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Hi, you're listening to Podlitical, BBC Scotland's podcast that brings you an inside look at the big stories coming out of Hollywood and Westminster.

It's four minutes past two on

Thursday the 5th of December. I'm Phil Sim, a journalist based at Hollerood and today I'm joined by.

I'm Lindsay Buse, a journalist also based at the Scottish Parliament.

And I'm Joanne Selsa, Deputy Director of the Fraser of Vandler Institute at the University of Strathclyde.

And you can always tell it's a budget episode when we've called upon

the Fraser of Allender Institute to come in and answer all of our really difficult questions.

And I explain all the things that we don't understand. So thank you, Joie, for taking the bullet for

Mary Spowage on this occasion. So yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, budget always a day of big

sort of analysis of the fiscals and what all of the under the hood sort of figures all mean.

But, Lindsay, I feel like this was a budget actually where politics was very much at the fore.

Because the big thing we've come out of talking about it is, is about the two-child cap, which is the rabbit out of the hat.

But it's actually technically not really a budget proposal in the short term.

Is it more of a long-term political promise?

Yeah, it was a very political budget, wasn't it?

And this was the big reveal that came, I think, pretty much right at the end of Shona Robeson's speech. She had already

talked about child poverty, about the measures the government was taking in that area. And then at the

end of her speech, we got this announcement that the Scottish government wants to mitigate to

effectively end the two child cap in Scotland. however, does not have the data that it needs

from the Department of Working Pensions in the UK government in order to do that, doesn't

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