Who will cut tax?

I noted this letter from reader Neil Craig:

As he states later, since our total corporation tax receipts are £2.1 billion, a cut of one-third would be £700 million. Scottish Enterprise already costs us £500 million, for less obvious effect, and Holyrood has regularly had an underspend of £500 million. This is, therefore, clearly affordable.

Neil's writing about the SNP's proposals for cutting corporation tax in Scotland.

The Tories Conservatives have their own tax cutting plans as Peter MacMahon observes today:

Monteith and McLetchie would privatise Scottish Water, move schools spending to the centre to cut council taxes, slash £250 million from Scottish Enterprise, abandon community schools and set up state-funded academies. And they would, they say, be able to give pensioners a council-tax discount, cut the business rate, employ more police and fill some more of the many pot-holes in Scotland’s appalling road system. THERE are flaws in the plan. First, it assumes that the Executive’s promise of £745 million in "efficiency gains" by 2007/08 can be met - an assumption that many Labour MSPs privately doubt. Unlike the Executive, though, Monteith is prepared to say that his plans would involve getting rid of some 1,000 civil servants, which would certainly go some way towards meeting the efficiency target.

But a couple of weeks ago Mr MacMahon wrote this:

Mr McLetchie clearly believes in moving slowly. The danger of that is that he could be over-taken. The Scottish National Party is beginning to move towards the centre and beyond by looking not just at low business taxes but at low personal taxes. Serious people in the SNP are beginning to think about the benefits of small government. It may not be long before the SNP, like other nationalist parties across Europe, continues formally to support "independence" but pragmatically aims for office based on running a low-tax, pro-enterprise Scotland with greater devolved powers. And that could put the Scottish Tories out of business.

I'm still not convinced that there's enough support among the SNP's membership and elected politicians to push through a tax cutting agenda at Holyrood. There again, the Tories Conservatives have failed to make a proper case for a smaller state during their time in opposition at Westminster - that's the cause of the Howard Flight debacle. It looks likely that Labour will win again at the general election. If the Tories Conservatives have any sense they would then ditch their NuLab-lite stance and adopt a radical libertarian position. I have a horrible feeling that they'll be "frit" and thus continue down the road to irrelevancy and destruction. In Scotland would the SNP then become a genuinely pro-business party while the Tories Conservatives drift off into the sunset?