WHEN the Scotland Office changed its name to UK Government Scotland back in 2018, it may have actually done the unthinkable for a political institution and told us exactly what it was about.

The Scotland Office’s role was supposedly to represent our country’s best interests in the hallowed halls of Westminster, and the name certainly suggested as much. A Scotland Office representing Scottish interests in London, a city for which you’d have to take a second job to afford the train ticket to visit it.

There was a definite sense of influence flowing down over the wall and into the ears of waiting ministers. It was all nonsense, obviously, but it had a nice ring to it. I imagine, for many ermine-clad Lords, perched by the fire with a bottle of taxpayer-subsidised champagne, it harked back to the simpler days before devolution when the Jocks needed a wee bit of indulgence every now and then but were broadly a North British irrelevance.

Those days are no more, and with that change, a rebranding opportunity presented itself. The then secretary of state for Scotland, David Mundell, changed the name to UK Government Scotland, one that conjures up the far more apt image of a British outpost in Edinburgh.

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Having established itself as a means for the UK Government to assert its own puffed up importance, and stem the flow of rising support for independence, it promptly got to work. Since the 2014 independence referendum, staffing numbers and costs for the unit have ballooned. The office has spent tens of thousands of pounds promoting the UK Government on social media in Scotland, functionally taking on the role of an unofficial No campaign. According to the former secretary of state for Scotland, it was spending around £700,000 on communications a year.

The Welsh equivalent of UK Government Scotland is known to spend a fraction of the budget of its big brother in the north. Then again, Wales doesn’t currently pose the same existential threat to British supremacy as Scotland does.

There was just one little snag with Westminster’s master plan to save the Union. How do you show the many ways that the UK is delivering for Scotland if, in fact, it isn’t? Turn your textbooks to page 69, class, because we’re about to look at some examples. Earlier this year, before we’d even begun to experience the great collective trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic, UK Government Scotland social media accounts posted a somewhat surprising claim about V&A Dundee. After a few statistics relating to new jobs and city visitors (which I’m happy to say included me) it dropped a hashtag that made me put down my fourth morning coffee and stare at my computer. It said: “#DeliveringForScotland”.

Delivering what for Scotland? V&A Dundee? Well that didn’t sound right – and it wasn’t. V&A Dundee’s construction costs totalled more than £80 million, with the money coming from a range of backers including Dundee City Council, Creative Scotland and a separate fundraising campaign. The single biggest cash injection came from the Scottish Government. So how much did the UK Government contribute? Less than 6%.

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FOR context, Boris Johnson’s failed Garden Bridge in London received almost 10 times as much public money – and it was never even built.

This left me wondering: if the former Scotland Office was willing to be this liberal with the truth around Dundee’s new museum, what else had it claimed credit for?

The next social media post stated that the UK was supposedly investing in Scotland’s beaches by expanding the UK’s coastal blue belt. Expanding conservation areas to protect wildlife is genuinely a great thing for the UK to be doing – but the marine habitats in question were thousands of miles from Scotland in the UK’s Overseas Territories.

What did that have to do with our coastline? The argument, if you can believe it, was that expanding the blue belt would benefit beaches around the entire planet, and since Scotland currently resides on said planet, it would also benefit.

I’ve just taken out my recycling bins and am hotly anticipating a letter of thanks from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for my role in reducing pollution in New York’s 14th Congressional District.

I was also informed Scotland will benefit from the UK’s target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It didn’t mention the Scottish Government had already set its own target for 2045 – a full five years earlier. (Though it’s worth mentioning that targets don’t mean a thing unless you actually hit them.)

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Between the misdirection, half-truths and stretches you could pull a muscle over were posts about military spending – though these only served as a reminder of how an independent Scotland would have the means to re-imagine what defence could look like, free from the shackles of Britain’s military industrial complex and without nuclear weapons on the Clyde.

If the UK Government truly believed it was Delivering For Scotland™, as it says on the tin, then why promote arguments that fall apart more quickly than Keir Starmer’s pledge to protect human rights? The only conclusion is that even the staff working to pump out this propaganda are perhaps all too aware of how little the Union benefits Scotland.