I’M PROUD to represent a county that offers much for visitors – VisitScotland calls it ‘Scotland in miniature’ – and also welcomes people to live and work here.

Labour's budget – the first to be delivered by a woman – has particular resonance in East Lothian, but maybe not as the Chancellor intended.

The cruel two-child cap and petty-minded winter fuel benefit cuts will continue to harm East Lothian’s most vulnerable. Rather than raising income tax on the wealthiest, Labour is putting the burden on employers, increasing both national insurance contributions and the minimum wage. A double blow for local businesses which employ the lower paid, this threatens jobs growth. Our farming community is feeling threatened also. Many local businesses have been in touch already.

Labour’s broken promises are already coming at us fast.

The budget also reveals broader realities. Scotland will, allegedly, receive an extra £1.5 billion in 2024 and a further £3.4 billion in 2026 – the devil, of course, is in the detail. But remember this: in 2023-24, tax receipts raised in Scotland for the UK treasury totalled £88.5 billion. Since the 2016 Brexit disaster, the Scottish Government has aligned itself with small European democracies (Denmark, Finland, Ireland), aiming to use the powers of independence to borrow for investment in infrastructure, jobs and green energy.

Anti-independence opponents, including the Labour Party, have rejected or criticised this strategy. The BBC's economics editor Faisal Islam says that Labour’s budget and increased spending of £70bn a year “amounts to two per cent of total UK economic output and brings the size of the British state close to European levels. This is half funded by... a significant increase in borrowing”.

Applying to rejoin the EU and borrowing to invest in the economy and social wellbeing are central to independence. Will Scottish Secretary Ian Murray still maintain his 2022 claim that the SNP cannot find a “viable proposition” for independence, and will Labour admit Brexit was a disastrous mistake that has fatally shrunk the UK economy?

Kemi Badenoch, elected by UK Tory members as party leader and potential PM, is the first black woman to lead a major UK party; unlike Scotland or Wales, however, Westminster Labour has never been led by a woman or person of colour. An interviewer pressed Kemi repeatedly to explain why she thinks the UK is “a voluntary union... but people can’t simply push a button and leave”.

Voting is a hard-won democratic right, but Kemi can’t say how a “voluntary union” might be ended. Her winning 53,806 votes by Tory members falls well short of current SNP membership figures; like her eight 21st-century predecessors, Kemi’s authority in Scotland is already on a shoogly peg.