We must admit, folks, that our initial reaction to this Scotsman headline from a couple of days ago was simply a weary sigh of “Oh FFS, here we go again”.

Blaming the Scottish Government for a private company’s decision to close down its plant and make hundreds of Scottish workers redundant is just the sort of ludicrous negative spinning we’ve come to expect from the country’s press over the past seven years, so this latest example just seemed like nothing more than par for the course.

But there turned out to be a little more to it than that.

Because a quote from the Scottish Government’s business minister Paul Wheelhouse in the article made our ears prick up a little.

And then an alert reader put a little meat on the bones of it. Because it turns out that the company had an incentive to move the jobs down to the east coast of England – namely £1.3m in UK government cash.

The number of jobs to be created and safeguarded in Grimsby by the grant money awarded by Westminster a couple of years ago was given by the report as 450 – by a remarkable coincidence exactly the same number that are being lost in Annan.

And now it looks rather like the plan to create and safeguard those jobs in return for the cash was simply to move them down from Scotland. There appears to be a direct and explicit link between the money paid by the UK government to Young’s and the company’s decision to close the Annan plant and shift its operations to Grimsby.

Indeed, the SNP had warned about exactly that possibility at the time – although it had suspected that the job shift might chiefly impact on the other major Young’s centre in Scotland, in Fraserburgh:

And sure enough, hundreds of jobs at the Fraserburgh site were lost just months later (although it was kept open with a drastically reduced staff of 250, down from 900).

So in those circumstances, blaming the Scottish Government for failing to keep the plant open seems even more wildly unfair than it usually would. And readers might well feel that some questions could be asked not of Scottish Government ministers but of the local Conservative MP and Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell, whose administration oversaw the awarding of the grant which has now stripped over 1000 jobs away from Scotland, seemingly entirely by prior design.

We won’t hold our breath too hard for the Scotsman to pursue that line of questioning.