Kate Forbes built the SNP’s feel-good economic model and sold it as progressive. In reality, it’s an incoherent, anti-market disaster enabled by Forbes’s intellectual vanity.
There are parts of this critique that ring painfully true. However one feels about Kate Forbes, the point about spin replacing substance deserves to be heard. The wellbeing economy was wrapped in the language of fairness and flourishing, but behind the soothing words the hard numbers never stacked up.
That’s a playbook I recognise only too well. In addiction policy, the same trick is used, leaders talk endlessly about “meeting people where they’re at” and “reducing harm” while the death rate climbs and the system keeps people trapped. The rhetoric is therapeutic, the reality is lethal.
It’s not wrong to care about wellbeing. The instinct is honourable. But when governments substitute language for measurable outcomes, it becomes a dangerous self‑delusion. Spin may win arguments in the short term, but it never saves lives or livelihoods in the long term.
You’re so right about this government and addiction policy. The SNP have been talking about ‘reducing harm’ while they slashed funding for rehabilitation beds during the Sturgeon era. Fluffy language masking a brutal incompetence which has cost lives.
There are parts of this critique that ring painfully true. However one feels about Kate Forbes, the point about spin replacing substance deserves to be heard. The wellbeing economy was wrapped in the language of fairness and flourishing, but behind the soothing words the hard numbers never stacked up.
That’s a playbook I recognise only too well. In addiction policy, the same trick is used, leaders talk endlessly about “meeting people where they’re at” and “reducing harm” while the death rate climbs and the system keeps people trapped. The rhetoric is therapeutic, the reality is lethal.
It’s not wrong to care about wellbeing. The instinct is honourable. But when governments substitute language for measurable outcomes, it becomes a dangerous self‑delusion. Spin may win arguments in the short term, but it never saves lives or livelihoods in the long term.
You’re so right about this government and addiction policy. The SNP have been talking about ‘reducing harm’ while they slashed funding for rehabilitation beds during the Sturgeon era. Fluffy language masking a brutal incompetence which has cost lives.