In the past, when your local authority chased you for outstanding council tax you had two choices: pay up promptly or get taken to court. Now it appears there is another option, thanks to the recent pronouncements by Scotland’s Justice Minister.
You could protest that you are being persecuted and compare your predicament to that of historical civil rights movements, then hope to walk away scot free. This might sound far-fetched but Kenny MacAskill, who is responsible for law and order in this country, has just said as much.
He likened, on Twitter, the plight of blacks in the wake of the American civil war to poll tax defaulters in modern day Scotland:
“In southern states of USA post civil war poll tax and other ruses were used to disenfranchise black people. In 2014 we have Aberdeenshire.”
His strange intervention came days after the First Minister issued an amnesty to all those people who still haven’t paid their poll tax more than two decades after it was abolished.
This followed a decision by several town halls to use their records updated when unprecedented numbers of people registered to vote in the independence referendum to track down £300 million of debt, mostly from the poll tax boycott of the early Nineties.
Some 97% of Scottish residents registered to vote before the referendum, with a last-minute surge as Alex Salmond called on the “missing million” some who hadn’t voted for 25 years to grab the chance to have their say.
Tales of queues forming outside council offices in the final weeks of the campaign gladdened the hearts of nationalists, but little did they realise that the officials inside the town halls were rubbing their hands in glee.
Figures within the debt recovery business were quoted as saying the referendum was a “heaven-sent opportunity” to retrieve money from people who had become impossible to trace. And most taxpayers probably agreed that that would have been a welcome outcome from September 18, especially if the funds returned to the public purse were used to pay for much-needed frontline services.
Councils such as Aberdeenshire quickly announced their intention to pursue debts using the new electoral roll. They were backed by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla), which said they felt a “moral obligation” to those who diligently pay their taxes.
But first Mr Salmond, and then Mr MacAskill, were livid. Perhaps they saw that their legacy as heroes of the independence campaign would be forever tarnished if many of those people they signed up to vote were subsequently hounded over unpaid debts.
An SNP spokesman said it was fantastic that hundreds of thousands had taken part in the decision on Scotland’s future, and that it would be “cynical” to try to scare them and “thus disenfranchise them”.
It’s interesting that the nationalists seem to have made a link between their own supporters and tax dodgers, but there must be a lot of law-abiding “yes” voters who will not want to be associated with those who avoid paying their dues.
It could be argued that Mr Salmond, who startled BBC Scotland listeners when he called a radio phone-in, is demob happy.
But Mr MacAskill, unless he’s keeping his plans up his sleeve, remains in charge of justice for the foreseeable future and should be held to account for his remarks.
The idea that participating in the democratic process for the first time is an achievement in itself, so marvellous that it exonerates you from your civic responsibilities, is an odd one, not shared by the bulk of the electorate.
People who have always been on the electoral roll and scrimped and saved to pay their taxes on time, may not be as enthusiastic as the Justice Minister is to reward new voters by writing off their debts.
Because the poll tax protest was engineered by the Left against Margaret Thatcher it is seen by firebrands as a political rather than a criminal act.
But Mr MacAskill should behave as if he is in government. Once you let one lot of crooks off the hook, where do you stop?