ON Monday, The National had an actual scoop of the kind that makes old fashioned newspaper editors yell, “Hold the front page!” Or at least old fashioned newspaper editors in most countries. In Scotland they’re far more likely to yell “Hold the front page!” when Ruth Davidson has done a photo-op with a farm animal again and they want to splash it all over the front page that neither Ruth nor the castrated pig she was posing with was in favour of another independence referendum.

However The National’s exclusive was genuine news. The National had got a hold of the Scottish Government's financial analysis of the cost of Brexit to Scotland. This is the analysis that the Scottish Government did because the UK Government had said that they were going to do one, only David Davis decided that he really would rather prefer to pretend that Brexit would give everyone a free unicorn and some magic sparkly fairy dust.

The analysis shows that there is no such thing as a good Brexit for Scotland. Every possible Brexit scenario leaves the country worse off than remaining a part of the EU. When the Tories claim that they’re seeking a good Brexit deal, what they really mean is that they’re frantically hoping that the damage will be containable and that they can reduce the impact on places where Conservative voters live so it won’t affect their chances of getting re-elected.

For Scotland, there’s no positive outcome. The Scottish Government’s Brexit impact papers show that a hard Brexit is going to cost Scotland £2,300 for every man, woman, and child in the country. The total cost to Scotland’s economy will be £12.7 billion every year. This is a considerably bigger hit than the £1,400 per person which the UK Treasury claimed in 2014 that independence would cost Scotland.

Even a Brexit with a favourable trade deal of the sort that Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn claim to be seeking is forecast to cost each person in Scotland £1,610 annually, still more than the worst forecasts for the cost of independence by the Better Together campaign and the British Government. We’re actually going to be quite a bit worse off by remaining in the UK than we would have been if we had opted for independence in 2014, even if the very worst economic forecasts for an independent Scotland had come true.

The least worst option for Brexit is to remain in the customs union and single market after Brexit, a scenario which both the Conservatives and Labour have ruled out. Even that is still forecast to cost each person in Scotland £688 annually.

You might just imagine that the revelation that the economic case for the Union had been blown out of the water – by the British Government, no less – was news. The financial disaster facing Scotland isn’t the fault of the Scottish Government.

Even the Scottish press would struggle to find a way of blaming the SNP for Brexit, although that won’t stop them trying. The economic argument, the claim that independence would make Scotland far worse off, was the main argument that the Better Together campaign had back in 2014. It was a claim that was central to their campaign. Voting for independence, they told us, would make Scotland poorer, and it would bring about instability and create insecurity.

Now we discover that because Scotland chose to remain a part of the UK in 2014, it’s going to be much worse off than it would have been if it had opted for independence, and we’re facing political instability and economic insecurity which is far worse than anything independence would have caused. That’s pretty Earth-shattering news, or more exactly Better-Together-shattering. It’s news which demonstrates that Scotland was lied to in 2014. It’s news which proves the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the British establishment.

But naturally, in its round up of the Scottish press on Monday morning, BBC Scotland’s online news pages chose to highlight The Herald’s front page instead: “FM faces indyref2 criticism”.

There’s the Scottish Unionist media for you. An exclusive story on the destruction of the economic justification for the Union by British political parties isn’t news, instead it’s news that some Unionist politician said something about the prospect of indyref2.

Later, at the press conference on Monday to present the report, Nicola Sturgeon wanted to talk about the impact of Brexit on the Scottish economy. That was, after all, the entire purpose of the press conference. Instead certain representatives of the Scottish media wanted instead to ask her about a second independence referendum so that when she tried to steer the conference back to the topic at hand, they could attack her for avoiding talk of another independence referendum.

The hypocrisy is jaw dropping. After spending months, nay years, attacking the SNP for talking too much about independence and not concentrating on the day job, now they’re attacking the SNP for not talking more about independence and for concentrating on the day job. It makes you wish that the British nationalist media in Scotland could make their minds up. Do they think that the SNP is damaging Brexit with talk of independence, or do they think that the SNP isn’t talking enough about independence? They can’t have it both ways.

There are some who say that independence supporters shouldn’t criticise the media, that it undermines the cause of independence. That would be fine if Scotland had a media which was broadly representative of the range of views found in this country. But it doesn’t. Only two out of 39 newspapers support a constitutional position backed by almost half of the people in Scotland, and our publicly funded public broadcaster follows the line set by that unrepresentative press.

Scotland’s media grossly distorts events in pursuit of a British nationalist agenda. A genuine scoop from The National gets swamped in puffery and guff that criticises Nicola Sturgeon about an independence referendum on a day we learn about the economic calamity being foisted on Scotland by a British Government. If independence supporters don’t continue to draw attention to the bias and shortcomings of the Scottish media, we’ll never win independence at all.