We’ve never tried to put a precise breakdown on how much of the falsehood pumped out daily by the Scottish political media is due to deliberately misleading spin and how much of it is simply due to journalists who are really, really terrible at their jobs.

But there’s plenty of both in today’s Times.

The paper’s #2 Scotland story today, on the Scottish Government’s replacement for stamp duty, took two reporters to write yet at no point actually identifies the “experts” quoted in its own headline. The piece rambles on for almost 700 words without ever providing the names of the people who allegedly used the terms “ill-suited” and “poor” to describe the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT).

An alert Wings reader managed to track down the source of one of the microquotes to a report in the Scotsman:

That, however, wasn’t a reference to LBTT itself as a policy, but to the model used to predict how much revenue it would raise. And even the Scotsman couldn’t specify who had used the word “poor” or in what context, so we’re still in the dark on that one.

But then the Times piece got worse. Towards the end it eventually roped in a couple of Some Arsehole types to relate two heart-wrenching case studies of hypothetical woe about the poor innocent victims of the policy.

We know, readers, we know. We can hear your weeping and rending of garments from here over the thought that people buying a SECOND home for £500,000 (more than three times the average Scottish house price) might get landed with a hefty tax bill.

(LBTT purposely penalises second-home purchase in order to reduce taxes for people buying smaller properties to actually live in. The tax on a £500K primary home would be just £23,350 – only £8000 higher than the figure for the rest of the UK.)

So we can chalk that one down to political spin – most people only own one home (at the most), so quoting the much higher tax for a SECOND home is a deliberate attempt to create a misleading impression, and one which is particularly disingenuous when foreign-owned “investment” homes that nobody actually lives in are widely held to be largely responsible for the UK’s housing crisis.

But the Times then moves on from questionable spin to outright lies.

The second quote in the article is clearly a reference to people moving their primary home from the country to the city – we know this because we’re explicitly told they’re selling up their country property. As such, the LBTT on a £750,000 house purchase would be £48,350 rather than “the best part of £70,000”.

That’s £21,000 more than the stamp duty that the buyers would pay in the UK. It’s certainly a significant amount of money, but that’s because it’s supposed to be. The openly-stated point of LBTT, as we’ve noted, is to redistribute the tax burden on house purchases in Scotland from poorer people to wealthier ones.

But what that £21K difference means is that our prospective movers would in effect have to downsize from their £750K country pile to an Edinburgh house worth a measly £729,000. The horror! The humanity! That sort of feeble pittance is only going to get you a miserable six-bedroom, two-bathroom (plus two WCs and an ensuite shower), double-garaged dump in Merchiston, 10 minutes walk from a mainline railway station.

Or this filthy, crumbling five-bed detached hovel in the notorious slum zone between the Meadows and Holyrood Park, with a gated double driveway, two ensuite master bedrooms, a large garden and stained-glass windows.

We don’t know about you, readers, but we’re struggling to hold back the tears. It’s to find the money to reverse this shameful, unfair tax that the Tories (Murdo Fraser is quoted extensively in the story) quite rightly want to claw back child benefit from the greedy working single mothers trousering a juicy £13 a week for their third child.

Now, we’re happy to admit that the absence of the headlined experts from the Times article does provide some support for the theory that the paper’s journalists are merely abominably, almost comically, useless at their jobs. But in the light of the later bits, we’re rather more persuaded by the idea that they’re misinforming Scots on purpose.