In the last financial year the Scottish Government spent nearly £40 billion on a wide range of important services such as healthcare, policing, education and local government.
It spent the money, but it had raised only a tiny proportion of it.
Indeed, the Scottish Government has very little responsibility over how or where the money it spends comes from. Instead Scottish taxes are recycled via a grant from Westminster, which has bred a less responsible political culture than people want and need.
It was said that the recent 2012 Scotland Act would increase the level of responsibility. It did, but accounting for that piece of legislation will involve the Parliament raising only 22 per cent of what it spends.
This imbalance, this lack of accountability and responsibility, does not lead to good governance. If any government is overly reliant on fiscal transfers from elsewhere, its responsibility is diminished. For parliaments as for people, when they are given responsibility they will learn to behave more responsibly.
John Kennedy once said that we should not seek to fix the blame for the past. Instead, he said, we should accept our own responsibility for the future. That, in essence, is why I am a member of the Campaign for Scottish Home Rule. The campaign wants to help our politicians deliver an ambitious new era - and a new culture - of responsibility.
We want Holyrood, and indeed Westminster, to raise what it spends, and we've been urging the Smith Commission to develop proposals which enable it to do so.
A responsibility culture would allow the Scottish Parliament and Government to enjoy the fiscal fruits of higher economic growth through which it could reduce social inequality, or suffer the cost of failing to make the economy grow.
Both the good and the bad would encourage realistic, responsibility-based policy, precisely because it would have consequences. It would matter. Devolution, after all, was always meant to be about Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, not to mention Scottish opportunities.
But the lack of financial devolution to back it up has pulled politics in the other direction. It is not only about need or cost; it is also about choice. Why is it that tuition fees should be inevitable because the rest of the UK has decided so? Happily, the Labour party appears to be joining the SNP in accepting this but both need the financial power to make good that commitment sustainably. That is one of the many opportunities Scotland has in the post-referendum period.
Equally, such a principle would protect Scottish devolved services from structural changes that may be being made elsewhere. During the referendum campaign a great deal was made of the way in which the NHS in England is moving in a different direction to that in Scotland.
While any move to privatise the NHS in England would not force the Scottish NHS to do so, there could conceivably be budget effects brought on by the system of Barnett consequentials. The principle of raising what you spend would eliminate that as an issue.
Much has been written about Labour's shifting position on this issue. Whilst a move towards devolving income tax in full is to be welcomed, it is important to stress that, even if income tax were devolved in full, this would still only give the Scottish Parliament control over just 40 per cent of what it spends. Whilst certainly an improvement, it does not go far enough, and nobody should make the mistake of believing income tax to be a panacea.
This political horse-trading over which taxes should sit where is becoming a game of politics rather than of principle.
What we need is a broad basket of taxes to be devolved, in full, to enable the Scottish Government to be properly responsible both for raising money, as well as for how it is spent.
Only then will we move beyond a culture of assigning blame and towards a culture of accepting responsibility.
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