We were hoping to come up with a subtler headline than that, but trying to analyse today’s media in fine detail is a bit like trying to translate a complex scientific report from Mandarin into Latin, when it’s taped onto the front of a locomotive that’s hurtling directly towards you at 125mph and you’re standing on the track with a telescope.

There’s horror as far as the eye can see on this morning’s newsstands, but the most despicable and inexcusable is the atrocity of a front page disfiguring the Daily Record. The cover of “Scotland’s Champion” is crammed with falsehoods and idiocy from top to bottom, but that’s not the half of it.

It starts before you even get to the main story. The sports flash in the top right steals a joke we made on Twitter last night, but which now makes absolutely no sense in the light of Ajax’s victory over Celtic lifting them off the bottom of their Champions’ League qualifying group. That’s just the madness warm-up, though.

“SUNK”, screams the gigantic headline over a picture of the Govan shipyard, above a paragraph which actually says “our Clyde yards were saved”. It then goes on to warn that another 2400 jobs are at risk “if orders for destroyers are scuppered by a Yes vote in next year’s referendum”.

Firstly, nobody’s ordering any destroyers. The Type 26 ships the UK will be ordering at some point this decade are frigates. The work-experience chimps apparently manning the Record these days appear to have confused them with the Type 45 destroyers BAE built in the last decade and which are already in service.

But the “threat” posed by independence is a shameful fabrication. In so much as it has any basis at all, it’s founded in claims which were repeated like a mantra by a succession of Unionist politicians across all of last night’s TV and radio coverage, and which are in themselves untrue on almost every level.

Ironically, as Scottish MPs fell over themselves to insist that the UK had never built a warship outside its own shores, only defence secretary Phillip Hammond – perhaps driven by some lingering public-school vestige of “British fair play” – mumbled the qualifier “in peacetime”. As alert readers of this site established yesterday, the Royal Navy HAS in fact commissioned warships from abroad, most notably Canada and the US, during the World Wars.

(The Unionist bias on last night’s broadcasts about the subject, incidentally, was crushing. Five anti-independence politicians were joined by a shop steward most recently seen in a “Better Together” leaflet sent out prior to a local election in Govan, with only the SNP’s Stewart Maxwell put up to contest the stream of groundless assertions about the catastrophic effect of independence on Scottish shipbuilding.)

But that semi-true statement, clung to by the likes of Alistair Carmichael, Michael Moore, Ian Davidson and Anas Sarwar like a drowning man clings to a piece of driftwood, is of no relevance anyway. Nobody cares what happened in the past, and in the future the Type 26s will HAVE to be built in “foreign” yards no matter what.

Carmichael ties himself in knots in the Record over that point:

Let’s take a moment to pick our way through that. Portsmouth is about to be closed as a shipbuilding concern, its skilled and highly-specialised workers scattered to the four winds. They’ll have to try to find jobs elsewhere, and if they can’t the government will have them working in Poundland for nothing in double-quick time.

Portsmouth, then, will NOT be “well placed” to pick up the Type 26 orders. It won’t have the staff, and presumably it’ll be fully occupied with maintenance work anyway, that being its new role. Restarting ship construction there with retrained workers would take years and cost uncountable millions.

So no matter what happens in September 2014, the UK (or rUK) will be building warships abroad. It might be on the Clyde, it might be in Poland, it might be in South Korea (where it already builds Royal Navy support vessels), it might be in India or Turkey, it might be in any number of places. But where it definitely WON’T be is in Portsmouth, or anywhere else in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.

A competitive tender would of course still risk the jobs at Govan and Scotstoun. But the Clyde has other advantages beyond proximity and experience. The UK government’s shipbuilder of choice is BAE Systems, and BAE Systems will still be a British company no matter what the referendum vote.

The EU defence procurement rules which Carmichael and others cited yesterday as “law” are covered by Article 346 of the Lisbon Treaty, which states:

It seems reasonable to posit that a UK government might legitimately consider it important to its security interests (and indeed its political ones) that its warship contracts be handled by a British company, no matter where that company chose to locate its business. The ships, after all, will still be “specifically military” items of hardware and the Treaty’s exemption will therefore still apply to them.

So it in fact simply ISN’T true that Scottish independence would legally result in the Type 26 contract being put out to international tender. The rUK could (and very likely would) seek a derogation from civilian procurement rules so that it could award the contract to BAE – not out of love for an independent Scotland, but because it made military, political and economic sense to do so.

But more than that, the location of any particular shipyard, inside or outside of the UK, is a complete red herring. Article 346 doesn’t say “You’re exempt from the procurement rules if you’re using contractors in your own country.” It says “You’re exempt from procurement rules if it’s for military or security contracts.”

So far as we can make out, the UK government could commission BAE to build the Type 26s anywhere it wanted without having to put the deal out to tender, because it’s the hardware that’s exempt, not the location.

Back on the newsstands, meanwhile, it’s business as usual.

Above is the Sun’s coverage of the story in England.

And that’s the rather different spin it puts on the story for Scottish readers.

The media in general is hugely confused about how to portray the decision. That piece in the Sun in England (by former Mirror hack Kevin Schofield), opens with the line “Ministers were last night accused of pandering to Scottish nationalists after it was announced that shipbuilding will end in Portsmouth – while Glasgow yards are spared.”

But on the BBC website yesterday, political correspondent Nick Robinson gave a very different and rather more logical account:

It doesn’t seem rationally possible that keeping the Clyde yards open is “pandering to Scottish nationalists”, yet closing them would also have been a “political gift to Alex Salmond”. Only one of those things, at best, can be true. Perhaps the deputy political editor of the Daily Mail can help us out as a tiebreaker?

Impressively, Tim Shipman manages to play for both teams in the space of five minutes. Firstly the decision is “pandering to Scottish separatists”, then mere moments later it’s being taken in order to STOP Scotland from leaving the UK, by “buying it off”. Make your mind up, Tim.

(It would be remiss of us not to also include another couple of tweets for local colour, the first of which mysteriously vanished from Mr Shipman’s account at some point yesterday morning just before he renamed it.)

Over on the Telegraph, the paper’s deputy editor Benedict Brogan was rather clearer about which side the politics were coming down on, saying that the South of England “has learned today just how far David Cameron is prepared to go to keep the Scots sweet and maximise the chances of a vote in favour of the Union”.

The BBC’s coverage, meanwhile, has been astonishing. Despite Portsmouth and Glasgow losing almost identical numbers of jobs (940 to 835), and therefore the burden falling disproportionately highly on Scotland by a factor of 10, the narrative on the state broadcaster’s reporting was entirely of Portsmouth closing to “save” Scotland.

On Newsnight last night (20m 5s), the voiceover solemnly intoned “The government says this isn’t a matter of English jobs versus Scottish jobs. But for workers leaving this site in Portsmouth, it might feel very much like that”, while the studio pundit described shipbuilding economics and Scottish independence as “inseparable”.

At one point on this morning’s BBC Breakfast, presenter Charlie Stayt even referred to the non-Portsmouth job losses as taking place “Er… across the UK” (on the grounds that a tiny handful affected Filton in Bristol as well as Govan, Scotstoun and Rosyth).

We’ll leave the last word, though, to Ian Davidson, Labour MP for the Govan area, speaking on Scotland Tonight (7.10) on the day the Clyde lost 25% of its workforce:

RONA DOUGALL: Ian Davidson, 800 jobs have been lost here, but Govan and Scotstoun stay open. IAN DAVIDSON: On balance, this is an excellent day for Scottish shipbuilding.

When Lou Reed died earlier this month, there was the usual speculation about whether his song “Perfect Day” was really about heroin addiction or just a nice romantic song for a lover, or both.

Ian Davidson’s idea of an “excellent day”, we suspect, refers more to his own political outlook than to that of the workers of BAE Govan and Scotstoun.