Of all the tropes of the 2014 independence referendum, few were fought over more repeatedly and bitterly, or more dishonestly by the No campaign, than the saga of the Type 26 frigates. The UK government promised Clyde shipbuilders hit hard by years of neglect and job losses that it would build 13 of the state-of-the-art vessels at BAE’s Scotstoun yard, but only if Scots voted No.

Once that vote was secured the number very swiftly dropped to eight, accompanied by a whirlwind of misinformation insisting that there had in fact been no reduction. (As keen social media users will know, this brazen lie was pushed particularly hard by the militarist website UK Defence Journal.)

So we were interested to see a story in today’s Scotland On Sunday which showed how desperate the Unionist side is to cling on to the ships as a future blackmail tool.

The paper has chosen to present the news with a super-positive spin, as you can see from the headline. But the text of the article tells a very different story.

Because the web version of the piece is a little more honest:

Wait a minute – HOW many?

What was once 13 frigates is now three, less than a quarter of that number. The tame GMB trade union, long a mainstay of the No campaign, was pathetically grateful for even this small fraction of what it had been promised, proclaiming the news “a fantastic announcement”, but more critical readers didn’t have far to look for a colder reality.

(The SoS’s claim that the three-ship contract guarantees the yards’ security until 2035 seems to be arrant nonsense in the light of that later paragraph, unless the three vessels are going to take 18 years to build. And even the puppy-dog enthusiasm of the union representative had turned into frustration and concern by the end of his quote.)

In other words, should a second referendum materialise, the frigates will yet again be used as a threat against the remaining jobs at the yard. Workers will be held hostage just to secure a dubious and vague pledge of EIGHT frigates, at some unspecified time in the future, rather than the 13 they were originally promised would be commissioned and started in 2016.

Project Fear will live on. We wish we could feign more surprise, just to make it exciting.