The Scottish Daily Mail has been working itself into a froth this week over the idea that the Scottish Government doesn’t intend to match George Osborne’s increase in the upper-rate income tax threshold from £42,000 to £45,000.

Central to the complaint is that rejecting the increase will hurt what the Mail calls “the squeezed middle” and “middle earners”, including “nurses, teachers and police”.

There are, of course, several ways of defining “middle”.

Below is a graph of UK earnings distribution, created by alert Wings contributor Alistair Davidson from this UK government data.

We’ve highlighted in red the group who’ll be affected. And sure enough, in one sense (because it truncates the X-axis of the graph) you can say they’re in the “middle”.

But alert readers will notice that there are a lot more people on the left-hand side of the graph than the right-hand side. In fact, the Mail itself admits that less than 15% of the population is in what it calls the “middle” group paying the higher rate of tax. This graphic is taken from today’s article in the paper:

That would mean that the Mail was defining “low, middle and high” earners like this:

That’s a pretty strange definition of “middle” to most people’s eyes. But in fact it’s even more bizarre than that. Because most of that definition of “middle” – which encompasses people earning up to £150,000 – will barely even notice the Scottish Government’s freeze. If you’re taking home £3000 a week you’re not going to be very hurt by not getting an £8 tax cut, and you’re certainly not in the “middle” of anything.

The people who will feel missing out on the cut the most are those on over £42K but under £45K – the ones on whose behalf the Mail is howling about being “dragged” into the upper bracket in Scotland while their counterparts in England escape it – make up just 2% of the population.

Which means that what the Mail is really talking about is this:

Nothing in the paper’s story is technically untrue. “Middle” is an extremely versatile word, as readers who remember being taught about the mean, mode and median in school will know. (Even if most of us no longer recall what those terms mean.)

Strictly speaking, the Mail hasn’t told any lies. It’s just presented the truth in a way that creates a massively false impression. And that, folks, is why you should never believe the headline.