WHEN income tax was first introduced in 1799 by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, it was a temporary fix to help pay for Britain’s Napoleonic wars.

It was occasionally abolished but ultimately reintroduced to pay for the Crimean War, before becoming a permanent levy on citizens from the mid-19th century onwards. The lesson being, once a genie gets out of the bottle it’s hard to put it back in.

Income tax never granted anyone three wishes, it just kept going up and spawning siblings like purchase tax on luxury goods, later to morph into the regressive VAT on just about everything.

Governments like having more powers. And there are no better powers than absolute ones.

Last week the Scottish Government introduced its Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) Bill. In a nutshell, it wants to give Scottish ministers the permanent power to impose future lockdown restrictions on citizens, businesses, schools and universities in Scotland.

In justifying the need for these powers we’re told: “The bill will also give Scottish ministers powers to allow them to build resilience against future public health threats.”

That makes no sense to me whatsoever. The creation of permanent draconian ministerial powers for an unknown future threat doesn’t build or create anything.

If we have a future public health emergency ministers can easily obtain additional powers from the Scottish Parliament – through our normal democratic process.

The Parliament has dealt with all manner of emergency legislation over the last 20 years. Why would you need to hang onto emergency powers forever?

This is reminiscent of the 1539 Statute of Proclamations which allowed Henry VIII to rule by decree and effectively bypass Parliament. Why should Scotland regress to the rotten old days of rule by executive edict? Aren’t we a modern, inclusive democracy?

I should add that the new Coronavirus Bill has some good ideas – like retaining efficiencies of communicating electronically where convenient, pre-action requirements in private tenancy evictions and abolishing mandatory evictions in the private sector.

That said, there were those of us who cautioned the Scottish Government against the creation of mandatory eviction grounds in the first place seven years ago. Such warnings were largely ignored.

I recall describing the then 2015 Private Housing (Tenancies) Bill as creating a menu for private landlords to evict tenants with no defence or test of reasonableness. Likewise, the fair rent measures in the bill were ill-conceived, and to this day have never been used.

Why don’t we prioritise legislation to help private sector tenants and others in society cope with the cost-of-living crisis?

Curiously, the bill aims to help tackle the backlog of cases in the criminal justice system. I see no evidence that it would do that.

We have witnessed the long withering decline of the criminal defence bar with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) and public bodies offering bigger salaries than high street firms can afford to pay.

COPFS is recruiting trainee solicitors over the next two years with salaries of £30,000 per annum and a 26% employer’s contributory pension. Private firms or community law centres can’t match that.

Younger lawyers are leaving the defence bar – how can you tackle court backlogs when you won’t have any defence lawyers?

We have a growing inequality of arms for ordinary citizens to access justice in Scotland and ultimately enforce their legal rights and challenge unlawful public law decisions. The Coronavirus Bill offers nothing to resolve these problems.

Perhaps the greatest contradiction in the Scottish Government’s desire to keep lockdown powers is how out of kilter this is with the Council of Europe’s (CoE) 12 principles of democratic governance.

Explain to me how the bill meets the CoE participation principle? How does it ensure “all voices, including those of the less privileged and most vulnerable, are heard and taken into account in decision-making, including over the allocation of resources”?

Or the CoE principle of openness and transparency? – “There is public access to all information which is not classified for well-specified reasons as provided for by law.”

Or the CoE principle of accountability? – “Decisions are reported on, explained and can be sanctioned.”

The past two years of Covid rulemaking has seen parliamentarians and the public excluded from access to the full data and reasons why particular decisions were made. Decisions that had profound consequences for removing individual liberty and the ability of businesses to operate.

Often there had been no real parliamentary scrutiny of the exercise of draconian powers by Scottish ministers. Making this type of arrangement permanent is unconscionable. You cannot have an emergency for life.

This bill will open a Pandora’s box for the health and wellbeing of our democracy; it is wholly ill-conceived, unjustified and egregious.