Humza Yousaf, the favourite to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Scottish First Minister, has been ticking all the right boxes in his campaign so far.
Last week, he declared: ‘As your SNP First Minister, and as someone from a minority background myself, I will stand up and champion equal rights for all.’
I don’t imagine he’ll be championing the rights of Scottish public-school boys, though. But that is exactly what Yousaf is.
Yes, the 37-year-old Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care is the first non-white, first Muslim cabinet minister in the Scottish government. But he’s also an old boy of Hutchesons’ Grammar School, Glasgow, one of the oldest public schools in Scotland, founded in 1641 by brothers George and Thomas Hutcheson.
The school has its own dark blue and red tartan and all pupils are in one of four magnificently named houses: Montrose, Stuart, Lochiel and Argyll. Old Hutchesonians include the great novelist and Governor-General of Canada, John Buchan, and Ken Bruce, the masterly DJ, late of Radio 2. Adam Fleming, chief political correspondent for BBC News, is another alumnus.
Oh yes, and the old boys also include Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour party, another great powerbroker in the land. Both Yousaf and Sarwar were keen debaters at Hutchesons’.
The rise of Sarwar and Yousaf tells an inspiring story of children born to Pakistani Muslim migrant parents. Those parents worked out that one of the best things about living in Glasgow is affordable, excellent private schools: £13,000 a year for Hutchesons’, compared to well over double that for the leading English public schools. Glasgow Academy (also £13,000 a year) is superb, too.
Mohammad Sarwar, Anas’s father, came to Britain with nothing, and became Labour MP for Glasgow Govan from 1997 until 2010. He was the first Muslim MP in the United Kingdom and the first Asian MP for a Scottish constituency. He went on to become Governor of Punjab until last year. He has always been extremely gracious about how his life story would never have been possible in Pakistan.
The marvellous schools they have all so richly benefited from will become the preserve of gilded, multi-millionaire parents only
And his son could never have been catapulted so quickly into the first rank of Pakistani politics as he has into the elite level of Scottish politics, thanks to his Hutchesons’ education. These schools are amazing, relatively cheap and likely to propel your children to the top.
We shouldn’t be so surprised at public school boys running British politics. ‘Twas ever thus. Take those prominent Scottish public schoolboys: Tony Blair (Fettes College), his lord chancellors Derry Irvine (Hutchesons’) and Charlie Falconer (Edinburgh Academy and Glenalmond College), and Alistair Darling (Loretto), Gordon Brown’s chancellor of the exchequer.
But they were all Labour, of course. The funny thing is that the SNP, that hard-left redoubt, might well be led by yet another Scottish public-school boy.
And it’s now much the same down south. Rishi Sunak’s parents – south-east African-born, of Indian Punjabi descent – worked very hard to pay for their son to go to Winchester College.
And, yes, Keir Starmer’s parents may have named him after Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party. But they ensured he went to Reigate Grammar School, a voluntary-aided selective grammar school that went private in 1976 while he was there.
Sunak has often acknowledged his debt to Winchester – not least in the shape of the £100,000-plus donation he and his wife made to the school in order to widen access through bursaries. But Starmer has promptly bitten the hand that fed him, demanding that private schools should lose their tax breaks and start charging VAT on top of school fees. That will ensure that fewer parents – like his, Sunak’s, Yousaf’s and Sarwar’s – will be able to afford these lightning-quick escalators into elite politics. The marvellous schools they have all so richly benefited from will become the preserve of gilded, multi-millionaire parents only.
Hutchesons’ Grammar School was – like many English public schools, including Eton, Winchester and Westminster – founded for the poor; specifically, in the case of Hutchesons’, for ‘12 male children, indigent orphans’. Tax breaks – and the kind of bursaries Rishi Sunak contributed to in his donation to Winchester – help to ensure public schools can go on teaching poor as well as rich children.
Will Humza Yousaf and Anas Sarwar do all they can to sing the praises of the sort of brilliant school they went to – and open them up to more Scottish children, irrespective of family money? Don’t hold your breath.
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