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.
WRAPPED in the language of flourishing and fairness, Scotland’s “wellbeing economy” is a vacuous experiment in policy-by-feelings. Kate Forbes built the fantasy – now Scots are forced to live with the consequences as she steps away from frontline politics.
Scotland’s Green supported SNP government replaced price signals with positive feelings, collapsing economic reality under the weight of a fantasy. At the heart of this platitudinal economics is Kate Forbes, whose tenure as Finance Secretary embedded a therapeutic delusion – marketed as the “wellbeing economy” – into law, budgets, and bureaucracy. Her framework traded objective economics for empty metrics, confusing governance with group therapy. As she announces her retirement from elected office, it’s time to tear up her legacy, undo the rhetoric, and rebuild economic policy on a foundation of measurable reality. Markets work, ‘wellbeing’ doesn’t.
Forbes: the intellectual midwife of economic nonsense
Under Cabinet Secretary Màiri McAllan’s unwieldy and incoherent portfolio of “Wellbeing Economy, Net Zero and Energy,” Scotland is attempting to run a national economy based on subjective happiness indices and unmeasurable concepts of “human flourishing.”
This isn’t progressive economics – it’s the abandonment of economics altogether in favour of therapeutic language and wishful thinking.
The architect of this mess deserves particular scrutiny: Kate Forbes, whose tenure as Finance Secretary from 2020 to 2023 saw the systematic embedding of wellbeing rhetoric into Scotland’s economic institutions. Forbes didn’t merely implement bad policy – she created the intellectual framework that legitimised it.
Kate Forbes’s role cannot be understated. As Finance Secretary, she authored foundational articles arguing that traditional GDP measures were “insufficient,” championed the National Performance Framework that placed wellbeing “at the heart of economic policy,” and launched the Wellbeing Economy Monitor as a complement to – and implicit competitor with – objective economic measurement.
Forbes represented Scotland in the Wellbeing Economy Governments’ network alongside Iceland, New Zealand, and Wales, hosting “Economic Policy Labs” that treated happiness indices as serious economic indicators. Her budgets allocated hundreds of millions toward programs explicitly framed as advancing the “wellbeing agenda” – from a £50 million Whole Family Wellbeing Fund to mental health spending justified not by medical necessity but by their contribution to abstract societal flourishing.
Most damagingly, Forbes provided intellectual respectability to what should have been recognised as economic quackery. Her speeches to business forums consistently tied “economic prosperity, social fairness, net-zero and wellbeing together”, as if these were naturally compatible goals rather than competing priorities requiring difficult trade-offs. She spoke of “greater, greener and fairer prosperity” as if repetition of pleasant adjectives could overcome the fundamental contradictions in her approach.
Even critics who supported the general direction acknowledged the hollowness of Forbes’s framework. Professor Iain Black of Common Weal argued her wellbeing rhetoric was merely a “fashionable label” that repackaged traditional tax-and-spend policies without genuine transformation. The criticism stings because it’s accurate: Forbes’s budgets continued prioritising productivity, exports, and private investment while dressing them up in wellness language.
This reveals the deeper intellectual dishonesty of Forbes’s approach. Rather than honestly defending market-based policies, she felt compelled to justify them through therapeutic buzzwords. The result was neither genuine free-market economics nor coherent wellbeing policy, but a confused hybrid that pleased no one and solved nothing.
The core absurdity
The fundamental problem with the wellbeing economy isn’t its implementation – it’s the concept itself. Economic policy exists to allocate scarce resources efficiently and create the conditions for wealth generation. “Wellbeing” and “happiness” are subjective psychological states that vary wildly between individuals and cultures. They cannot be measured meaningfully at scale, cannot be optimised through government policy, and certainly cannot form the basis for running a modern economy.
GDP measures something concrete: the total value of goods and services produced. A person either has a job or doesn’t. A business either turns a profit or goes bankrupt. Energy either costs £50 per megawatt hour or £150. These are objective, measurable realities that governments can actually influence through policy.
“Human flourishing,” by contrast, is a philosophical concept masquerading as an economic metric. It’s the equivalent of organising transportation policy around “journey satisfaction” or defence policy around “national confidence levels.” The categories are simply inappropriate for the task at hand. The practical consequences of this confused thinking are visible across Scottish economic policy.
The Deposit Return Scheme: bureaucracy over reality
The Deposit Return Scheme exemplified what happens when policy is designed to generate good feelings rather than solve actual problems. The scheme imposed complex registration requirements on producers and turned every corner shop into a part-time recycling centre – all to increase recycling rates that market mechanisms could have achieved more efficiently.
The Scottish Beer and Pub Association warned that compliance costs would force craft brewers out of the Scottish market entirely. Tesco estimated the scheme would cost retailers £200 million annually. When the government finally postponed it indefinitely, waste management firm Biffa sued for £200 million in contract cancellation costs.
The real cost: A Federation of Small Businesses survey found 78 per cent of small retailers said the scheme would have made their businesses unviable. That’s not a policy trade-off – that’s economic vandalism justified by environmental sentiment. Wellbeing?
Short-term let licensing: destroying rural tourism
The short-term let licensing scheme demonstrates the collision between wellbeing rhetoric and economic reality. Ostensibly designed to address housing shortages, the scheme requires property owners to navigate months-long licensing procedures costing hundreds of pounds in fees.
Highland Council data shows license applications fell 40 per cent below projections, with operators simply exiting the market. In rural areas dependent on tourism, this represents a direct assault on local employment and economic activity.
The real impact: The Highlands and Islands Tourism Alliance reported that 35 per cent of short-term let operators ceased operations rather than comply with licensing requirements. Each lost property represents an average of 2.3 local jobs, according to industry data. Wellbeing?
Energy policy: ideology trumps economics
Perhaps most damagingly, the government’s energy stance reveals the wellbeing economy’s hostility to actual wealth creation. Despite North Sea oil and gas supporting over 200,000 jobs and contributing £35 billion annually to the UK economy, the Scottish Government opposes new exploration in favour of pursuing renewable energy targets that exist more in political rhetoric than engineering reality.
The real outcome: The result is energy uncertainty, higher costs for consumers, and an exodus of expertise from Scotland’s energy sector. Offshore Energies UK reports that 15,000 energy sector jobs have relocated to Norway and the Netherlands since 2020, taking with them the technical knowledge essential for any renewable energy transition. Wellbeing?
The public sees through it
Recent polling data reveals that Scots recognise the disconnect between wellbeing rhetoric and their actual economic concerns:
- Energy reality check: 75 per cent of Scottish people back domestic North Sea production according to polling by True North/Survation, while 35 per cent of respondents said the Scottish Government’s policy presuming against new North Sea exploration is wrong.
- Economic realities: 15 per cent of Scottish households had cut back on essentials such as food in the last six months to help manage their household finances, rising to 45 per cent of households who were managing less well financially.
- Policy scepticism: 56 per cent of respondents considered the Scottish Government’s plan to phase out gas and diesel boilers by 2045 not achievable, while 70 per cent said plans to phase out petrol and diesel cars by 2030 was not achievable
Meanwhile, almost one third of Scottish adults (32 per cent) reported feeling anxious about their financial situation, and only 23 per cent of people living in Scotland were confident that there was financial help and support available for people who need it. These are concrete, measurable problems that require economic solutions, not wellness workshops.
The market alternative
The free market remains what it has always been: the most effective mechanism ever devised for coordinating human economic activity. Markets work because they operate on objective information – prices, profits, losses, supply, and demand. They reward efficiency, punish waste, and channel self-interest toward socially beneficial outcomes without requiring anyone to agree on what constitutes “human flourishing”.
Adam Smith’s insight remains valid: it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. This isn’t cynicism – it’s realism about human nature and the only sustainable foundation for economic policy.
When governments attempt to replace market signals with subjective wellbeing measures, they lose the information system that makes rational economic decisions possible. The result is inevitably the kind of policy chaos Scotland is experiencing: schemes that sound virtuous but destroy actual businesses, energy policies that increase costs while reducing supply, and regulatory frameworks that prioritise bureaucratic process over economic outcomes.
International reality check
Countries that successfully combine economic prosperity with high living standards – Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore – do so by maintaining competitive, market-oriented economies that generate the wealth necessary for social spending. They measure their success in conventional economic terms: employment rates, productivity growth, business competitiveness, and export performance.
None of these successful economies organise their industrial policy around happiness indices or attempt to replace GDP with subjective wellbeing measures. They recognise that sustainable social outcomes require sustainable economic foundations.
Dismantle Forbes’s framework
Scotland needs to abandon the wellbeing economy fantasy and return to policies based on economic reality. This requires acknowledging that Kate Forbes’s intellectual legacy – the institutionalisation of subjective measures as economic policy tools – was fundamentally misguided from the outset.
- Abolish the Wellbeing Economy Monitor and return to objective economic measurement
- Remove wellbeing criteria from budget allocation decisions
- Withdraw from international wellbeing initiatives that legitimise pseudo-economic thinking
- Restore traditional economic analysis to policy formation
Restore market mechanisms:
- Support rather than obstruct energy sector development
- Eliminate regulatory barriers that serve no measurable purpose
- Allow price signals to guide resource allocation
- Protect property rights and business formation
Focus on measurable outcomes:
- Job creation and unemployment rates
- Business formation and investment levels
- Export competitiveness and productivity growth
- Energy security and cost competitiveness
Abandon therapeutic governance:
- Stop treating economic policy as social work
- Recognise that government cannot engineer happiness
- Focus on creating conditions for voluntary cooperation through markets
- Leave “human flourishing” to individuals, families, and communities
Conclusion: economics, not therapy
The wellbeing economy represents a fundamental category error: the confusion of subjective psychological states with objective economic conditions. Kate Forbes’s role in embedding this confusion into Scotland’s institutional framework represents one of the most damaging intellectual legacies in modern Scottish politics.
Forbes created the bureaucratic architecture and rhetorical justification for treating feelings as economic data. Her Wellbeing Economy Monitor, National Performance Framework modifications, and budget rhetoric provided a veneer of sophistication to what was essentially the abandonment of rational economic analysis.
Scotland’s economic challenges – high energy costs, regulatory burden, business uncertainty – require economic solutions: competitive markets, clear property rights, predictable regulation, and policies that support rather than obstruct wealth creation. They cannot be solved by the therapeutic governance framework that Forbes helped institutionalise.
The alternative is continued economic decline dressed up in the language of wellness and sustainability. That may have made Kate Forbes feel better about her policies, but it won’t create jobs, reduce costs, or improve the actual living conditions of Scottish families. There will be no wellbeing there.
Economic policy should be about economics – not therapy. Scotland’s future depends on recognising the difference and dismantling the intellectual framework that Forbes created to obscure it.
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