A few months ago the excellent family-run ironmonger in a village near where I live announced it was seeking a buyer. More recently it has announced that in January it will close for good.

The result is that a village loses its most prominent shop, the one which was most likely to bring in people from further afield who would then make purchases at other shops in the village or buy a coffee in a café or have lunch at a restaurant.

Jobs will be lost, footfall will drop, spending reduce and the ratchet of decline tightens a further notch. Meanwhile, our beloved national water company has closed the road through the village, its main street, for several months in the run-up to Christmas, just to help things along.

Who is to blame for the hollowing out of our towns and villages? Mostly it is you and me. Sometimes we go to one of the shopping malls or a city centre but increasingly we buy on-line from the comfort of our sofa. The absolutely must-have printer cartridge is then delivered by somebody, always in a rush, the next day, having been plucked from a warehouse near Nottingham and driven overnight to a depot in Scotland.

People shake their heads and sigh at the decline in our high streets. Some feel sheepish; could they have done more to support the local retailer? But it is too late. More than once in the next year we will wish that we could just pop in to the local store and get what we need but we won’t be able to, it has gone for good.

Read more: Guy Stenhouse: Scottish Government should be ashamed of these joke indy papers

If you ask people if they would like their locality to be more economically vibrant they almost invariably say yes.

A key reason for the rise of the man in the white van and the crushing of your local shop is that how we tax things is far behind the curve of technological change. Shops don’t vote so they get taxed a lot for virtually no service whatsoever. The burden of excessive business rates is killing our local high streets but the Scottish Government does nothing meaningful to relieve the pressure.

You cannot blame councils; they are so starved of money by the Scottish Government that they have no choice but to take cash where they can get it. The pathetic SNP Government stunt at its last conference to cancel any rises in council tax was ludicrous. The councils needed that money and much more; everybody knows it.

Why is there no delivery tax so that when you order your printer cartridge and ask for next-day service rather than a standard postal delivery, you pay tax for that very non-environmentally friendly request ? A £10 tax charge for your inefficiency seems fair to me and you might then have gone to a local shop for it instead.

There are some things only the UK Government can do effectively but if the Scottish Government was not so intent on picking fights with the UK Government and worked with it instead , such a change could easily be made and would help level the playing field a little.

There is no excuse though for the Scottish Government not to reform the taxes on property in Scotland. The SNP often wails about the ability to use the mysterious levers of power but in relation to property it has that power right now and conspicuously does nothing sensible with it.

Stamp duty is a stupid tax, more stupidly structured as land and buildings transaction tax (LBTT) in Scotland than it is in England. LBTT deters economic activity by raising too much from the wrong people. Why not cut the rates of LBTT with a top rate of no more than 5% but levy the tax on both buyers and sellers? The burden would be more equitably shared, more money is raised and the people who most need help in the housing market (the young trying to buy) would be helped the most.

Council tax with its odd bands which have remained fixed for each dwelling for over 30 years means that areas such as Edinburgh which have seen rapid house price growth pay increasingly less as a proportion of the value of their house than people in areas where house prices have stagnated. Is that fair? Of course it is not.

The Scottish Government needs to reform council tax. Not to some pie in the sky tax on all your wealth or yet more tax on your income but a simple fair mechanism which levies council tax as a proportion of the value of your house and, because council's need more money, raises more.

Read more: Guy Stenhouse: We need to be honest about the true costs of net zero

Why not exempt the first £50,000 of the value of a house from council tax then charge 1% on the value of the rest? This would be simple as well as fair and it would raise much more money. Business rates could then be reduced to encourage more commercial activity on our high streets.

Go on Humza Yousaf, do something useful for a change.