Gavin Mark Hamilton debuted in Test No. 1471 in Nov 1999, against South Africa. In both the innings he was caught by Pollock off Alan Donald for duck and did not take any wicket, and was dropped. But later went on to play 38 One dayers for Scotland, scoring in all the matches in 1999 WC ! Scotland is part of the United Kingdom and covers the northern third of the island of Great Britain.It shares a border with England to the south, and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the south-west. In addition to the mainland, the country is made up of more than 790 islands. The Kingdom of Scotland emerged as an independent sovereign state in the Early Middle Ages and continued to exist until 1707. Scotland subsequently entered into a political union with the Kingdom of England to create the new Kingdom of Great Britain. Within Scotland, the monarchy of the United Kingdom has continued to use a variety of styles, titles and other royal symbols of statehood specific to the pre-union Kingdom of Scotland. In 1997, a Scottish Parliament was re-established, in the form of a devolved unicameral legislature comprising 129 members, having authority over many areas of domestic policy. Scotland is also a member of the British–Irish Council, and sends five members of the Scottish Parliament to the British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly. Tartan is a pattern consisting of criss-crossed horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colours. The Scottish variable rate (SVR) was a mechanism which would have enabled the Scottish Government to vary (down or up) the basic rate of UK income tax by up to 3p in the pound. The power was never used (and indeed was allowed to lapse by the Scottish Government in 2007. When legislating for the Scottish Parliament, a number of matters were reserved by the UK Parliament at Westminster. One such reserved matter was taxation; however, this had been a key point in Scottish negotiations relating to parliamentary control. As a means of compromise, Westminster afforded the Scottish Parliament the ability to vary income tax, which was subsequently given the consent of the Scottish electorate in the second question of the 1997 devolution referendum. Therefore, the Scotland Act 1998 granted the Scottish Parliament the power to vary income tax by ±3p in every pound. This power was often referred to as the tartan tax, a phrase first used by Conservative financier and politician Michael Forsyth as a way of attacking the power, using the idea of 'tartan' to get across the idea that it would be an extra tax on Scots alone.
14th Dec 2017.