Rachel Amery in Lossiemouth with the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

Transcript

00:00 Hi, my name is Rachel and I'm the Scotsman's political correspondent. Right now I'm in

00:09 a very sunny, lossy mouth and that's because the Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, has been visiting

00:13 the RAF base here. Now primarily he was here to thank the troops ahead of Christmas but

00:18 we were able to get a bit of a chat with him about the budget talks coming up on Tuesday.

00:21 Now when Shona Robison, the Finance Secretary, unveils the budget it's widely expected that

00:25 she's going to introduce a new income tax ban for higher earners, so those between £75,000

00:30 and £125,000 in earnings. Rachel Sunak said that would be disappointing, also pointing

00:35 out that perhaps the government should not be raising taxes due to the cost of living

00:39 crisis. Very keen to point out the fact that Scotland is the highest taxed part of the

00:43 UK during the discussions that we had with him. We also spoke very briefly about Michelle

00:48 Lone, I'm sure you must have seen the interview recently with Laura Koonsberg on the BBC where

00:52 she admitted that she does stand to benefit financially from the PPE Med Pro deal that

00:58 was made during the pandemic. He wouldn't be drawn too much on the specifics of the

01:01 case but did say that he's taking the matter incredibly seriously. So we'll have more on

01:06 that on the Scotsman's website throughout the day and of course when it comes to the

01:09 budget we'll have more on that as well on Tuesday.

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