Readers will doubtless be startled to hear that today’s Scottish newspapers have taken a somewhat misleading approach to the facts on one of the day’s big stories.

Several of them report the findings of a commission looking into the idea of a Citizen’s (or Universal) Basic Income, a scheme which pays every adult in the country a fixed sum every year regardless of their own income, almost completely replacing the current benefits system.

(We’ll use Universal/UBI, to avoid confusion with the greedy-businessman trade body.)

The idea is that as well as reducing poverty, the administrative costs of social security are massively reduced, as is the problem of vulnerable people not taking up benefits because of the stigma often attached to them by the press.

The downside is that it’s generally more expensive. But have the Scottish press accurately reported the scale of that cost, or have they massively exaggerated it for shock value and to serve a right-wing agenda? Read on for a surprise!

The report does indeed find that a UBI could add £12.3bn to the current welfare bill. But that’s not the full story. Because UBI also removes the personal tax-free allowance (there being no need for it any more), it brings about a substantial increase in income tax receipts. And according to the report, the size of that increase is almost £9bn.

That reduces the real cost of UBI by more than 70% – from £12.3bn to just £3.6bn. Which is still a pretty large sum of money, but an awful lot more affordable than the papers want you to believe. (It’s a bit like trading your car in for £9000 at a dealer’s in order to buy one that costs £12,000 but then saying that the upgrade has cost you £12,000 rather than the true net outlay of £3000.)

It’s also progressive, with the poorest gaining proportionately by far the most:

UBI may well not be affordable for Scotland – at least while it remains part of the UK and doesn’t control its own spending. But it wouldn’t in any remotely meaningful sense cost £12bn, and the motives of anyone trying to tell you otherwise should be treated with the deepest suspicion.