THE Greens say that their recent Scottish Parliamentary Debate regarding their proposed abolition of the Council Tax is about fairness.

But nothing could be further from the truth and this can be quantified by looking at their past records when it comes to tax.

The budget that their party supported earlier this year means that now all Scots earning over £26,000 a year will pay more in income tax than their counterparts in the rest of the United Kingdom.

This change will not just hit those on high incomes but those on more modest salaries, too.

Over the past few months, it has become increasingly clear that the SNP, the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats all want to put up taxes significantly and this is a fact; however, only the Scottish Conservatives have the confidence to challenge this cosy consensus.

Even the Scottish National Party acknowledges that there is no point raising taxes if they bring in less money than before.

They, thankfully, dropped their plans to increase the top rate of income tax to 50 pence accordingly; however, the Greens are ideologically obsessed and this is precisely the wrong time to be looking at changes that could lead to more tax hikes in Scotland.

Last year, UK growth was at 1.7 per cent but the Scottish economy is forecasted to have grown by just 0.7 per cent and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has forecasted that Scotland will have the lowest economic growth rate in the developed world over the next three years.

Moreover, the Scottish Government's own figures suggest that the Scottish economy will be over £17billion smaller by 2022 than it would have been, had it grown at the same rate as the rest of the UK. These figures should be of great concern to all parties; tax hikes would simply exacerbate these problems.

This is not to say that there is no place for a debate around local taxation. It is clear that while there is a strong public awareness of council tax, there are undoubted flaws with a system based on property values from 1991.

At present, however, as a MSP who spends a lot of time amongst real people, constituents and residents alike, I am all too aware that there is very little public appetite for reform of the Council Tax itself, which is perhaps one of the reasons why the SNP Scottish Government has failed to deliver on their promise of reforming Council Tax despite being in government for the past eleven years.

Since 2003, they have promised to replace Council Tax with a fairer system based on the ability to pay. Some form of this pledge was repeated in their 2007 manifesto, in their 2011 manifesto and in their 2016 manifesto, but still there has been no change. We in the Scottish Conservatives support widening the range of taxes that local authorities can use.

There are, for example, strong cases for allowing councils to keep all of their business rates income to incentivise them to grow their economies locally through rates relief initiatives and for devolving Land and Buildings Transactions Tax to councils given the clear links between LBTT and council tax and business rates.

The recent call by the Greens to reform local taxation is less about this, however, and more about securing further tax rises through the backdoor and we will not support such changes