IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/crpeac/v21y2010i3p195-210.html

The neoliberal project—Local taxation intervention in Scotland

Author

Listed:
  • Cooper, Christine
  • Danson, Mike
  • Whittam, Geoff
  • Sheridan, Tommy

Abstract

This paper is concerned with one of the central economic aspects of neoliberalism namely taxation. The shifting of the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor has been one of the raft of neoliberal economic reform policies. However, there has been a growing social movement in the UK against such a regressive form of taxation. This was led by a socialist political party in Scotland.11The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). Up until the last Scottish General Election in 2007 the SSP had 6 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), but due to an internal split the SSP lost all its seats in the Scottish Parliament. However, many of the key elements outlined in the Scottish Service Tax (SST) Bill, proposed by the SSP, were included in the Scottish Nationalist Party's (SNP) Bill put before the Scottish Parliament in 2008 to replace the regressive Council Tax. This party devised a new taxation system which was specifically designed to reverse some of the economic inequalities brought about by the neoliberal turn. The new form of taxation, the Scottish Service Tax formed a bill (the Council Tax Abolition and Service Tax Introduction (Scotland) Bill) which was put before the Scottish Parliament in February 2006. This paper, taking a political-economy perspective, sets the possibilities presented by the bill within the context of neoliberalism.

Suggested Citation

  • Cooper, Christine & Danson, Mike & Whittam, Geoff & Sheridan, Tommy, 2010. "The neoliberal project—Local taxation intervention in Scotland," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 195-210.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:crpeac:v:21:y:2010:i:3:p:195-210
    DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2009.11.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235409001282
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.cpa.2009.11.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2003. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(1), pages 1-41.
    2. Hunt, Herbert III & Hogler, Raymond L., 1990. "Agency theory as ideology: A comparative analysis based on critical legal theory and radical accounting," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 15(5), pages 437-454.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrew, Jane & Cortese, Corinne, 2013. "Free market environmentalism and the neoliberal project: The case of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 24(6), pages 397-409.
    2. Morales, Jérémy & Gendron, Yves & Guénin-Paracini, Henri, 2014. "State privatization and the unrelenting expansion of neoliberalism: The case of the Greek financial crisis," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 25(6), pages 423-445.
    3. Zhang, Eagle, 2024. "Accounting and statecraft in China: Accrual accounting for effective government rather than efficient market," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    4. Andrew, Jane & Baker, Max & Cooper, Christine & Tweedie, Jonathan, 2024. "Wealth taxes and the post-COVID future of the state," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    5. Tuck, Penelope A.L. & de Cogan, Dominic & Ormeño-Pérez, Rodrigo, 2024. "Devolution, counter-conduct and territoriality: The case of Tax Business Rates in the United Kingdom," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(6).
    6. Zhang, Ying & Andrew, Jane, 2014. "Financialisation and the Conceptual Framework," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 17-26.
    7. Schmiel, Ute, 2024. "Wealth taxation of individuals and equity: A political-cultural market theory perspective," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    8. Young, Amanda & James, Kieran & Hassan, Abeer, 2022. "The role of regressive sugar tax in the soft drink industry levy (SDIL): A Marxist analysis," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    9. Drujon d'Astros, Caecilia & Morales, Jeremy, 2024. "The silent resistance: An ethnographic study of the use of silence to resist accounting and managerialization," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    10. Tweedie, Dale, 2024. "Inclusive capitalism as accounting ideology: The case of integrated reporting," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    11. Boll, Karen, 2014. "Shady car dealings and taxing work practices: An ethnography of a tax audit process," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 1-19.
    12. Apostol, Oana & Pop, Alina, 2019. "‘Paying taxes is losing money’: A qualitative study on institutional logics in the tax consultancy field in Romania," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 1-23.
    13. Annisette, Marcia & Prasad, Ajnesh, 2017. "Critical accounting research in hyper-racial times," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 5-19.
    14. Morales, Jérémy & Sponem, Samuel, 2017. "You too can have a critical perspective! 25 years of Critical Perspectives on Accounting," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 149-166.
    15. Ballantine, Joan & Kelly, Martin & Larres, Patricia, 2020. "Banking for the common good: A Lonerganian perspective," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 67.
    16. Farrar, Jonathan, 2011. "Tax fairness in Canadian government budgets: How fair is ‘fair’?," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 365-375.
    17. Tweedie, Dale & Luzia, Karina, 2023. "In place, with power: (Re)conceptualising accountability in national non-government organisations," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Aurelie Charles & Damiano Sguotti, 2021. "Sustainable Earnings: How Can Herd Behavior in Financial Accumulation Feed into a Resilient Economic System?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(11), pages 1-19, May.
    2. Maida, Agata & Pezone, Vincenzo, 2024. "CEO Pay Disclosure and Within-Firm Wage Inequality," IZA Discussion Papers 17243, IZA Network @ LISER.
    3. Till Treeck, 2014. "Did Inequality Cause The U.S. Financial Crisis?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(3), pages 421-448, July.
    4. Wookjae Heo & John E. Grable & Barbara O’Neill, 2017. "Wealth Accumulation Inequality: Does Investment Risk Tolerance and Equity Ownership Drive Wealth Accumulation?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 133(1), pages 209-225, August.
    5. Naguib, Costanza, 2019. "Estimating the Heterogeneous Impact of the Free Movement of Persons on Relative Wage Mobility," Economics Working Paper Series 1903, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    6. Arun Advani, 2022. "Who does and doesn't pay taxes?," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 43(1), pages 5-22, March.
    7. Fontanari, Claudia & Levrero, Enrico Sergio & Romaniello, Davide, 2024. "A composite index for workers’ bargaining power and the inflation rate in the United States, 1960–2018," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 682-698.
    8. Bradley Hardy & Timothy Smeeding & James P. Ziliak, 2018. "The Changing Safety Net for Low-Income Parents and Their Children: Structural or Cyclical Changes in Income Support Policy?," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 55(1), pages 189-221, February.
    9. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose & Neil Lee & Cornelius Lipp, 2021. "Golfing with Trump. Social capital, decline, inequality, and the rise of populism in the US," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 14(3), pages 457-481.
    10. Emma Hooper & Sanjay Peters & Patrick A. Pintus, 2021. "The impact of infrastructure investments on income inequality: Evidence from US states," Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(2), pages 227-256, April.
    11. Raj Chetty & Nathaniel Hendren & Patrick Kline & Emmanuel Saez, 2014. "Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 129(4), pages 1553-1623.
    12. Majda Benzidia & Michel Lubrano & Paolo Melindi-Ghidi, 2024. "Education politics, schooling choice and public school quality: the impact of income polarization," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 31(6), pages 1640-1668, December.
    13. Anthony B. Atkinson & Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2011. "Top Incomes in the Long Run of History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(1), pages 3-71, March.
    14. Maya Eden & Paul Gaggl, 2018. "On the Welfare Implications of Automation," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 29, pages 15-43, July.
    15. Ihsaan Bassier & Ingrid Woolard, 2021. "Exclusive Growth? Rapidly Increasing Top Incomes Amid Low National Growth in South Africa," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 89(2), pages 246-273, June.
    16. Sarah Burkinshaw & Yaz Terajima & Carolyn A. Wilkins, 2022. "Income Inequality in Canada," Discussion Papers 2022-16, Bank of Canada.
    17. N. A. Kravchenko & S. D. Ageeva & A. I. Ivanova, 2023. "Investments for Sustainable and Inclusive Development of the Regions of Asian Russia: Problems and Prospects," Regional Research of Russia, Springer, vol. 13(3), pages 470-479, September.
    18. Johannes König & Christian Schluter & Carsten Schröder, 2025. "Routes to the Top," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 71(2), May.
    19. Chiara Binelli, 2008. "Returns to Education and Increasing Wage Inequality in Latin America," Working Paper series 30_08, Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.
    20. Schäfer, Andreas & Prettner, Klaus, 2016. "The fall and rise of inequality," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145806, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:crpeac:v:21:y:2010:i:3:p:195-210. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/critical-perspectives-on-accounting/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.