FOR the past seven years, I have always known and grudgingly accepted that when Scotland’s new business rating revaluations were published there would be a price to pay, a small amount of financial pain to endure.

After all, rateable values had not been adjusted since 2010, and it would be too much to expect or even hope for the powers that be to keep them fixed or, in some dream scenario, reduce them for the next seven years.

Fat chance! Dreamland has turned into a nightmarish Groundhog Day from which there seems to be no awakening.

I reckon I have just been rounded upon, mugged in broad daylight and also taken for one. How else can you explain the whopping 91 per cent rateable value increase my Glasgow nightclub The Garage has been hit with? That equates to an unjustified jump of over £100,000 in rates.

Even now, this unsettling news has still not settled in and the colour of my face is alternating between a garish yellow and bright red. Much the same as The Garage’s legendary truck.

Why, I ask, are they so high? What justification can there be? What has materially changed at The Garage to warrant such a leap? I couldn’t jump that high if I plugged myself into the National Grid.

And I am not alone. Hundreds of businesses across Scotland have been affected, especially in hospitality and tourism. Scotland’s second-biggest employer outside the public sector is reeling from huge, unjustifiable and unqualified increases in their rateable values.

We feel sorely betrayed and totally let down. We thought the Scottish Government, whose objectives many of us support, had our backs, even after the catastrophic effects caused by the smoking ban and new drink-drive legislation. Instead, they have turned their backs on our howls of protest and cries for immediate help. Ministers have preferred to pass the buck to the Scottish Assessors Authority, a supposedly independent body chosen to inflict the pain, rather than acknowledge that “Holyrood there is a problem” in the rates system. Would it not have been wiser sort this out, in the here and now, rather than keep stirring the boiling cauldron of Brexit and Indy Ref 2 soup?

These rises take no account of factors such as current profitability, or the cost of staffing, entertainment, training and security.

Instead, they are based on a hypothetical assumption that the industry did well in 2014, from which the figures are roughly based on. That was the Year of Homecoming, Ryder Cup, the Commonwealth Games and MTV Awards – a bonanza year for tourism in Glasgow.

These brutal rises will mean that many small publicans, hoteliers and caterers won’t pay, because they really can’t. Enough is enough, for them the bell has rung. It really is last orders.

Hard-up operators are up against it. They are being punished by an outdated system and a Government which, in their pursuit of an Indyref 2, seem to have taken their eyes right off the ball and forgotten their ain.

That is not on. If they fail to address this issue and hope that it just goes away then they can forget any chance of electoral support from the tens of thousands of individuals whose jobs may now be on the line. And they will deserve to.

As the great 19th century philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, “Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties and ages it is the rule.” Are the SNP now afflicted by madness? I hope not!

Donald MacLeod is a director of nightclub group Hold Fast Entertainment.