Scottish islanders battling second home tax force council to reconsider: Could more follow suit?

A Scottish Island may be about to force a u-turn over the decision to impose double council tax on second homeowners.
Residents of Great Cumbrae, a small island off the west coast of Scotland, have been left outraged by the tax, according to reports in the Telegraph.
North Ayrshire Council is now reviewing its decision to impose a 100 per cent council tax premium on second homeowners amid the backlash.
Residents argue the tax will hurt the local economy due to its heavy reliance on tourism.
Roughly one third of all properties on the island are second homes, while one quarter of its 1,400 residents work in tourist related jobs.
Cameron Inglis, the Conservative leader on North Ayrshire Council, told the Telegraph that the reaction from residents had been 'fiery.'
Residents on the island of Great Cumbrae argue that the second home tax will hurt the local economy due to its heavy reliance on tourism Pictured: Millport, Great Cumbrae Island
'We are asking second home owners to pay double, get nothing in return, so that we can balance our budget gap,' said Inglis.
'The whole thing has been pushed through so that supposedly rich people can plug a budget gap. The whole thing is a sham. It's smoke and mirrors.'
Meanwhile, Alex Harvie, chairman of the Cumbrae Community Council said the double council tax would reduce income across the island and potentially 'start a spiral of decline' as facilities fall into disrepair.
An impact assessment found the council tax hike would strip £500,000 off the island's £12.9million annual GDP.
It remains to be seen as to whether this will be the first of many challenges faced by councils over the 100 per cent council tax premium.
The majority of Scottish councils have now doubled council tax on second homes and three quarters of local authorities in England and Wales have also done so.
Second homes for council tax purposes are defined as furnished properties where nobody lives, or where the owner has their main residence elsewhere.
It means many second home owners in England paying the typical Band D council tax of £2,171 are seeing their annual bills rise to £4,342.
Holiday hotspots such as Cornwall, Norfolk and Somerset are among those introducing the tax, in a bid to make homes more affordable for local people.
For those who own second homes that are in a more expensive bracket, the costs could be astronomical.
For example, someone who owns a Band H home in Salcombe - a second home hotspot in Devon - will see their council tax double from £4,716.42 to £9,432.84.
Have you been hit by the second home council tax hike? Get in touch: editor@thisismoney.co.uk
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BBC News

26 minutes ago

• BBC News

Section 28: Death threats and Holyrood's 'first culture war'

It was rare for politicians to get death threats in former MSP Wendy Alexander says she found herself an "obvious target" during what she describes as the Scottish Parliament's first culture war – the battle to repeal a law commonly known as Section law prohibited schools and councils from intentionally promoting homosexuality or the teaching of "the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship"."It was very unpleasant," she says. "There were death threats, which sadly have become more common to politicians, but in those days were mercifully rare. It was really incredibly febrile." Section 28 – known as Section 2A in Scotland – was introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1988 after an outcry sparked by reports about content in school books in LondonAlexander – who is now a member of the House of Lords – describes the law as "pernicious". And 25 years on, she recalls how she and Scotland's "fledgling" parliament would take on the tabloid media and one of the country's richest men. "You could label this as one of the first pieces of culture war legislation," she says."This was something that Mrs Thatcher put on the statute books because somebody didn't like, literally, a storybook, which had children growing up in a gay family."This was a story book that some London borough allegedly used, and this was a chance for Mrs Thatcher to commence a culture war."She adds: "Because it banned local government from promoting homosexuality, what it did was make teachers very, very scared about being able to talk about relationships in schools."They were frightened that they would be accused of promoting homosexuality by virtue of talking to children who were confused about their sexuality or simply talking about the lives they saw around them, if it came up in personal education." In 1997, the UK's new Labour government had pledged to abolish the law. And by 2000, it would fall to Scotland's new parliament to pass the was communities minister in Holyrood's first Scottish Executive when she received a call from Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott."He said: 'Wendy, we are about to embark on our manifesto commitment to abolish Section 28… If you want to repeal on the same timetable as England, you have to start now.'"We announced in the October before, it was then the Queen's Speech in England, that we intended to repeal in Scotland. The consultation we ran was in favour of the repeal of Section 28 in Scotland as well."However, while the majority of MSPs looked likely to vote to repeal Section 28 in Scotland, there were voices outside parliament opposed to the move. In 2000, Brian Souter, founder of the Stagecoach Group, funded the "Keep the Clause" campaign that sought to prevent Section 28 from being by the Daily Record newspaper and several religious groups, the campaign ran a private postal referendum. It received more than 1.2 million responses, with more than 86% respondents voting to retain the after the result in May 2000, Mr Souter addressed MSPs via the media. He said: "We plead with you to respect parents' rights to nurture their children with their own beliefs and values."And we warn you that we will not stand back and allow a politically correct minority to undermine the important position of marriage and determine morality of the majority."The BBC contacted Mr Souter for this article but he declined to comment. Alexander says: "Cardinal [Thomas] Winning at the time accused me of being the greatest threat to Christian unity in Scotland."Of course, the right thing was to try and take the temperature down. We were not interested in a crusade, but I was an obvious target at that time. I was young, single, I wasn't married, I didn't have kids."But we worked to give reassurance around guidelines to schools that fundamentally this was not about sex education, that the sex education guidelines were there, they were adequate.""This was about society, recognizing that you don't honour marriage by denying the reality of other relationships which are equally well established and honourable."In the end, the repeal was passed on 21 June 2000 – with 99 MSPs voting in favour and 17 and Wales would follow suit by repealing Section 28 in 2003."And of course within 10 years, it was forgotten," Alexander says."People, I think, are proud that Scotland became a more tolerant society and of course it laid the foundation for civil partnerships and then equal marriage, which again are well accepted."The Scottish Conservatives had voted against the repeal, but before he became prime minister in 2010, the party's UK leader David Cameron apologised for Section 28, labelling it "offensive to gay people".Alexander says: "I think it's important in these cases to hold your ground but to do so with humility and try and take people with you."And I think looking back we didn't always manage to take the country with us but the parliament stood firm." After the bruising debate over Section 28, Wendy Alexander had a brief stint as Scottish Labour leader. She is currently a member of the House of her personal life, she married and had two children. In 2020, her husband came out as trans and she says they are now amicably to recent debates over trans right, she says: "In society we do have to be very, very careful not to stigmatise small minorities and certainly not weaponize them in a debate. I've watched this in my own family."I think the arc of progress bends long… Section 28 is instructive in the sense that there was a huge orchestrated media campaign of opposition to legislation that had overwhelming support in the elected parliament and that involved distortion."It was classically in the culture wars tradition - magnifying and weaponising an issue that stigmatised a community."Social media just happens to be the vehicle of choice these days. Twenty-five years ago, it was well funded tabloid campaigns funded by PR agencies and business people."I think the lesson is that, I suppose, it says we're all at risk of being intolerant to the minority," she says.

Scotsman

3 hours ago

• Scotsman

The EIBF has learned nothing about real diversity

Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Last year, the board of the Edinburgh International Book Festival was forced to sever ties with its sponsor of two decades, Baillie Gifford. The threats from protestors to disrupt the festival due to Baillie Gifford's alleged ties with Israel and fossil fuel companies were simply too grave to ignore. Greta Thunberg pulling out of the programme and a pious bunch of petition-signing celebrities helped pile the pressure onto the EIBF and, with regret, they kowtowed. For those of us in the writing world with openly heterodox opinions, it was a sorry but predictable farce the Scottish arts world had brought on itself. This is what happened in a culture that had done nothing but, for instance, pander to trans activists when they were hounding people with reality-based views on sex and chant blindly along with every trendy 'social justice' slogan. If you make political diversity heresy, don't act surprised when the torch-bearers turn on you. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Activist Greta Thunberg, seen at a protest in Paris, cancelled a planned appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival over investments in the fossil fuel industry by the event's then-sponsor Baillie Gifford | AFP via Getty Images Alongside the justified schadenfraude there was also tentative hope that a lesson would be learned. That the Scottish literary scene would start to amend this crisis of its own making and start platforming a spectrum of political views. The theme for this year's festival is 'Repair', after all. Alas though, things remain broken. One would think that in the year the UK Supreme Court confirmed the definition of women in law and multiple politicians have rescinded their support for gender self-ID, there might be a single event featuring a notable women's rights campaigner. Quite a few of them have written excellent books recently after all. Victoria Smith. Julie Bindel. Susanna Rustin. Orwell-prize shortlisted Hannah Barnes. The Scotland-focused Sunday Times bestseller The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, has come out on paperback, in which over thirty essayists (including myself) are featured. Yet nothing. I'm not naive enough to be surprised but it remains highly depressing. One particularly glaring omission There is one omission that seems particularly glaring however, and that is Jenny Lindsay, a performance poet and leading figure in the Scottish literary scene. In November last year she published a book 'Hounded: Women, Harms And The Gender Wars' and there's few texts that would have complemented the 'Repair' theme more aptly. Because before you can fix anything, you have to understand what's gone wrong, and that's exactly what 'Hounded' explores. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Drawing on Lindsay's own experience in the arts, where overnight she found herself a target of wrongthink hounding for the crime of calling out violence against women, her book moves through the psychological, social and democratic harms the normalisation of bullying-disguised-as-virtue is wreaking on society. Lindsay had drawn attention to trans-identified Cathy Brennan, a writer for The Skinny, who'd advocated online for physical violence against lesbians at that year's Pride. For this, Lindsay was branded a 'TERF' and subjected to years of harassment and career disruptions. A matter of days after, Brennan allegedly attacked lesbian and women's rights campaigner Julie Bindel at Edinburgh University. As Lindsay speculated in a recent podcast interview , her being proven right was the most unforgivable thing in her hounders' eyes. Of course, it's at the EIBF's discretion to invite who they please. No one is entitled to a platform. But on the programme are several of Lindsay's most vicious and vocal hounders. Alice Tarbuck, for instance, the Literature Officer at Creative Scotland who brought disgrace on the institution when she was exposed as having actually rang bookshops and demanded they do not stock Lindsay's book. There's also Harry Josephine Giles, who co-authored a censorious petition to The Scottish Poetry Library against Lindsay and fellow poet Magi Gibson. (I confess I've a particular abject loathing for those that orchestrate petitions against individuals, trumped only by my disgust at the sheep who sign them). Statement of allegiance? Giles, whose most recent noteworthy public appearance has been screaming 'Give us wombs and give us t***ies!' to a crowd of baying activists after the Supreme Court ruling, will be appearing at six events in the programme. It's hard to read this as anything but a statement of allegiance to misogynistic bullies over a renewed dedication to freedom of expression. What a concerning indictment of the Scottish arts scene. Susan Smith, left, and Marion Calder, co-directors of For Women Scotland, celebrate outside the Supreme Court in London in April after its ruling on the definition of a woman | PA In the interest of transparency, Jenny is a dear friend of mine. I've known and loved her as a sister in feminism trying to navigate the Orwellian artistic landscape in which we (still) find ourselves. But before that, I knew her as a poet and writer. Without bias, the EIBF has snubbed not only a throughly principled artist but an enviably talented one. Around the time she published her brave, articulate essay 'Anatomy Of A Hounding' in The Dark Horse magazine, I was a creative writing student and seeing first hand the damage ideological hiveminderey was doing, not only to aspiring writers' freedom of expression, but literary quality itself. 'Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others' as Albert Camus said. There are seemingly few artists left that embody this spirit. Jenny is one of them. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad My favourite poem of Jenny's is 'The Schism Ring' from her collection This Script. She opens it by describing the menu for a feminist literary gathering - a superficially inclusive, oh-so-safe borefest of gluten-free and vegan cakes, before going on to describe the meaty, unctuous, mischievously un-PC feast she secretly craves - frogs legs, steak on the bone, duck eggs and full-fat buttery mash. It's a beautiful metaphor for the intellectual hunger so many of us feel around modern feminism, the literary scene or both. It would be disingenuous to say the EIBF doesn't feature a lot of talented, compelling writers outside the likes of Tarbuck and Giles. All the same, I read the programme and see an artistic climate that remains starved, mostly of courage.

The National

4 hours ago

• The National

SNP 'working with Tories to weaken Land Reform Bill', MSPs say

The Greens' Mark Ruskell and Labour's Mercedes Villalba both told the Sunday National that the SNP Government was using Tory votes to keep effective measures out of the new legislation. The Land Reform (Scotland) Bill will this week pass 'stage two' at Holyrood, where amendments to the initial wording are proposed by MSPs and voted on for inclusion or rejection by members of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. However, last week, MSPs on the committee – which has three SNP, two Tory, one Labour, and one Green member – voted against measures including putting a public interest test on the proposed buyer of Scottish land. Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon speaking to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee in a meeting held on June 17 (Image: Holyrood TV) The amendment, proposed by Villalba and rejected by the SNP and Tories, would have forced ministers to take into account things like a potential landowners' tax residence when deciding if a sale would be in the public interest. MSPs and the Government did support dropping the threshold for estates covered by the legislation from 3000 to 1000 hectares – but the SNP and Tories voted together to reject an amendment to push that down further to 500 hectares. There are around 2.5 acres to a hectare, and 1.6 acres to a standard football pitch. Villalba had tabled a more radical proposal that would have prevented anyone in Scotland from owning more than 500 hectares of land unless it could be shown to have environmental or community benefits. This was also voted down by the SNP and Tories. READ MORE: Rachael Revesz: The Land Reform Bill is only tinkering round the edges Changing the threshold at which estates are covered by the bill from 3000 to 1000 hectares means that the number of estates which will be required to publish Land Management Plans, support wild places, and comply with the Scottish Outdoor Access Code has been doubled to a total of about 700, covering just over 60% of Scotland's land, the John Muir Trust said. Villalba said that 67% of Scotland's countryside is owned by 'just 0.025% of the population' and that the 1000-hectare threshold would do nothing to change this. Further questions surround whether land must be contiguous to be considered a single 1000-hectare estate. The SNP put forward a rule saying that plots of land are a single holding if their borders are within 250 metres. The Greens had been set to table an amendment to make this 10 miles, but it was not moved. Ruskell said this was due to a shared understanding that the 250m limit was too low – and that it would be addressed at a later stage. However, Ruskell further said that the bill in its current state was 'fundamentally not going to lead to a solution to the growing inequalities in land ownership that we have in Scotland'. Scottish Green MSP Mark Ruskell in the parliament chamber (Image: Holyrood TV)'This bill does not tackle that, full stop,' he went on. 'It gives communities a bit more power, it provides a bit more scrutiny as to what landowners are currently doing, but it's not clear that this is going to make any major difference in terms of getting a more diverse pattern of land ownership and really changing the answer to 'Who owns Scotland?'. 'Things will continue broadly as they have been for centuries, but with a wee bit more community involvement. It's a bill that's tweaking around the edges of existing systems rather than having a big bold vision.' He told the Sunday National that the Scottish Government could 'easily put forward a more radical vision into this bill and get support from Labour and the Greens, easily'. 'Every amendment would pass. Every single amendment would be unchallengeable. So it's their call because they have the votes for it and they have the consensus on the left – but they don't want to play to that. 'So they're getting support from the Tories to defeat anything that's taking a bill into a more radical place.' READ MORE: Lesley Riddoch: Scotland needs real action on land reform Villalba went a step further, saying the bill was not fit for purpose and would entrench inequality across Scotland. The Scottish Labour MSP went on: 'The SNP have demonstrated that their true allegiance is not with the Scottish people, but rather with wealthy private landowners who manage their property not in the public interest but to maximise their own profits. 'Scotland's land should belong to the people, and benefit both local communities and the natural environment. It's high time the SNP stopped deferring to lobbyists and empowered Scots to take back control of their land.' She added: 'By voting against the inclusion of a presumed limit on ownership over 500 hectares in the bill, the SNP risk allowing land to be sold or managed in ways that benefit private interests at the expense of the public good, entrenching the very problems their proposals seek to correct. 'What's more, by aligning with the Conservative Party to reject the inclusion of a robust public interest test, rather than stand up for Scots, they have rolled over for the wealthy – and not for the first time.' The SNP and Scottish Government were approached for comment.