By Rab Bruce’s Spider

You’d think Scottish Labour would have learned by now that going along with the Tories is a bad idea but no, they still don’t seem to have learned the lesson of Better Together because Kezia Dugdale is now calling for an increase of 1p on Scottish Income Tax in order to offset Tory cuts to the Scottish budget.

Needless to say, this Labour policy announcement has been prominently featured by BBC Scotland, with Kezia playing the line that, faced with either using the new powers of the Scottish Government or implementing Tory cuts, she’d rather use the powers.

This is disingenuous on several levels.

For a start, Kezia’s chances of being First Minister after the Holyrood elections are, thankfully, minimal, so it’s easy to announce a policy which you know you will never be required to implement.

Secondly, although Scottish taxpayers are all having new Tax Code identifiers applied, there still doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory fiscal arrangement to ensure that any additional taxes actually flow through to the Scottish Government. That’s a technicality which will hopefully be sorted soon but it’s a pretty big technicality.

Thirdly, there is a fundamental contradiction in any policy like this. Having spent the IndieRef campaign insisting that Scotland must be run from Westminster, Labour are now proposing to penalise Scottish taxpayers for having voted the way they wanted us to. It’s hardly an endorsement of the "Better Together" mantra as it seems Scots will actually be "Worse Off Together". Thanks, Labour.

Finally, and most importantly, Kezia is playing the Tory game. How often have you heard Cameron and Osborne issue challenges to the SNP to use their extensive new powers and stop complaining? Putting aside the fact that the new powers are only extensive in the imaginations of the Tories and the Scottish media, this is exactly what the Tories want. They reason that Scottish voters will soon become fed up of the SNP Government if they are paying higher taxes than any other citizens of the UK. Desperate to return to the safety of the UK, voters will kick the SNP out, a Unionist Party will replace them and all will be well with the Tory world. Of course, the Scottish electorate might not see it that way and an increase in Income Tax might just have the opposite effect, forcing people to confront the issue of whether we would be better off as an independent country. However, that is a moot point since, so far at least, the SNP do not seem inclined to test the matter.

As for Kezia, she’s doing the Tories’ work for them, painting a picture of Scotland as the highest tax region among the nations of the UK. She’s walked straight into the trap the Tories have set and she’s done so willingly. If we give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she is not completely stupid, the only other conclusion must be that she is happy to play the stooge for her Better Together chums by doing their work for them and, in so doing, has hammered another nail in the coffin of Scottish Labour.