We had to be out most of yesterday, so we didn’t have time to cover a story which broke in the morning in several UK papers. 24 hours later, though, we can still find no mention of it in the Scottish media, which remains fully occupied in filling its pages with recycled wittering drivel about the pound.

This is a worrying state of affairs, because yesterday’s story is of direct concern to an awful lot more Scots than a hypothetical scaremongering fantasy about currency.

It appeared in the Independent and Telegraph, and noted a disturbing plan:

“Hundreds of millions of pounds from ring-fenced Whitehall health and education budgets could reportedly be “reclassified” to protect Britain’s Armed Forces from the next wave of Treasury spending cuts. The Defence Secretary Philip Hammond, who has previously championed increased welfare cuts to protect his budgets, is said to have been in talks with the Treasury over proposals to transfer money earmarked for the Department of Health and Department for Education and use “it to ease the impact of cuts on the Ministry of Defence”.”

It’s a fairly self-explanatory piece, but anyone who’s been paying attention to this website over the last few months will immediately realise the implications for Scotland. Health and education are devolved areas of government, and therefore subject to the Barnett Formula for establishing the Scottish Government’s annual block grant.

In short, Scotland gets 11.76p of block grant for every £1 spent in England on devolved matters. It therefore follows that if half a billion pounds is taken out of the English side and diverted to a non-devolved issue like defence (which generates no Barnett funding for Scotland), the Scottish Government will lose out to the tune of almost £60 million.

This, of course, comes on top of the cuts to the block grant which will result from the increasing privatisation of the English NHS. (A subject you won’t have heard about on the BBC, which is too busy.) The net effect will be hundreds of millions of pounds sucked out of the Scottish Government’s budget – which it will have to make up from elsewhere – and into an area where Scotland already sees hundreds of millions of pounds a year less than its share of spending.

The latest proposals are far from unique. Scotland already contributes billions of pounds to “UK” projects which don’t benefit Scotland in any way yet don’t generate Barnett consequentials in compensation. The Olympics were a high-profile example, but others ignored by the Scottish media have also cost Scotland huge sums.

The money lost to the block grant by UK government chicanery since the 2011 election alone would have funded universal services in Scotland – “free” prescriptions, concessionary bus travel, personal care for the elderly – for years. This week’s revelations are pretty small beer in comparison.

But while the money involved was still significant (it would have been enough, for example, to cover the cost of the bedroom tax to Scotland’s social tenants, with enough left over to set up a Scottish cancer drugs fund), the real story is why you have to come to sites like this in order to read anything about it.