Humza Yousaf has a difficult road ahead of him

It was, by his own admission, a ‘not ideal’ set of circumstances for Humza Yousaf’s speech setting out his priorities as First Minister, with the arrest of the party treasurer just hours before he was due in the Scottish parliament chamber amid the ongoing investigation into the party’s finances. Then again, there were a lot of ‘not ideal’ policies that Yousaf had to deal with.

Despite previously boasting that he would have Nicola Sturgeon on ‘speed dial’, Yousaf spent a fair bit of today’s speech distancing himself from Sturgeon’s policies: a delay to the deposit return scheme and the vote on (his) National Care Service Bill, as well as a review on plans to restrict advertising of alcohol. His commitment to continuity came in the form of blaming the UK government, in this instance for ‘delaying the decision to exclude the [deposit return] scheme from the Internal Market Act’.

Yousaf added, almost as an afterthought, that there had also been concerns from businesses about the controversial scheme’s readiness for a launch in August. There was also a ‘cost crisis made worse by the UK government’s economic mismanagement’ and the Scottish government’s ability to deal with the pressure on the public finances was ‘being constrained by UK government spending decisions and a lack of borrowing powers’. The ‘cost to Scotland of not being independent has never been clearer,’ he argued. 

But the cost of the Scottish government itself wasn’t something he was prepared to acknowledge: he spoke only of education, for instance, in terms of rejoining international statistics systems on school performance ‘as part of our efforts to improve school performance’. The NHS was part of his third mission to focus on the delivery of public services including the NHS and social care, schools and childcare – but the former health secretary knows all too well that the health service is in a ‘not ideal’ state and that even less ideally, Scottish voters tend to blame him for that, given he was until recently directly responsible for that policy area.

The opposition parties feasted on what they variously called a ‘meltdown’ and a ‘plodding’ speech that showed the SNP had run out of ideas and road. Yousaf’s policy prospectus claimed to offer a ‘fresh start’ for Scotland, and insisted that the new FM will ‘build the case for a socially just, independent Scotland within the European Union’. But the meltdown in his party means the first case he will have to build is one arguing the SNP still has the ability to run its own show, let alone the Scottish government.