I SUSPECT that Rachel Reeves went to bed on Wednesday evening, relieved that her first (and I hope last) Budget day had gone well. If she did, then she was wrong. The legacy of this Budget will last for a long time, and Scotland needs to take note of the messages buried within it.

To work those messages out, I thought about what she had to say in the same way that I think about the detective novels that I read to relax. When reading them, I always wonder whether the author started their plot from the beginning and let the novel develop from there or started from the end, determining at the outset who would die and why and how, and then worked back to create a plot that supported their ultimate destination.

Having noted what Rachel Reeves delivered, I have no doubt that she is in the second of these camps.

That is because the one and only thing that is clear from everything that she had to say was that she was determined to ensure that her Budget was balanced in accordance with the fiscal rules that she had created for herself.

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Very obviously, nothing else – whatever it might be, and whether it might be important for society, the economy or all the people who will have to live with the consequences of her decisions – mattered to her in any way.

All that mattered to Reeves was that she could claim that she had complied with her own fiscal rules.

Worryingly for all of us, the reality is that the detail of those fiscal rules is largely inconsequential.

History has already taught us three things about such rules that we can be quite confident will be as true for Reeves’s version as they have been for all earlier versions. The first of these lessons is that these rules are invariably broken. The second is that all Chancellors do, as a consequence, rewrite their rules in a vain attempt to hide their obvious failings so that they can claim success when that is unjustified. Thirdly, since everyone knows that this will happen, fiscal rules are irrelevant in the real world. They only exist as part of a futile Westminster game played out by our major political parties at great cost to us all.

All that being said, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, Reeves will, on the basis of their meaningless economic forecasts (which are meaningless because they are notorious for getting these things wildly wrong), balance her books.

Reeves did, therefore, award herself a gold star and promoted herself to the top of the class with the sort of smug smile that we are beginning to associate with Labour ministers.

It’s just a shame that the consequence of her doing so will be so devastating for the people of Scotland.

So, what did she do that was so bad?

Firstly, she increased the rate of national insurance paid by anyone employing someone in Scotland. Since national insurance is not a devolved tax, Westminster can decide to do this, and there is nothing that Holyrood can do about it.

What this charge represents is a tax on work. It is particularly punishing for smaller businesses where employment costs tend to represent a much higher proportion of overall business expenditure than is the case in larger businesses, and since, overall, Scotland has smaller businesses on average than England does, this is especially punishing for the Scottish economy.

Secondly, this move is also especially punishing on the Scottish Government because for very good reasons, there are more public-sector employees in Scotland than there are in proportion to its population in England. There seems, so far, to be no proper comprehension of this in Westminster or compensation for it in the already paltry settlement that Reeves has offered to Holyrood as a part of her Budget proposals, meaning that there will have to be greater austerity in Scotland as a consequence than would otherwise be the case. I consider this unforgivable.

Thirdly, that Budget settlement for Scotland was, in any case, not enough to make up for the shortfalls in allocations in earlier years. Scotland still remains behind where it should be.

Fourthly, ignore all the protests that are being made by the wealthy about how terribly unfair Reeves has been to them. They are shedding crocodile tears because the truth is that Reeves was incredibly generous to the wealthy in this Budget when the national insurance charge to which I have already referred will eventually impose significant penalties on those on lower pay and, most especially, on young people looking for a job that might now be denied to them because of the increased cost of employing them.

Fifthly, therefore, note that inequality is bound to increase as a result of this Budget. Reeves did not even mention it during her speech, so indifferent is she to the problems that it creates, which cause so much stress in Scotland.

Sixthly, note too that there was very little in this Budget on climate change. When Scotland should be at the forefront of renewable energy generation, the best that she had to offer was one green hydrogen plant, while the funds offered to Scotland for investment purposes were too small to make any significant difference on this issue.

Making a difference was, however, not what this Budget was about.

The biggest lesson of all from this Budget was that Reeves really did not care what was proposed. All that mattered to her was going through a process, the endpoint of which was her supposedly balanced Budget rule being complied with.

The message to what Labour call “working people” from this Budget was that Labour do not care about you. If they did, they would not have imposed a new tax on work. Things, though, are worse than that. They also do not care if your children use a nursery or if you need to use social care because the cost of these is also going to rise because of that increase in the tax on wages.

That means increased inflation is also a possibility.

And if you were hoping for some good news with regard to interest rates, the forecast is that whilst inflation is meant to remain around 2% for the next four years, bank interest rates are expected to be at around 4%, meaning that there will be no relief for homeowners or for those who rent because rents are high precisely because of high interest rates.

If you thought the cost of living crisis might be over when Labour got into office, think again then.

And also think again if you believed that Labour were going to deliver growth.

(Image: PA)

The Westminster-based Office for Budget Responsibility has suggested that for all the extra taxes that Labour are going to collect, there will be no significant growth because those taxes are being used to balance the Budget and not for social purposes.

You will, then, be paying the price for Reeves’s economic vanity.

Most Budgets are bad, but some end in tears.

This one is most definitely in that second category, and all because Reeves does not care about anyone but herself.