Watching Kate Forbes this week struggle to reconcile her social conservatism with her ambition to be First Minister of Scotland has been excruciating. But it has also deflected attention away from another important aspect of her politics: her economic conservatism. As well as sitting on the right on issues such as gay marriage, Forbes also gives every indication of being a fiscal conservative who is comfortable with austerity.
Exhibit one is her role sitting on the SNP’s 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission. The Commission’s report was pitched as a realistic roadmap to independence. Unlike the land-of-milk-and-honey narrative that was sold to Scots in 2014, this group would face economic reality square in the face. Unicorns would be slain, and Alex Salmond’s fiscal fantasies of billions of pounds in oil revenues pouring into a new Scottish treasury would be replaced with blunt realism.
Forbes also gives every indication of being a fiscal conservative who is comfortable with austerity
At least, that was the intention.
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