The gigantic-clown-shoed bunglemuppet that is Scottish Tory MP Ross Thomson was galumphing around social media yesterday, quoting a notoriously dim-witted Yoon troll to the effect that the Scottish Government could (and therefore presumably should) use its own money to compensate the “WASPI women” – a group who’ve been robbed of years of rightful pension payments by the UK government changing the rules after they’d already qualified for their pensions.

Which throws up a whole series of questions.

1. Pensions are reserved to Westminster, which is where Thomson sits. If he believes these women have been wronged – and they have – then shouldn’t he be demanding and fighting for his own party’s UK government to right that wrong, rather than calling for the Scottish Government to clear up the mess using funds that are supposed to be for its devolved responsibilities?

2. If the Scottish Government were to do so, WASPI women elsewhere in the UK would be worse off than their Scottish counterparts, despite their having paid the exact same pension contributions to the UK Treasury. As a Unionist, why does Thomson think English and Welsh and Northern Irish women don’t deserve the same treatment as Scottish ones?

3. If the matter was to be resolved – as Thomson seems to want – by the Scottish Government unilaterally using its new welfare powers to create a benefit to “top up” the WASPI women’s pensions, how would he propose to deal with women who may have worked for years on either side of the border?

Would they only be compensated for those years that they’d worked in Scotland, creating yet more sub-categories of UK women with lesser pension entitlements than other seemingly-identical ones?

4. And of course, which devolved Scottish public services would Thomson cut, or which taxes would he hike, to pay for picking up Westminster’s tab?

It all sounds very tricky. No wonder he’s so angry about it.

But as it happened, the issue was yet another that we’d raised in our most recent Panelbase poll, so let’s see what the Scottish public thinks.

Oh. Just a third of Scottish voters – and only a tenth of Tory voters – think that it should be the Scottish Government’s job to extract more money from Scottish taxpayers to subsidise UK government policy decisions.

By an enormous margin – over 7 to 1 – the Scottish Tory voters that Ross Thomson was elected by oppose his demands that Holyrood should have to replace money taken away by Westminster by putting up Scottish taxes.

And interestingly, most Scottish Labour voters also reject their own party’s policy of tax increases to fund public services like increasing public-sector pay and mitigating the bedroom tax (a Scottish Government policy Labour tried to claim credit for after years of doing nothing about it).

Only SNP voters – by almost 2 to 1 – along with a very small plurality of Lib Dems are actually willing to pay more tax to protect Scotland from Tory cuts.

We don’t imagine any of this will penetrate Ross Thomson’s tiny sub-prehensile brain. But the Scottish people seem pretty clear that they’re not willing to be held hostage by Westminster in an attempt to blackmail Holyrood into bankrupting itself and damaging the SNP government.

As we warned endlessly in advance, of course, this was always the true purpose of giving the Scottish Parliament “more powers” after the independence referendum. And the Unionist parties tried to be more subtle about the plan by retaining the Barnett Formula while cutting the budget in other ways. But it doesn’t look like voters are going to be so easily fooled.