The efforts by the Scottish Tories to pull off some frankly ambitious shenanigans over today’s Budget continued overnight in increasingly bizarre fashion.

As with the Poppy Scotland funding, the party appears to be quite openly punting the line “We knew all along that this was possible and the right thing to do, but we deliberately punished Scotland for not electing enough Tory MPs”, in what can only be reasonably interpreted as an attempt at blackmailing future electorates.

The Scottish media, meanwhile, is doing its best to sell the issue as “a plague on both their houses”, holding the Scottish Government and UK government equally culpable for the mess. So let’s see what we know.

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1. As a reaction to budget pressures, all the main Scottish parties pledged at the 2011 Holyrood election that if elected they’d amalgate Scotland’s police into a single force. The SNP, Labour and Tory manifestos all proposed the move.

2. Neither the Tories nor Labour offered any proposals regarding how the new single force would be funded or how VAT issues could be averted.

3. The UK government undoubtedly did warn the Scottish Government in advance about the VAT implications, but Scottish ministers either decided they were bluffing, or hoped to force them to back down in the face of public opinion, or they calculated that the savings would significantly outweigh the losses in VAT.

(The last point certainly seems to be the case – the amalgamation is claimed to have saved £130m a year, compared to the annual loss through VAT of around £25m, and none of the opposition parties challenged those figures at the time, or indeed since.)

4. Very late in the day (in June 2012, just months before the new Police Scotland came into being), the Unison trade union proposed a funding model which would have split the cost of policing 50/50 between the Scottish Government and local authorities, and thereby theoretically possibly get around the VAT problem.

However, this was widely held to be unworkable for a number of reasons, chiefly that it would have required 32 local authorities to agree the exact division of a police bill of around £500m a year between them, all with their own competing agendas, demands, local pressures and political axes to grind.

(The impossibility of the situation would have been greatly amplified a couple of years later when local government fractured and several authorities left COSLA.)

5. Throughout this time the UK government – which had been in office since 2010 – had it in its power to take the measures that it’s finally taken now and exempt Police Scotland from VAT (by means of a Section 33 order) like the UK’s other forces. Under successive Prime Ministers it chose not to do so, and the Scottish Tories regularly attacked the Scottish Government for “playing petty political games” by asking.

While Scottish Labour, of course, just blamed the SNP for everything as usual.

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So what the evidence suggests is that amalgamating Scotland’s police forces into one was by any rational calculation the right thing to do in any event – saving over £100m a year even after taking the VAT ramifications into account – and that the Tories now accept that an exemption was merited, just as the Scottish Government had claimed all along despite the Tories rubbishing the idea for five years.

Voters are being asked to accept that the UK government was only able to understand this point when an extra 12 Tory MPs were elected in Scotland.

It also appears that despite admitting it made the wrong decision, the UK government inexplicably does NOT plan to refund the £140m in VAT paid over the five years Police Scotland has been in existence. A story claiming otherwise in Politics Home has since been deleted:

And news outlets are reporting that the cash will stay in the Treasury’s coffers as – it can only be surmised – a punishment to Scotland for not electing Tory MPs sooner.

So what the Scottish Tories are describing as “clearing up the SNP’s mess” is in fact the UK Conservative government doing what it should have done in the first place, but also keeping £140m of Scotland’s money that it stole in the meantime and demanding that Scots should be grateful that they’re not stealing any more.

It’s an audacious line, we’ll give them that.