How you feel, the decisions you make; often these are more affected not by where you are now but by where you think you will be in the future. The direction of travel is key.

This is something the Scottish Government does not understand. Perhaps they don’t want to understand but they should.

The ministers in the present Scottish administration are, from top to bottom, of remarkably low calibre. Few have done anything of note, to have actually had to satisfy customers to keep a real job, to understand that all the nice things they would like to spend money on require a profit to be made. They have little idea of how a market economy works.

There are roughly 40,000 top rate tax payers in Scotland. From April they will now pay a rate of tax increased by one percentage point, with National Insurance on top that means half of each extra pound they earn is taken by the state. A few years ago it was 47 per cent, then 49 per cent, now it is 50 per cent. In England it remains 47 per cent.

After allowing for what the experts call "behavioural change" the amount raised by the extra top tax rate will be a........

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