Yesterday we brought you news of the Scottish Mail On Sunday’s deep concern that the new Scottish budget might cost wealthy old people cashing in a £600,000 pension pot as one lump sum as much as £3,000 in extra tax. It was a heart-rending tale, but today we have one even more harrowing.

That’s our old Scotland In Union pal Merryn Somerset Webb writing in “the UK’s best-selling financial magazine” Money Week, and she was furious.

She started off with a tear-choked plea on behalf of people who were barely making ends meet on just six times the national average full-time wage – people like the Prime Minister, who currently gets only £150,402 (plus perks):

But then she decided the seriousness of the situation needed more emphasis, so she doubled up just to really drive the point home.

In case you’re not quite sure what you just read, that was someone claiming that a family on an annual income of £300,000 might leave Scotland in a fit of piqued injustice because their earnings were no longer enough to afford a nice holiday.

And the reason they’d do so is that two successive years of vile SNP tax changes have left them in a situation where that level of income had been effectively reduced to the barren pittance of just £296,452 a year (or a barely-survivable £5,701 a week).

(Heavens, just imagine how hard they must work, unlike some useless scrounging layabout nurse, teacher, firefighter or train driver on less than £33,000 pa, let alone a minimum-wage cleaner or shop assistant or office worker that barely even bothers getting out of bed for their two-hour commute.)

We hope readers aren’t too traumatised to carry on. We should probably have issued a trigger warning at the start of the article. But the weird thing is that not too long ago Somerset Webb was urging the Scottish Government to do exactly what she’s just attacked it for – use its new tax powers to raise extra money for public spending.

It’s a puzzler. But in a week when the Guardian related the tale of a family who’d only been able to eat because they’d been invited to a funeral, and as Universal Credit rolls out across more and more of the UK, bringing Victorian levels of destitution with it, we hope readers will spare a thought for the poor skiers.