The end of Humza the Brief

Humza Yousaf has paid the penalty for the political sins of his predecessor, but that didn't make his downfall any less deserved.

I make no claims of special foresight in having forecast last April that Humza Yousaf  would be unlikely to last past his first general election as First Minister of Scotland .  Many thought the same - including some in the SNP itself. But no one could have imagined it would end this way.

A messy divorce with the Greens, followed by a shotgun marriage proposal from Alex Salmond, the rejection of which has left Humza Yousaf at the mercy of the very Green Party he sacked only last week. Make it up you could not. He tried to be his own man and ended up being Patrick Harvie’s punk.

It’s clear that the Nicola Sturgeon faction, led of course by the former SNP leader and First Minister herself, was simply no’ huvvin’ it. In yer dreams, Humza. No way would they allow Sturgeon’s bete noir, Alex Salmond, to have any say in the SNP’s future. The former SNP leader and First Minister humiliated the Scottish Government in the Court of Session in 2019, and then was acquitted in the High Court in 2020 of a raft of allegations of sexual harassment and attempted rape made by senior figures in the SNP and the Scottish government. The scars are still deep.

You thought the cause of independence meant more to these Scottish nationalists than personal vendettas? Think again. The SNP currently makes a sackful of ferrets look like a convention of old friends. The only consolation for them, perhaps, is that the Scottish Green Party is in the same state of factional madness and division. A campaign is getting under way to dump their co- leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater at their extraordinary general meeting next month. That really would be something for the record books: a brace of leaders being removed by two different parties in the space of one month.

And so, as Humza Yousaf departs the political stage today he takes with him the electoral prospects of the SNP, and the cause of independence which has now been put in cold storage at least for a generation. There certainly isn’t going to be a repeat referendum now - not that one was likely before all this - which partly explains why these nominally nationalist parties have fallen out so spectacularly.

Humza Yousaf was over promoted by a party that no longer knew what it was in government for. In the search for one, Nicola Sturgeon harnessed the SNP to a party of gender zealots. Yousaf, the “continuity candidate”, was elected at precisely the moment when the SNP needed DIScontinuity from the progressive authoritarianism that had replaced the party’s nationalist ideology.  The irony is that Yousaf has had to fall on his sword for doing the right thing for once: getting rid of the Greens.  If only he ‘d done it sooner many of his worst disasters might not have happened. 

Consider them; the Deposit Return Scheme that collapsed after a boycott by 4000 small businesses; the Highly Protected Marine Areas rules that caused a Highland rebellion; the bonkers heat-in-buildings plan to scrap a million gas boilers by 2030, and of course the endless genuflection to the dogma that transwomen are women .  All these, and many more policy failures, not least the hopelessly unrealistic 2030 climate emissions targets,  were Green-inspired. 

Of course Humza added his own cock ups to the inventory of misfortune.  The illiberal Hate Crime Act, which he promoted so assiduously, has damaged Scotland’s image abroad as a country that values freedom of speech and lively debate. He persevered with Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill - currently stalled by the UK government - after it was obvious to all that it was dead following the scandal of a trans rapists being placed in a women’s prison.  He sensibly abandoned Sturgeon’s daft and undemocratic ploy of turning the next general election into a “defacto” referendum on independence. Then he replaced with an equally daft notion of declaring a majority of seats the  “trigger” for Indyref2.

 But Yousaf’s biggest failures were in precisely those areas he now says are his priority: health, education and the economy. One in seven Scots is on a hospital waiting list; Scottish education is in steep decline, and his only answer to the black hole in public finances was to increaser taxes on every Scot earning over £28,000 and hand out over-generous pay awards to public sector workers without securing any significant  productivity gains. Since Yousaf was in government with the Greens, who oppose economic growth in principle, it was perhaps unsurprising that the productive economy got lost in the thickets of “wellbeing”. 

Who knows what Humza Yousaf thought he was doing last week when he decided to pull the plugs on the Bute House Agreement. He didn’t appear to have thought through the arithmetic and the risk of being dependent on the casting vote of Alba’s Ash Regan. Mind you, the SNP really should have held its nose and stuck with Yousaf through the confidence motions this week -  because the alternative is even worse. The SNP government  is now effectively hostage to the very Green MSPs who have contributed  to the goverment’s downfall. Regan’s vote was the only thing keeping the Greens from effectively deciding the next leader of the SNP.  

Patrick Harvie says he could never accept the “socially conservative” former finance secretary, Kate Forbes, even though she is arguably the most competent candidate. If he gets his way it will probably be the education secretary, Jenny Gilruth, who’ll take over after an interregnum in which someone like John Swinney, the former deputy First Minister, acts as caretaker.  Ms Gilruth, is a Sturgeon clone who supports  the Gender Bill. She also happens to be married to the former Scottish Labour leader, Kezia Dugdale. So it is back to continuity with the disastrous Sturgeon era. And continuity with electoral decline. She’ll be pleased since the Scottish Labour Party will be the beneficiaries of the SNP committing seppuku. As recently as 2010, Labour had 41 MPs in Scotland against only 6 for the SNP. That was after the indifferent reign of the then leader, John Swinney. It looks like Mr Swinney is being drafted in once again, so history may repeat itself.

But then there is probably no politician alive who could salvage this divided, discredited and directionless government. The SNP has gone from landslide victory to pariah status in less than a decade. That may largely be the legacy of Nicola Sturgeon, but it has been Humza Yousaf’s misfortune to carry the can.