The Wee Ginger Dug is off this week, so The Jouker will be filling in.

RISHI Sunak has done it again – he’s made himself the unavoidable focus of The National’s 7pm REAL Scottish Politics newsletter.

This time, it’s been confirmed that Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty had US green cards while he served as Chancellor. This means that, for 19 months, he was declared a “permanent US resident” for tax purposes.

It follows fresh on the heels of the revelation that Murty had taken up “non-domiciled” status, with India her apparent home, reducing her tax bill. They are worth millions and millions and millions and millions of pounds, while families across the UK struggle to survive amid the cost of living crisis.

Perhaps Sunak misunderstood what “permanent” means – he potentially thought popping off on holiday to California (as he has done during this Easter recess) at one of his many homes qualified.

Anyway, the couple no longer have green cards. Which is really a bit of a shame. Given the heinous cost of living crisis that has been so exacerbated under Sunak’s leadership, he’s more than welcome to take up living in America full time if it means someone better will come into the post. Looking at the ranks of the current Tories, that isn’t too likely, admittedly.

The non-dom status being claimed by Murty meant she could avoid UK tax on foreign earnings, on the grounds that she would one day be returning to live in India.

If this sounds like a bizarre arrangement, that’s because it is. Non-domiciled status was put in place in 1799 by then prime minister William Pitt the Younger, allowing wealthy Brits abroad – such as plantation owners – to avoid taxation. Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the MPs to vote for it at the time.

More recently, in 2021, let’s remember Dominic Raab defending Tory MP and former attorney general Sir Geoffrey Cox making almost a million pounds from a role in an overseas tax haven.

He took a role advising the government of the British Virgin Islands in an inquiry launched by the UK Foreign Office. The Tory MP for Torridge and West Devon was reportedly paid up to £900,000 for his work while he took advantage of lockdown rules to cast proxy votes in the Commons while working 4000 miles away from the Caribbean islands, as The National reported at the time.

Meanwhile, Sunak himself, after the Pandora Papers leak, denied that London's central role in tax avoidance schemes was a "source of shame". He said there was a strong record, in fact.

There’s no suggestion of anything illegal being done here. That’s the case for the non-dom status, and that’s the case for the Green Card. This is a fact worth acknowledging because of how central it is to the issue. It is the system that is broken. The system has been manipulated to make all of this entirely possible.

Scotland cannot, at present, vote to put an end to this. Our voice will be overruled at Westminster. Only independence can deliver us even the option of tackling the massive wealth inequalities highlighted by these issues. That’s not a conclusion that will be new to anyone reading this newsletter. However, on the doorsteps, what we have been gifted is a new, neat example of one rule for them, one rule for the rest of us – and when indyref2 rolls around, let’s see how that resonates.

PS. We know Douglas Ross loves a media stunt involving a red card. Let's see if the BBC give him a call for his views on green ones.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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