HAVING just discovered in the last 24 hours, from two news articles, that there has been a consultation ongoing to receive views on the new proposals for local tax, I understand that it is already too late to contribute (Shona Craven: Holyrood committees need your tuppence worth, The National, Sep 23).

I would still, however, like to contribute my “tuppence worth” on an aspect that seems either to have been totally ignored or at least not fully considered.

In the area where I live, there are a fair number of houses still occupied by those who bought them around 40 or 50 years ago or more, in the hope of providing a secure home not only for their families as they grew up but also for themselves in retirement and in the full knowledge that one of the partners might eventually require that security to remain independent when left alone.

Many of these people struggled through hard times, with no state help, to pay a mortgage on which interest was always far higher than today, and for some time as high as 15 per cent. I am sure none grudged the sacrifices they made over the years for what they saw as safeguarding their own later lives.

It may well be that today the prices paid, such as £2,000 to £3,000, seem extremely cheap, but at that time they were commensurate with the incomes and prospects of buyers, who were obliged to save at least a five per cent deposit and allowed a mortgage on only a maximum of three times one income. Most had to wait till their later twenties or early thirties to meet the conditions. That these houses are now worth considerably more is totally irrelevant to ability to pay tax.

Those who have bought recently at values close to current ones still have the prospect of earning the current levels of income. Most of those having lived long-term in the same house spent their working lives paying tax as well as mortgage from such income as was commensurate at the time but are, with the passage of so many years, now mostly on much reduced and generally fixed incomes. How can it therefore be acceptable or fair to re-band such properties and thereby increase the burden on those who have no means of increasing their income? Equally, is it right to revalue the property to a current level at which the long-term owner could not now afford to buy and which imposes an impossible tax burden?

Some may say that the answer is for these folk to sell up and move house - but what would have been the point in all those years of saving and working to provide a secure home and the independence that goes with it, if you are expected to dispose of it almost as soon as it has become fully paid up and your own? Are the current generation trying to get on the housing ladder to gain something that they intend to get rid of as soon as they achieve it?

To my mind, no form of tax on one’s home is fair. It is no indication of income or wealth and takes no account of changing circumstances. Surely the only fair solution is a local income tax, which relates directly to one’s income year by year, and can be easily applied, since any government which collects income tax knows (or should know) the exact details of every person’s income every year and it could be collected by PAYE. Moreover, no earner could escape it, and the pool of payers would probably be larger, thus increasing the tax take without penalising any particular group.

It is a great pity that the defeat of the SNP manifesto promise on this, as a minority government, has left them all scrabbling around among a hotchpotch of unsatisfactory ideas, instead of admitting they got it wrong and agreeing to back a straightforward local income tax.

P Davidson, Falkirk

I READ with particular interest that the First Minister has asked the Prime Minister fundamental questions abut the effect of Brexit on the UK economy (Sturgeon tells May: We need answers to Brexit questions, The National, Sep 24).

The story was particularly relevant to me as I have German friends who love Scotland so much that they were on the verge of selling their house near Stuttgart and opening a German restaurant somewhere in Scotland. They were on the phone last night to tell my wife and me that after taking advice following Brexit they have withdrawn their house from the market and put their plans on hold for the present till the situation becomes clearer.

One small example perhaps, but multiply this sort of thing by several hundred or thousand and it is not difficult to get a feeling for the economic consequences of the suffocating Little Englandism of Brexit now so seriously threatening this land.

Alan Clayton, Westfield, Strachur

JUST when Nicola Sturgeon was thinking her “independence transcends Brexit, economy and oil” edict made it safe to go back into the indyref2 waters, up pops “Jaws” Jim Sillars to chop her down, saying “You cannot win by telling people who have suffered years of low wages, high levels of poverty and sanctions, that independence offers more of the same.”

It’s a bit like a horror film where a couple escapes from a haunted house in a car but the winding roads always lead them back to there to the same horrors: currency, deficit and inherited national debt.

Recent comments by Salmond, Sillars, Neil, Kennedy, MacAskill, Kerevan and Bell are the sounds of elephants crashing about in the jungle, and with less than three weeks until the party conference Sturgeon's options for escape or silencing the dissenters are running out.

The only honest way to win over the electorate is to say we won’t be fit for independence until we have a hard-working, skilled, educated healthy population supported by a much leaner public sector and vibrant private sector making goods and services the world wants to buy. I might vote for that.

Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven


J KERR wrote “Well, the Better Together side had better get themselves together” (Letters, September 23). So far any approach to indyref2 has been about how Yes will have to come up with a new strategy to counter Better Together. But Better Together no longer exists, and their promises proved to be false. The major player

Labour, under Alastair Darling and Jim Murphy, saw their alliance with the Tories lose them 40 of their 41 Westminster seats at the following General Election. The Tories retained their solitary seat with a wafer-thin margin, and the LibDems lost 10 of their 11 seats, with only Alistair Carmichael holding on with an even slimmer margin than David Mundell’s.

At the Holyrood election this year, the SNP lost six seats to tactical voting, Labour lost 13 seats and the Tories gained 17 seats; the Greens also gained four seats, and the LibDems were static. Now, who would join a Better Together campaign which had lied and cheated in 2014? Ruth Davidson, or Gordon Brown creeping out of the crypt? There will still be a hostile media, and the Tories' right-wing majority in Westminster. That’s it? I think Better Together is undone. They fell apart – Humpty Dumpty jumped off the wall.

Jim Lynch, Edinburgh

I AGREE with Dave Williams that the quick crossword is a devilish little beast (Letters, September 24). Best to have a copy of The Concise Oxford Dictionary to hand. Staying with crosswords and with a nod to Hugh Macdonald’s essay (Mind your language! Why do Scots hate Scots? The National, Sep 24), one of my favourite crossword clues in The Observer Everyman crossword was “A part of England well known in Scotland, four letters”. I leave it for like-minded buffs to solve it.

Terry Keegans, Beith

ON Saturday the news that horses can communicate with us came higher in the news list than that of the RAF stepping up Daesh air strikes! I’m not sure either are true!

Christopher Bruce, Taynuilt


Letters I: Can Jeremy Corbyn unite a divided Labour? Don't bother asking Kezia Dugdale