Below is a tweet made by Scottish Labour yesterday.

For the true version, keep reading.

Politicians like to take advantage of the fact that almost nobody pays much attention to what actually goes on in the day-to-day business of parliaments, and of the fact that anyone who IS interested will have to navigate painfully labyrinthine records in order to try to find out.

Both Holyrood and Westminster have acres and acres of transcripts which constantly refer to texts and amendments but don’t tell you what they are, forcing you to hunt through their websites to find the actual thing the debate is about.

In this case we’ve dug them all out so you don’t have to, but it’s a miserable chore and politicians like it that way, because it means they can utterly misrepresent events as Labour have in the tweet above.

This is the Official Report of the debate referred to in the tweet:

Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2015

This is the relevant section of the welfare bill under discussion:

And these are the defeated Labour amendments:

We’ve provided you with the direct links so that you can easily follow the debate and reach your own conclusion, but on that proviso we’ll summarise it for you now:

1. The Scottish Government has an emergency welfare fund, administered by local councils, of £38m. It provides that councils can give extra help to people in exceptional need, and that that help can be given as cash, or other assistance.

(For example, a large family could be given a washing machine if their own breaks down and they can’t afford a replacement. Sometimes councils can make the emergency fund go further by buying such items in bulk at discount prices.)

2. Labour wanted to remove councils’ flexibility to decide in what form to give the help, by having the Scottish Government impose rules forcing councils to give such help in cash only.

3. The SNP disagreed and voted down the amendments. Councils will retain the ability to decide which forms of help are most suitable in each individual case.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. We don’t doubt that Ken Macintosh’s motives were entirely honourable and aimed at reducing the stigma often felt by those in need. There’s a respectable argument to be made for both positions, and readers can decide for themselves whether the Scottish Government took the correct view.

But to misrepresent the outcome as “the SNP teamed up with the Tories to demand welfare payments are made in vouchers” is dishonesty of staggering proportions. (Quite apart from anything else, the SNP control just two out of 32 Scottish councils outright, and seven others in coalitions. Labour run 16, four of them outright.)

All the SNP argued for was that councils should have the flexibility to choose. In other words, they wanted to keep the power devolved to local authorities – something Labour have been demanding for years – rather than impose one-size-fits-all diktats from Holyrood that ignored specific circumstances on the ground.

The inner workings of government are often far too opaque. But to use that fact to tell absolute lies, counting on not being found out because it’s too much work for voters to establish the truth, is the sort of behaviour that’s got Scottish Labour into the parlous state in which it currently finds itself.

The people of Scotland just don’t seem to trust a word they say any more. And the party has nobody to blame for that but itself.