A Sunday Times freedom of information inquiry found about 800 Scottish public staff kept on the payroll after their posts were cut, at about £27m a year. GB News headlined them as workers ‘who do not even exist’. Three words in the GB News headline do the work, and none comes from the figures. The verb “splurges” is loaded: it turns a cost into a spree. The £27m is wages for about 794 staff whose posts were cut and who wait in redeployment pools under a no-compulsory-redundancy policy. The adjective “eye-watering” asks you to feel the size with nothing to compare it to. The frame picks the feeling: people paid while they wait for a new post, or money thrown at people who are not there. The closing phrase, “who do not even exist”, is the line the page itself takes back. GB News’s fifth paragraph says those affected are in redeployment pools; the Telegraph says they usually do less senior roles or ad hoc duties. STV’s PA headline says it plainly: the jobs are gone, the workers are not. Even Craig Hoy, the Scottish Conservative spokesman calling for the Auditor General to investigate, said “zombie jobs”. The tell: when the verb carries the verdict, find the plain verb the figures support. Here it is pays. The sum also changes owner on the way. The Sunday Times collected data from 70 bodies, not all of which gave costs: £27.6m a year, of which £5.8m is councils, which the policy does not bind. GB News bills all of it to the SNP; the Express rounds it to £30m. One case, a single NHS Highland employee without a fixed role for 17 years, stands in for 794 people, 255 of whom had waited more than 12 months.
