense. Taking the £77,000 salary and generous expenses that included Greer purchasing a £226 office chair (they already provide them free inside Holyrood). The one thing with student unions is we don’t give their professional activists a pension – yet. Greer will naturally be entitled to one since being elected in 2016, even if he were to manage the impossible and lose his comfy seat in an election.

That’s because the reality is we are probably stuck with Ross Greer for life. So long as he does not trip himself up inside the Scottish Green Party (not impossible, but currently unlikely), he can assure himself of a cozy spot as top of a regional list and the Scottish voters will then struggle to remove him.

For the last two decades, our education system has been shoving Green propaganda down the throats of our children for the twelve most impressionable years of their lives while abandoning any serious intent in achieving acceptable literacy and numeracy rates.

Is it any wonder the Green Party vote share has been growing over that period?

In this “be nice” world, where the school curriculum fails to teach our kids the hard truths of how to survive through all the vicissitudes and challenges of putting bread on the table and keeping a roof over our heads, is it any wonder that student union politics – all earnest ideology and little reality – is now shaping legislation which is so often shoddy, unworkable and unfit for purpose?

Not that Ross Greer has much experience, even of student unions or being a student, having left Strathclyde University after only three months of his politics course to work for the Yes campaign and then the Green Party. Elected when he was 21, Greer has little real life experience beyond being a political activist, mostly suckling on the teat of the taxpayer. He is the arch poster boy of Holyrood’s professional politicians, who chuckles dismissively when confronted with economic issues he doesn’t comprehend.

Let me finish with the words of the greatest living economist, Thomas Sowell:

“I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money”.

We urgently need a new type of Holyrood. One that nurtures and encourages more people to aspire to success in their chosen fields, to make things, to sell things and to build things. Demonising the wealth that may come from success will drive many of those who want to achieve success to leave Scotland for more welcoming climes. If Holyrood does not change its approach, then we shall all be the poorer for it.