"Nicola Sturgeon versus the Austerions; part deux".

As our diminutive superhero took on the might of the British State she faced the withering force of the evil ToryLabourtrons and their deadly allies the MediaMagnetos. Wham! Pow!

Actually the response of the UK political and media establishment to the First Minister's first pre-election foray south of the border yesterday was bemused indifference. The media seemed more interested in the comic possibilities presented by Harriet Harman's "pink bus" that is supposed to be taking the Labour message to the women of Britain.

The Scots are just "at it" again, said a weary Dan Hodges of the Daily Telegraph, a former Labourite who embodies the values of the austerity consensus. "English voters are getting just a little tired of this," he told the BBC.

Ms Sturgeon's speech to UCL didn't have quite the range of Alex Salmond's famous Hugo Young lecture to the Guardian in 2011, when he called on the UK left to regard Scotland as a "beacon of progressive politics". But it was more specific and directly political. The stakes have risen since then: the SNP could be in coalition government in the UK in three months time.

Given that, she had a pretty benign reception for her lecture on how the UK should manage its economic affairs. The First Minister condemned current economic policy - Labour and Tory - for being "morally unjustifiable and economically unsustainable".

She wants to borrow a bit more and cut a bit less and insisted that by doing so - to the tune of £180 billion by 2020 - the UK Treasury could cut the debt faster through economic growth rather than though spending cuts. This is essentially what Labour's Ed Balls had been saying until around 2013, when Britain began to pull out of recession and unemployment started to fall, contrary to his expectations.

Since then the UK Labour party has moved in a markedly conservative fiscal direction. Ed Miliband's pitch to the UK at this election will be to "balance the books" - ie eliminate the deficit - by the end of the next parliament.

If that has a familiar ring to it, then that is because it is exactly what the Coalition said in 2010. It didn't happen. The deficit is lower, certainly, than it was - but Britain's debt pile has continued to increase. It now stands at £1.4 trillion, nearly 80 per cent of GDP.

The reason the debt hasn't been tamed is complex but it has a lot to do with the character of the economic recovery, which created jobs but but reduced wages and salaries. When even a Tory Prime Minister calls for pay increases, as David Cameron did this week, you know something weird is happening.

Families have had to borrow to maintain living standards because wages have been falling faster than at any time since the 1870s. Government revenues have been falling below expectations because people on low wages don't pay tax, they consume tax. The biggest increase in welfare payments now are to people who are in low-paid work.

All well and good for Ms Sturgeon to point this out, but then it gets a bit sticky. For there is a certain irony in the First Minister lecturing Westminster on deficit financing when the Scottish Government has been commending itself for "balancing the books" in Scotland.

She did it again in her speech to UCL yesterday. "Fiscal discipline is good for governments" she told her audience of academics and politicians. Admittedly, the Scottish Government say they've been making a virtue out of necessity and that they would like more borrowing powers than are on offer. But the the SNP has been adept at talking left while acting conservative - at least in fiscal terms.

The council tax freeze, for example, has been criticised by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for creating at local level precisely the austerity that Nicola Sturgeon condemns at UK level. The SNP insist keeping council tax low benefits less well off Scots, but less well off Scots are mostly exempt from council tax anyway.

The real reason for the freeze - and the reason Labour criticise it but never quite get round to opposing it - is that it is extremely popular with voters, especially homeowners. No one wants to mention increased taxation, which is a key element of "fiscal discipline", because it is electorally toxic.

But the Scottish Government have to be careful not to look like fiscal hypocrites. Ms Sturgeon's anti-austerity philosophy must recognise the possibility taxes could and should increase. She agrees wealth distribution has become grossly unbalanced in most large developed economies over the last 30 years, and is becoming more and more unbalanced.

Inequality feeds on itself, as the economist Thomas Piketty observed: the more you have, the more you get. The only way to reverse this trend is through redistribution at some level.

Jim Murphy says the First Minister should make a start in her own patch by increasing taxes on the rich - the 16,000 Scots who earn more than £150,000 a year. Slap a 50p tax on them. The Scottish Government is very wary of doing this in case the rich individuals who are liable hop over the border and avoid paying any tax at all to the Scottish exchequer.

But the trouble is that the same argument is used by the Conservatives in England about the 50p top rate for the UK as a whole. They say that businesspeople either avoid it, with the help of PriceWaterhouseCooper and HSBC, or they leave the country taking their businesses with them.

Now, obviously it is easier to hop over to England than it is to hop over to Monaco or Liechtenstein. Nevertheless, the essential argument is the same: that with globalisation, wealth taxes are an inefficient way of raising revenue. It has to start lower down the income scale.

Mr Murphy knows this perfectly well, but why should he worry since he isn't going to be in government for the foreseeable future. But hard choices could arise very soon for the Scottish Government after the general election if the Tories continue in power at Westminster.

Will Ms Sturgeon's anti-austerity message come back to haunt her? Will she find she has to use the new powers of Holyrood to raise income tax in Scotland to combat austerity if there is another Conservative-led coalition in Westminster?

Presumably, she's hoping it will never happen; that she will join an anti-austerity coalition in Westminster with Labour after May. Certainly, there was no indication yesterday from senior Labour figures in London that they would rule out a deal with the SNP in the way Labourites in Scotland like Labour Hame's Duncan Hotershall have been urging

Labour's Shadow Leader of the House, Angela Eagle, on the BBC's Daily Politics show, didn't seem too concerned when the presenter Andrew Neil suggested she was speaking the same anti-austerity language as the SNP and that a coalition already looked a done deal.

Realpolitik dictates that if Labour seriously want to enter government they must contemplate a possible alliance with the SNP against the Coalition austerions. It's simple arithmetic. So, let the final conflict commence! Just don't mention the "T" word.