Tag Archives: scotland act

Caron Lindsay

Beyond Royal Assent: implementing the Scotland Act

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 1st May 2013 - 3:30 pm

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 …

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Caron Lindsay

The unsung hero of the Edinburgh Agreement

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 16th October 2012 - 11:53 am

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.

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Posted in News and Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 12 Comments
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