Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson a couple of hours ago:

Just a few teeny tiny issues with that one.

Firstly, as we all know by now, there was no “tax grab” in the budget. Not one single Scot had their taxes increased in any way whatsoever. Indeed, a person whose wages haven’t changed will pay slightly LESS tax this year than they did last year, because their personal allowance has gone up and everything else has stayed the same.

(That didn’t stop the Sunday Times from punting the same lie, of course – sneaking it casually into a story about something else entirely, in the way the media likes to do with things it knows aren’t true but which it wants people to believe anyway.)

And secondly, the budget was revealed on Thursday, which was the 2nd of February. But when did Panelbase ask people for their voting intentions?

Ah. A week to two weeks BEFORE the tax measures were known. And it’s not even the first time Davidson’s had some trouble reading the data from that same poll:

Because as all alert readers will know, what it actually found was support for a second referendum at some point within the next two years is currently at 50%, not 27%.

And there’s even more. Despite Davidson’s claims, the poll DOESN’T show a 3% drop for the SNP and a 6% rise for the Tories. Compared to the previous Panelbase poll on Westminster voting intention – in September 2016 – the SNP haven’t dropped at all. They’re still on the same 47%, with the Tories up just 3%, from 24%.

So that’s THREE falsehoods in a single tweet – there was no “tax grab”, the poll was before the budget not after it, and the change numbers are wrong by a factor of 100%.

Nice try, though. We think we begin to see where David Torrance gets it from.