WHEN John Swinney, the Deputy First Minister, met Chancellor George Osborne at the Treasury, he went armed with a detailed analysis of the UK Government's spending plans.
Illustrated with graphs and bar charts aplenty, it looked at planned spending up to 2019/20 in the context of the government's key fiscal targets: firstly, to balance the current budget by the end of the period and, secondly, to ensure public sector debt is falling as a proportion of GDP by next financial year, 2016/17.
It concluded the Chancellor could meet those targets while spending £93billion more than planned.
It was an impressive piece of work on a number of levels. But easily the most impressive thing was the sheer brass neck required to produce and publish it all.
We are, after all, only a month on from an election campaign in which the SNP argued the exact opposite.
The fiscal targets come from the Charter for Budget Responsibility, which was approved by MPs in January.
It attached no numbers to the principle of bringing the deficit under control over the lifetime of the new UK parliament but for the SNP it meant one thing and one thing only: £30billion of cuts.
The figure had originally been estimated by the Treasury. Labour dismissed it, having voted for the Charter for Budget Responsibility on the basis that its own, more moderate proposals to cut spending could be accommodated within the fiscal targets. But the SNP accepted the figure and used it to attack both Labour and the Conservatives with devastating effect.
Remember this from the challengers' debate on ITV? Confronting Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon said: "Ed talks the language on austerity, but it's only a few weeks since he trooped through the lobbies to vote for £30billion of cuts. We need to invest and grow our way out of austerity - why did you vote for £30billion of cuts?"
"That wasn't what the vote was for," the former Labour leader replied accurately but somewhat lamely. Few, it seems, paid much attention to him.
The debate took place on April 2.
It wasn't the first or last time the SNP claimed the Charter for Budget Responsibility meant £30billion of cuts and, by the way, those "red Tories" Labour had signed up to it. Indeed, hardly a day passed without an SNP minister mentioning the two parties' "cosy consensus on austerity".
The message did not waver even when the independent IFS think tank crunched the numbers in the various party manifestos and found that overall public spending on services up to 2019/20 would be slightly higher under Labour's proposals than the SNP's.
That was the election, though.
Since persuading people the Charter for Budget Responsibility was a one way ticket to deep austerity, Ms Sturgeon and Mr Swinney have been quietly shifting their position.
The process began with a mention in the First Minister's first big economic speech after the election, at Tynecastle stadium a couple of weeks ago, and has now been completed by Mr Swinney's new graphs and charts. A jaw-dropping about turn - not least because hardly anyone has noticed.
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