The Tories kicked off yesterday’s reaction to the budget with a straight-up lie.

No promise has been broken. The basic rate HAS been frozen, at 20p, and low and middle earners HAVE been protected. Nobody who’s on less than £33,000 – which is considerably higher than the average (£23K) or full-time median (£28K) wages – will pay a penny more tax, and the large majority of Scots will in fact see a small tax cut.

(The weasel-wording justification is of course that pretty much everyone who pays tax pays some of it at the basic rate, and are therefore in a sense “basic-rate taxpayers”. But “nobody will pay any more tax” wasn’t the promise. Indeed, the manifesto pledge is a pretty clear implication that better-off people WOULD be taxed a little more.)

But the numbering was interesting. In order to try to obscure that fact that most Scots would be paying LESS tax as a result of the budget, the Tories went with a nicely vague but high-sounding “hundreds of thousands” for the number of people who’d lose out a little. And then the Scottish media went to work.

First STV dutifully parroted the Tory line without adding any more information:

Then the Daily Mail firmed it up to three-quarters of a million (which for what it’s worth actually seems to be the correct number):

By the time it got to the Herald it was a million:

This, though, was a flat-out lie. In the tiny print it revealed that it meant “more tax than in England“, not an actual increase in tax, and we already know what stupendously dishonest and disingenuous framing that is, because there’s more than one kind of tax and overall most Scots taxpayers do better than their southern counterparts AND get better services to boot (free tuition, free prescriptions, free personal care, free bridge tolls, free hospital parking, etc etc).

But the biscuit, as ever, went to the Scottish Daily Express:

The Express managed to combine inflating the Herald’s number by 60% with making it even more of a lie, eschewing the Herald’s cowardly ambiguous use of “more” (which can serve as both a relative and an absolute term) and turning it into an absolutely categorically untrue claim of “tax hikes”.

We’ve been unable to work out how the Express arrived at that 1.6m figure. Its own coverage says, in two separate articles, that “45% of the country’s 2.5m taxpayers will pay more from next April than if they lived south of the border”.

But 45% of 2.5m is 1.12m, not 1.6m. We can only hope that the 500,000 brand-new taxpayers the Express has just conjured out of thin air will be making a substantial unexpected contribution to the Scottish Government’s coffers, and that next year most people’s taxes will go down even more than they did yesterday.