LAST week's UK government budget was intended to be clever - in the sense that the public wasn't meant to rumble what the chancellor was really up to.

Thankfully, though, folk are not daft and the ink was barely dry on George Osborne's speech when the harsh reality of the cuts that he announced began to sink in.

The fact is that this budget was a con trick - and a very cruel one at that.

That probably shouldn't be too surprising given that this was the first purely Tory budget for nearly 20 years. But it is still a bitter pill to swallow.

In a nutshell, this budget hammered working people and made it a racing certainty that poverty and inequality will get worse, not better, over the next few years.

Tax credits are designed to help people who work hard but who, through no fault of their own, don't earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

Of course, we should be trying to lift wages so that a decent day's work delivers a decent day's pay - and therefore reducing the need for the government to step in with tax credits.

That is exactly why the Scottish Government is putting so much effort into extending the real living wage across Scotland.

But until we get to a stage where low wages are no longer a feature of our economy, people need help. To slash that help at the stroke of a pen, as the Tories are doing, doesn't mean that wages will suddenly rise - it just means that families will have less money to live on.

And that means more people - including children - will live in poverty.

Since the budget was delivered, independent experts have confirmed that the effect of it will be to leave 13 million households across the UK worse off.

Three million of these will be worse off to the tune of £1000 per year.

The Scottish Government's own analysis backs this up.

We estimate that, across Scotland, 250,000 households will lose £1000 per year.

So, at a time when we are trying to help people lift themselves out of poverty, the chancellor has just dug the poverty hole even deeper. It really is shameful.

And that's before we get to the con trick.

George Osborne hoped that he could hide the pain of his cuts behind a supposed wage increase for the low paid.

In a flourish at the end of his speech, he announced that he was introducing what he described as a "national living wage" for people aged over 25 - and said that it would rise to £9 per hour by 2020.

He really must think we button up the back.

The problem for George Osborne, though, is that the real living wage campaign has been gathering pace in Scotland.

That means people have a fairly good idea of what the living wage level really is - and they know that £9 per hour by 2020 doesn't fit the bill.

The fact is that the living wage now is £7.85 per hour - by 2020, a real living wage would be more than £10 per hour.

And, if the chancellor's cut to tax credits are taken into account, it would have to be in the region of £12 per hour.

So what the chancellor announced last week is not a living wage at all - at best, it is a higher minimum wage for people over 25.

But that's not where the con trick ends.

Because even such an increase in the minimum wage is not enough to compensate people for the cuts in tax credits.

The brutal truth is that the chancellor is taking away much more than he is giving back through higher wages - and he is taking it from the people who can afford it least.

People at the lowest end of the income scale will be worse off as a result of this budget and they will be hit much harder than those with bigger incomes.

In other words, it will make the country more unequal at a time when evidence from around the world is showing that greater equality is not only good for individuals, but good for our economy too.

So, all in all, this has been a miserable budget from an ideologically driven Tory government.

Those struggling to make a decent living will find life even harder.

Astonishingly, Labour has said that it won't oppose most of these cuts.

The SNP takes a different view - we will continue to stand up for fairness and equality.