Tag Archives: scotland act

Beyond Royal Assent: implementing the Scotland Act

Last year, against the odds, Michael Moore successfully piloted the Scotland Act through Parliament. This gives the Scottish Government, from 2015, some pretty major new powers, including more accountability for setting its own revenue. They will also have borrowing powers. The powers include:

  • a Scottish rate of income tax
  • borrowing powers for Scottish ministers
  • the power to create new devolved taxes
  • enabling the replacement of UK Stamp Duty land tax and UK landfill tax with new Scottish equivalents

The Scotland Office recently published its first annual report detailing the progress in implementing these powers. It gives quite a good insight into the practical process …

Posted in News | Also tagged and | 4 Comments

The unsung hero of the Edinburgh Agreement

As I watched the events unfold in the Edinburgh sunshine today, as Alex Salmond and David Cameron signed the historic Agreement on the process for the Independence Referendum, my thoughts were with the man who actually put the leg work in on this.

To put it bluntly, if we’d waited for David Cameron and Alex Salmond to reach agreement, we’d be waiting until people were telling their grandchildren about the day Hell froze over. In fact, only recently the Tories were murmuring about the UK Government running its own referendum. That, believe me, would not have ended well.

Posted in News and Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 12 Comments
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  • Graham Evans
    Peter Martin is absolutely right. Ordoliberal had a time in the sun in Germany but the debt break and the pursuit of balanced budgets have produced a crumbling ...
  • Rosemary Runswick
    @Peter The "Jenkinsite" title is a bit of a weird holdover from when we were simply a Jenkins appreciation group, but people have been loud and clear so far on ...
  • Jack Meredith
    Fantastic to see you guys doing well, congratulations! I look forward to seeing you go from strength to strength ☺️...
  • Peter Martin
    It's odd to see "ordoliberalism" mentioned with approval (as in the link given in the OP)- especially as the calls for government to adopt a more a Keynesian ap...
  • Peter Davies
    Perhaps the answer to Michael's comment and those of the MPs and councillors William refered to is that you redisribute at a personal or household level. That m...