As Scotland adjusts to the Chancellor’s budget, the political battle begins with an eye to next May’s Holyrood elections. Brian Taylor examines the options.

Bear in mind, if you would, that this is not the budget the Chancellor intended to present. Her earlier aim was to cut the benefits bill: to limit the winter fuel allowance, to curb disability payments.

She abandoned these plans not from strategy or philosophy. No, this was the purest form of political pragmatism. Survival.

Unaccountably, Labour MPs were less than pleased with changes which official figures said would push thousands more into poverty.

The discontent grew, resulting in a bizarre counter-coup when sources presumably adjacent to Downing Street indicated that the PM would fight any attempt to oust him.

And so we end up with a push-me-pull-you budget — a mass of internal contradictions, rather than a coherent strategy.

Entirely understandably, the Prime Minister has sought to project an alternative image. It was, he insisted, his burning aim to tackle child poverty. Hence the removal of the two-child benefit cap.

It was left to the wicked media to inquire why, if that were truly the case, he had not acted sooner in his premiership to remove this sanction.

Now, I do not doubt that Sir Keir and Ms Reeves genuinely want to tackle poverty. However, I believe their immediate motivation in this budget was to placate restless MPs on their own side.

Beyond that limited but crucial constituency, this budget statement may end up pleasing nobody.

Just look at the contradictions.........

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