Scottish Unionist Party

All posts are promoted on behalf of the Scottish Unionists

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

Make 18th September, #UnionDay, a Bank Holiday UK wide.

@murdo_fraser @TheBluetrot @themajorityscot

[William Yarwood @yarwoodwilliam]

"Sanctimony doesn’t balance the books"

Cannot believe I am saying this, but this is some solid and much needed clarity from Nick Clegg on coalition era rhetoric around austerity.

The Miliband era rhetoric on austerity gave Labour MPs and activists a moral framework for opposing almost any serious attempt to control spending. Deficit reduction stopped being a necessary part of what the government needed to do post 2008 and became something wicked, cruel and ideological.

Never mind that Brown and Darling both accepted spending restraint would be needed - they forgot all that. The activist story became much simpler: cuts are evil, spending is compassionate, and if only Labour were in charge there would be a land of milk and honey paid for by "the bankers the bonuses" and "non doms".

And that mindset still haunts Labour today, with Starmer and Reeves failing to effectively cut public spending in any way, no matter how trivial or small. Too many backbenchers do not see fiscal prudence as responsible but instead see it as a surrender to something they fought against for years.

Most do not ask whether taxpayers can afford to keep forking over for ever-growing spending commitments. Instead, they're more concerned about how opposing it makes them sound more virtuous, even if deep down they see the stats and realise public spending has got out of control.

[Jon Burrows MLA @JonBurrowsMLA]

It’s totally legitimate to scrutinise judicial decisions after the fact & encourage a greater understanding of the need for a robust approach to bail in terrorism cases. It’s our police & prison officers who are the targets of the New IRA & I won’t apologise for raising concerns.

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

Burnham's Manchesterism at large with the closure of Jodrell Bank, operated by the university of Manchester.

Hundreds of millions on missiles in foreign wars, BILLIONS on benefits, hundreds of thousands a time on third sector wheezes.

And we close down our science industry....

[𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺U𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗻 @TeamUnion_UK]

Unionists should unite 👑+🇬🇧

(clues in the name)

It’s time to build alliances and it is not the time to endorse one brand of the right over the other

By Arlene Foster https://t.co/L1h9pE1yNR

[GB Politics @GBPolitcs]

🚨NEW: Over £700,000 was allocated to a “Queer Milk” charity by the Scottish Government, prompting criticism from women’s rights groups

The charity holds weekly sessions in order to help transgender women try to give human milk to their babies

[@GBNEWS]

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

One of the cleanest experiments in history already settled the economic debate on capitalism vs. socialism.

Same Germans, same starting line in 1949, the only variable was the system they lived under.

West Germany under Ludwig Erhard abolished the old price controls and introduced a new currency in 1948 and industrial production jumped 50% in 6 months.

East Germany went Soviet-style central planning with the state controlling prices, production, and property.

By 1989, East Germany’s GDP per capita sat at about $9,679 while West Germany’s was roughly 3x higher, and at reunification in 1990, East German output per capita was only 55% of the West’s.

The wall fell, but the gap never closed up to this day. All to say it’s been easier to recover from an atomic bomb than years of socialist rule.

[Glenn @GlennGlennReal]

Why does Scotland need so many politicians??
We have 3.6 x more politicians per head of population than England.
The Scottish civil service has tripled since devolution and we are now saddled with an ever growing welfare bill and a completely bloated public sector!
The question Scots should be asking is:
Has devolution with all the extra layers of bureaucracy and cost to the taxpayer delivered better outcomes for ordinary Scots, or has Holyrood simply become an expensive, self-perpetuating disappointment that Scotland can no longer afford to treat as beyond criticism?

We should be asking why debates about gender ideology, foreign policy, Net zero, Palestine and constitutional issues remain front and centre stage when concerns about healthcare, education, public infrastructure, economic growth and government accountability remain unresolved?

[Sam McBride @SJAMcBride]

Is this an inflection point for unionism? Only the second time since the DUP overtook the UUP in 2003 that a poll has put the Ulster Unionists ahead (the other being amid the DUP's leadership chaos in 2021). Also very bad for Alliance - now clearly behind Claire Hanna's SDLP.

[Rosie Duffield MP @RosieDuffield1]

Ah, oh-kay...! I see the vacuous, commercially-sponsored sex toy MP is now desperately trying to pivot it as some sort of stance against VAWG. Yeah, good luck with that.
Funnily enough, most of us women in Parliament have managed to avoid the mention of dildos in the same sentence as rape for a good many years...

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

The SNP runs into the Laffer Curve: its 48% top rate of income tax (NICs on top) results in £22m LESS in tax revenues.
Don’t they teach economics in the land of Adam Smith any more?
Or does left-wing virtue signalling — I’m ‘taxing the rich’ more than you — trump everything?

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Scotland raised its top income tax rate to 48% to make the rich pay more.

New HMRC data suggests the result may have been the opposite: Scotland collected about £22m less.

We can't be sure, but Scotland may have fallen over the Laffer curve.

🧵:

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

England and Wales will muddle through without Scots on their leaflets for Bedfordshire.

Scotland will struggle to thrive when its own children are locked out university places that are then hawked at high prices to civic joyous oppressive regimes abroad.

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

Braveheart larpers rage against the removal of Gaelic from campaign literature in England as a new form of Clearances.

This is in no way a distraction from the loss of clearing places this year where Scots come last in applications to study in Scottish universities. @Max4Moray

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

@bowgroup Meanwhile NetZero economic growth and gunboat unionism that relied on threatening a second Tory referendum on independence was always going to have a shelf life when GDP per capita was falling for 15 years.

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

"Broad church" Toryism led to a church with empty pews, a choir of liberals singing songs no one was listening to and the roof repairs paid by mysterious benefactors who made their money in the utilities trade.

Putting the choir on part time hours won't change that @TheBluetrot

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

The total corporatisation of the party conference to the exclusion of think tanks like @bowgroup, throwing out social conservatives made for an annual Den of Thieves that didn't convert Manchester to the blue team. Maybe they'll move CCHQ to Manchester Mets' art department.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

When it comes to tax in the UK, a lot of people are deluding themselves, thinking the government will just go after the wealthy to pay for the ballooning commitments they’ve made.

The truth is, the real target is the middle class. And the reason is simple. The middle class is the only viable option for the kind of revenue the government wants.

Start with who’s off the table. A third of British adults pay no income tax at all. The bottom half of earners take home about a quarter of the income in this country and pay roughly a tenth of the tax. There’s no pot of gold buried down there, and every party has spent years promising to protect “working people.” Squeezing them is politically radioactive and would raise next to nothing anyway.

The rich are off the table too, whatever the Channel 4 documentaries say. The top 1% already pay 28% of all income tax. Their money is capital, dividends and gains, so they’re mobile, and they’ve already started leaving. One widely quoted forecast has Britain losing half a million millionaires by 2028. Push the rate on these people much higher and you collect less, not more. Threatening them polls brilliantly, but relying on them for a tax bonanza is pure fantasy.

Which leaves the middle class, and the middle class can’t run. Most are on PAYE, taxed at source before the money touches their account. They can’t turn a salary into a capital gain. They can’t declare residency in Monaco, because the job, the kids’ school and the mortgage are all here. Their wealth is a house they can’t hide under the mattress and a pension they can’t reach. Numerous, visible and immobile. The perfect target, and in some ways the only one.

And here’s how it’s already being done. They won’t raise your headline rate of income tax, because they promised not to. But the threshold freeze, the one that sounds like a non-event on Budget day, is quietly hammering you, and it’s now been extended to 2031.

Took out a student loan since 2012? You’ve been paying the graduate tax in all but name. Hold investments outside an ISA? You’ve watched CGT climb to 24%, and it’s likely to be equalised with income tax next. Sent your kids to private school? That’s the VAT charge. Saving into a cash ISA? That shelter just shrank from £20,000 to £12,000. And from 2027, your pension gets pulled into inheritance tax, so the pot you spent a career building can be taxed again on the way out.

There’s more coming. Mansion taxes, higher CGT, property levies, dividends. Most of the taxes we’re told will hit the ultra wealthy will actually land on the middle class. And in most cases they’re not sat on fortunes, they’re sat on assets they spent a working life building.

What’s worse, the burden grows with every Budget, because of the compounding commitments this government keeps making, and that nearly every other party has pledged too.

So who pays for the past, present and future spending of the UK government? The middle class. And there’s not a thing they can do about it. Debt-trapped, stuck in place, with nowhere to turn, and the government knows it.

If any of this resonated, you’re likely in the taxation crosshairs. I wish you luck.

[Scottish Unionist Party @unionistsonline]

This is nationalist government, for the Peeble o' Scotland....

[Dennis Noel Kavanagh @Jebadoo2]

This is the world Stonewall, Amnesty and the rest of the rotten monocultural third sector have ushered in.

[Owen Polley @3000Versts]

The Republic's deputy pm, Simon Harris, has effectively commissioned a report on breaking up a friendly, neighbouring country – the UK. This work will also presumably advocate ways of absorbing an integral part of Britain’s territory into the Irish state. https://t.co/OolPPCvakc