Last week the stark reality of the Tory Brexit bombshell was laid bare.

The Chancellor’s long-awaited autumn budget statement – outlined in the House of Commons on Wednesday - revealed just how much the economic outlook for the UK has deteriorated in the wake of the UK-wide vote to leave the EU.

Future economic growth projections have been revised downwards. And unemployment, inflation and borrowing projections have all been revised upwards. Livings standards look set to be severely squeezed as well.

And what about that infamous £350m-a-week for the NHS promise that was plastered across the Leave campaign battle buses during the referendum?

Well, it turns out that, rather than delivering more money, Brexit is actually costing us around £225 million a week in extra borrowing.

Immediately after the autumn statement was published, the Tories rushed out a news release boasting that there was to be an extra £800 million in funding for Scotland.

But even this isn’t the good news that they made it out to be.

Not only is the £800 million actually spread over five years, but it is of course completely dwarfed by the drastic cuts that the Tories have been making to Scotland’s budget since they took office.

While any extra funding is welcome, this £800 million simply means that, instead of our budget being £3.3 billion lower by the end of the decade than it was in 2010, it will be £2.9 billion lower.

And a glaring omission from the Chancellor’s statement was his failure to announce a single extra penny for the NHS. That would have unlocked more funding for Scotland’s hospitals – and is a missed opportunity.

On top of that, the fact that the planned cuts to Universal Credit will remain largely unchanged means that this budget is still taking money away from the poorest in our society.

A couple of examples provided by respected independent think tanks really brought home to me what all of this means for individual families.

The Resolution Foundation estimates that a dual-earning family with three children on low incomes will be £3,650 worse off by 2020. Likewise, they expect some lone parents to be up to £2,640 a year worse off.

The response from the Institute for Fiscal Studies was even more hard-hitting – they warned that the outlook for workers’ wages was “dreadful”, noting that people would earn less in real terms in 2021 than they did in 2008.

That’s an astonishing statistic – and completely blows apart any claim that the Tories have engineered an economic recovery for working people.

This Tory government has been in power for six years now. In all that time, we have consistently argued against their austerity agenda – warning that it will cost jobs, stifle growth, and as a result, make it harder to reduce the deficit.

This was Philip Hammond’s first budget statement as Chancellor, and he had an opportunity to chart a different course – but he chose not to.

Of course, the uncertainty caused by Brexit is only compounding the problems of years of austerity.

Strangely, in his statement the Chancellor described Brexit almost as if it were something being done to him.

He may not personally have supported Brexit, but make no mistake - neither he, nor Ruth Davidson, nor any other Tory can deny, or entirely escape responsibility for the consequences of that vote.

Having called a referendum simply to help quell dissent in Tory ranks, the Tories then failed to plan properly for the result. Now we are seeing the consequences of that failure to plan.

What’s most frustrating of all, of course, is that Scotland didn’t vote for any of this.

A Tory government, overwhelmingly rejected by the people of Scotland and with just one MP north of the border, is now trying to inflict on us a Brexit which we have also overwhelmingly rejected.

It is against this backdrop that the SNP government will be publishing our own budget in a few weeks’ time.

Despite the challenging circumstances, we will do everything we can to support our economy, tackle inequality and provide high quality public services for all – underlining the very different approaches our two governments take.

But if there is one overriding message from the UK autumn budget statement last week, it is the importance of safeguarding Scotland’s place in Europe and our membership of the single market – and we’ll be doing everything we can over the coming weeks and months to make sure that happens.