Dazed and Confused: Humza's First Hundred Days

Humza Yousaf has dumped many of Nicola Sturgeon's policies, but he remains firmly in her shadow.(Free to Read.)

Dear Reader: I never intended this Sub to be exclusively about Scottish politics but it has been hard to avoid since Nicola Sturgeon’s shock resignation in February up ended the independence movement. It has been the most astonishing story and it’s far from over - though I’ll be winding down over the summer off season to around one column per week. This week: what do we think of Humza Yousaf so far?

The first hundred days, on which we have come to judge the performance of political leaders, is a strange anniversary if you think about it. Why should three months and a bit matter in the first place? It has no statutory significance and dates from 1933 and the early months of Franklin D Roosevelt’s Presidency. In his first hundred days, FDR took America off the gold standard, launched job creation programmes, and ended prohibition. Not a bad record, it has to be said.

On the face of it, Humza Yousaf has been FDR in reverse. Instead of promoting a raft of groundbreaking legislation he has spent his first 100 days stripping himself of measures he inherited from his predecessor. The question is whether or not this is a conscious decoupling from the Sturgeon era or just a panicky clearing of the decks. Is there more to Humza Yousaf than appears on the surface?

To be fair, he couldn’t have had a worse post-election honeymoon – more like a nightmare. Yousaf won the SNP leadership by a whisker in March after a chaotic campaign marred by the resignation of the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell (Nicola Sturgeon’s husband) and the communications director, Murray Foote, after the press were given misleading membership figures. These appeared to disguise the loss of 30,000 SNP members in the previous 18 months.

One of Yousaf’s challengers, the former community safety minister, Ash Regan, said this had undermined the “integrity” of the election, though she ended up accepting the result. But hardly had that row subsided than Police Scotland decided to swoop on the Uddingston home of Nicola Sturgeon. They choked her suburban street with flashing police cars, erected a forensic tent in her front garden and arrested her husband. Peter Murrell was later released without charge. However, Operation Branchform, into the allegedly “missing” £660,000 in donations for a referendum campaign that never happened, has provided a lurid backdrop to Humza Yousaf’s quotidian century.

If nothing else, “donor gate” has been gift to Scottish journalism. Through April, eye-popping revelations emerged almost by the week. A luxury motorhome was removed by police from Peter Murrell’s mother’s driveway; there were reports of jewellery and household goods being seized; the SNP’s longstanding accountants, Johnson Carmichael, then refused to audit the SNP’s 2022 accounts. SNP politicians and party officials alternated between anger and despair. In May, Murray Foote said the police investigation was turning into a “wild goose chase” and suggested it had effectively been wound up. It hadn’t. The “donorgate” scandal came winging back on June 12th as Nicola Sturgeon was herself finally arrested. 

Like her husband, the former First Minister was released without charge. But a Police Scotland statement unhelpfully recorded that Sturgeon had been arrested as “a suspect” in an ongoing “criminal investigation”. There were calls for her to resign the party whip - as she had often required SNP politicians to do in the past when they became entangled with the law. But she refused on the grounds that “I know beyond doubt that I am in fact innocent of any wrong doing”.

We are no nearer learning what criminal charges, if any, will emerge from Operation Branchform, but the damage to the SNP’s image and its electoral prospects has already been immense. The most recent Panelbase opinion poll in the Times suggested that the SNP is on course to lose half its MPs at the next general election and come second to Labour. That would be its worst result since 2010. Though, intriguingly, support for Scottish independence has not suffered even as the SNP’s support has apparently declined . Scotland is still split down the middle on leaving the UK.

If Humza Yousaf has sometimes looked dazed and confused that is perhaps unsurprising - he could plausibly claim to be a victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And it’s not as if he didn’t have other inherited scandals to contend with. The ever rising cost, and ever lengthening delay, of the nationalised Ferguson Marine ferries has been another debilitating running sore. The cost of these lifeline island ferries is approaching the half billion mark, on some estimates, for vessels that should have cost less than a hundred million and been launched five years ago. Yousaf has decided to persevere with the project, despite the Scottish government’s own due diligence finding that Hull 802 would not be “value for money”.

This row matters because nationalisation is a policy close to the hearts of many on the nationalist left. Yet, like BiFab and Prestwick Airport, state-owned Ferguson Marine has given public ownership a bad reputation - just as the Scottish Government has nationalised the ailing Scotrail. The strike-ridden rail service never recovered from the collapse of passenger traffic during the pandemic and has now been hit by hefty fare increases and service cuts. 

Humza Yousaf can legitimately blame his predecessor for Ferguson Marine, but many of his problems have been self-inflicted. In his first week he decided to persevere with the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, currently blocked by the UK Government under Section 35 of the Scotland Act. Yousaf ordered his social justice secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, to take Westminster’s veto on the GRR bill to judicial review on the grounds that it is an unlawful restriction on Holyrood’s powers. Some suspect, however, that he is only going through the motions on an unpopular bill which will most likely get lost in the courts.

Rishi Sunak insists he is not going to introduce the policy of Self ID, which allows transgender people to acquire gender recognition certificates by declaration after three months. Scottish gender certificates would therefore not be valid in England, meaning some trans people would change legal sex at the border. This is the kind of constitutional anomaly that the Supreme Court, assuming the issue ends up there, will likely regard as intolerable.

It is assumed that Yousaf has continued digging in the GRR hole in order to placate his Green Party coalition partners, who regard Self-ID as their “red line”. They’ve certainly needed placating, since the First Minister has discarded much of Nicola Sturgeon’s, and their, environmental agenda. The First Minister has revised his predecessor’s rhetoric on the North Sea, and no longer condemns the development of the Cambo and Rosebank oil and gas fields. Yousaf has even started talking about the need for “energy security”. That is code for using Scottish sourced oil and gas where possible instead of importing it as the Green Party advocates. The Deposit Return Scheme, led by the Green co-leader, Lorna Slater, has been returned to sender, as has the Green Party’s policy on Highly Protected Marine Areas which almost caused a highland rebellion. Yousaf has also “paused” the move to ban alcohol advertising.

When she signed the Bute House agreement with the Scottish Green Party leader, Patrick Harvie, in 2021, Nicola Sturgeon said the SNP needed the coalition to ensure a majority in the Scottish Parliament for independence. It has never been clear just why she needed a formal coalition to ensure this since the Scottish Green Party supports Scottish independence and has always backed her on Indyref 2. Moreover, Nicola Sturgeon has already had a parliamentary majority for independence and has been unable to parlay that into a repeat referendum. This of course was why she proposed turning the next general election into a “defacto referendum” on independence. If the SNP won a majority of votes in 2024, said the SNP constitution spokesman, Mike Russell, Scotland would open negotiations on independence. Yousaf’s approach to this probably offers the best insight we have into his political character. 

Humza Yousaf has wisely dropped this idea, which was widely condemned as undemocratic and probably unachievable: the SNP didn’t win a majority of votes even in the 2015 “tsunami” election when it won 56 out of 59 seats. However he replaced the defacto referendum plan with a confusing proposal to make “every election” a kind of referendum on independence. He even suggested that if the SNP wins a majority of seats - not votes - at the next general election he would begin “laying the foundations of an independent state”.

No one believes him even in the SNP. It would be absurd to made a unilateral declaration of independence on the basis of winning 29 seats at a general election. (The SNP currently has 48.) This is a paper policy only, designed to last one news cycle and then be forgotten. Which seems to be very much Yousaf’s approach to politics: he is relentlessly focussed the short term – getting to the end of the week, making it up as he goes along. All politicians do this to some extent, but Yousaf seems to have elevated expediency into a principle of governance.

Has the deposit return scheme been laid to rest? We don’t know, since it has formally only been postponed till 2025. Similarly, many environmentalists seem to think the HPMA policy to remove fishing from 10% of Scottish waters has not been scrapped but delayed. Yousaf has swung this way and that over the defacto referendum. Is he serious about Self ID?

Like her or loathe her, you always knew what Nicola Sturgeon stood for. She was consistent to the end. Humza Yousaf is, by contrast, all over the place, trying to please everyone. He has the excuse that in his first hundred days he hasn’t had a chance to show who he really is because of the noises off. He promises to show his mettle in future by slashing NHS waiting lists, closing the poverty gap and protecting the environment. These are big tasks. He now has a couple of months in which to decide just how he’ll do it.

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