Is this the beginning of the end for Humza Yousaf?

Scottish politics may be about to enter the abyss following the disintegration of the Green-SNP coalition. The Scottish Conservatives have tabled a vote of no confidence in First Minister Humza Yousaf and he might very well lose it, now the Greens are out of the government. They only have 63 MSPs since the former community safety minister Ash Regan defected to Alba. Labour and the Liberal Democrats say they are eager for an early election. So Yousaf may have brought the temple down around his ears. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It has been a day of high drama and high emotion.

When Nicola Sturgeon signed the Bute House power-sharing agreement with the Scottish Green Party in the summer of 2021, she said it would ensure ‘stable government’ and deliver ‘a cast iron parliamentary majority for an independence referendum’. So does the disintegration of the SNP-Green coalition mean unstable government, and that the SNP will no longer have a parliamentary majority for independence? Well, it’s hard to tell.

Few would claim that this coalition of chaos has brought stability to Scotland. Humza Yousaf admitted as much during his press conference today, insisting that he had been mulling over the dissolution of the Bute House Agreement for weeks. Puzzling, therefore, that only the day before yesterday he described the coalition as ‘worth its weight in gold’ and that he was ‘fully committed’ to it. Clearly the gold standard has been devalued.

Nor did the presence of the Greens in the coalition make any significant difference to the arithmetic of independence. The Scottish Green Party is ardently pro-separation, and even after co-leader, Lorna Slater’s, hysterical accusations of ‘betrayal’ today it is highly unlikely ever to vote with the Scottish Tories and Labour against Indyref2. 

Not that anyone thinks a referendum on independence is going to happen any time soon. Indeed, the breakup of this originally constitutional alliance is a symptom of the steam going out of the entire independence project. It was hardly mentioned by the Greens today in their fulmination about ‘culture wars’ and the SNP ‘appeasing’ the far right. 

What they meant, of course, is SNP appeasement of the Cass report and the recent NHS Scotland ban on puberty blockers. The Green’s co-leader Patrick Harvie has repeatedly refused to endorse Dr Cass’s landmark review of gender services. The party’s education spokesman, Ross Greer, initially deemed it ‘transphobic and conservative’. The LGBTQI wing of the Scottish Greens has accused Cass of ‘social murder’.

It may seem perverse that an environmentalist party seems more exercised about puberty blockers than about greenhouse gas emissions. Or that they place ‘trans rights’ above the ‘rights of Scottish self determination’ as they used to put it. But the Greens actually supported last week’s scrapping of the Scottish government’s interim Net Zero emissions targets; yet they clearly could not accept Cass. This seems to have been the final straw on both sides. There had been growing discontent in the SNP at the Green’s obsession with the whole trans agenda: self ID, conversion therapy, LGBT propaganda in schools. Most nationalists just want it all to go away like the Gender Recognition Bill. The SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC, one of the alleged culture warriors, spoke for many when she tweeted: ‘Out with identity politics and virtue signalling. In with policies to tackle the bread and butter issues that our constituents bring up on the doorsteps’.

So did Yousaf jump before he was pushed? Did the threat of a negative vote from the forthcoming meeting of the Scottish Green Party mean he was forced to dump them before he was dumped himself? We’ll never know. The Greens are probably correct in saying that a vote against the Bute House agreement was not a done deal at their extraordinary general meeting next month – nothing ever is in a party of mercurial climate activists. It is possible that the membership might have responded to Harvie’s threat to resign if they didn’t back his call to let him remain ‘in the room’ of government. But now that Harvie has been ejected unceremoniously from the room, his position as leader is surely untenable. His co-leader, the circular economy minister, Lorna Slater, is still in orbit and her position may take some time to determine. 

As for Yousaf’s position, opinions are divided. Some see this as the beginning of the end for the First Minister. He was just too supportive of the ‘progressive’ SNP-Green coalition – until he wasn’t. This could be the final nail in the coffin of his credibility, already damaged by a series of policy failures. 

His defenders, however, say he has finally ‘taken back control’ of the party and that his ruthless defenestration of the two Green ministers contradicts the frequently made claim that he is a weak leader. Moreover, camp Yousaf point out that it was Nicola Sturgeon who negotiated the Bute House deal and most of the green-related mishaps, like the Gender Recognition Bill, were part of her dubious legacy. Yousaf now has an opportunity to reset his administration, to come out of her shadow and be his own man. To speak, as he put it today, ‘with one voice’ – whatever that is.

The next few weeks and months will be crucial. After this shotgun divorce, the Greens will no doubt be looking for some kind of payback, perhaps by refusing to back future Scottish government budgets, as they did in 2009. Back then, the Scottish Labour Party saved the day by abstaining on its own budget amendment. Minority government cuts both ways: it forces opposition parties to act responsibly. But responsibility is unlikely to be forthcoming from Slater. She condemned the break up of Bute as ‘an act of political cowardice selling out future generations to appease the most reactionary and backward-looking forces in the country.’

Humza Yousaf, she said, has shown ‘he can never be trusted’. Well, from now on, she won’t have to.