As he took office last week commentators, myself included, compared the new First Minister Humza Yousaf to Liz Truss, the chaotic, unpopular and short-lived former leader of the Conservative Party. Yousaf is similarly unpopular with voters, has a record of serial ministerial failure and, like Truss, has surrounded himself with a cabinet of cronies. Nor is Yousaf expected to linger very long in Bute House. Right on cue, the first poll since Humza’s installation as FM shows the SNP lead over Labour cut to 6 per cent – enough for the nationalists to lose 18 seats in next year’s general election.
However, now we have seen the First Minister’s priorities after his first week in office, perhaps the better comparison is not with Liz Truss but with Jeremy Corbyn. The Humza ministerial team is what a Corbyn cabinet might have looked like had Jezza won in 2017: young, red-green and pronoun-friendly, complete with a minister, Emma Roddick, who describes herself ‘queer’. Yousaf’s policy agenda is very Labour manifesto 2017. Public spending, wealth taxes, gender reform and sustainable energy, all packaged with greenwash and homilies about wellbeing.
The Guardian columnist, Owen Jones, penned a guest column in the nationalist tabloid, The National, giving Team Humza, the Labour left imprimatur. He portrayed Scotland as a land newly liberated from the dark forces of international transphobic neoliberalism. ‘If Kate Forbes had triumphed’ he thundered, ‘it would have been hailed as a victory for social reactionaries across the Western world’. It was all he could to stop himself chanting ‘Oh Humza Yousaf’.
Yousaf has made student politics into a principle of governance. There shall be no truck with capitalists, who as we all know are responsible for climate chaos, colonialism and slavery. Indeed, business has been cancelled by Humza. There is no longer a dedicated ministerial post of that name now the former business minister, Ivan McKee, has gone to join the former Finance Secretary, Kate Forbes on the backbenches. There they are expected to atone for having the temerity to win the votes of nearly half the SNP membership. Yousaf’s locking out his rivals was very much of the Glasgow University student handbook. None of his 28 strong ministerial list comes from the Kate or Ash Regan camps. Unity is for wimps.
Yousaf has made student politics into a principle of governance
Forbes was offered a demotion to rural affairs which she could not except. Yousaf then got ministers to say that actually, the poor dear, has her hands full with the new born baby. ‘For Kate it was all about work-life balance’ said matronly Shona Robison the new deputy FM. Though curiously Forbes seemed to think she could live in balance with with the much bigger job of First Minister only a few days previously. It sounded like heteronormative sexism. Perhaps Forbes should sue for constructive dismissal.
Forbes’s former brief, Finance and Economy, has been split down the middle. The crony in chief, Neil Gray, Humza’s campaign manager, is now in charge of the ‘wellbeing economy’. No one knows what a wellbeing economy is but we can assume it does not involve Scotland’s biggest engineering industry, North Sea oil and gas. Nor will the caring sharing economy have much time for the thousands of small businesses who say they’ll be ruined by the Deposit Return Scheme for bottles and cans. Yousaf said during the campaign that there would be a rethink on the disastrous DRS but now he is the boss it seems to be game on again – and under the same Green Minister, Lorna Slater, who had driven it into the ground. Given the fiasco over the Island Ferries – five years late and three times over budget – perhaps it’s a good thing that Humza is giving the economy a wide berth.
In place of growth we are likely to see wealth taxes and universal basic income. Humza is determined that the wealthy should pay more, even though at present the top 16 per cent of tax-payers account for 60 per cent of revenues, according to the Fraser Of Allender Institute. Scotland’s problem isn’t that high earners aren’t being taxed but that there aren’t enough high earners to generate funds for the SNP’s social programmes like Humza’s troubled National Care Service.
The other bit of Kate Forbes’ old department, finance, has been handed to the above mentioned veteran MSP Shona Robison. She has no experience of business or finance, except what she learned when she was forced to resign as Health Secretary in 2018 over a financial mismanagement scandal at Tayside Health Board.
The term plodding could have been invented for this cabinet workhorse. Robison was brought back by Nicola Sturgeon to mastermind the Gender Recognition Reform Bill which she handled so adroitly that it is now stalled under Section 35 of the Scotland Act on the grounds that the policy of Self-ID for trans people conflicts with women’s rights under the UK Equality Act.
Yousaf insisted last week that he would immediately challenge this ‘power grab’ by taking Westminster to court to overturn the S35 block on the GRR Bill. Big talk. Yet only last week he seemed to be backing off this kamikaze assault on the UK Supreme Court. ‘If you get an unequivocal answer from your Lord Advocate that says this cannot be won’, he told the Times Radio debate, ‘you would do the responsible thing and not take that to court’. But almost his first act after convening a photo-op prayer meeting in Bute House was to order Ms Robison to blunder on regardless.
The second thing he did on becoming First Minster was to demand a Section 30 Order to trigger an independence referendum. That was politely rebuffed by a spokesman for Rishi Sunak who said drily: ‘I think you know our well-established position.’
So there we have it. Humza’s first week ends not with a bang but with a whimper. After the recess he will spell out his programme for government – a uniquely tartan version of Corbynism. Owen Jones will no doubt be coming north to celebrate the New Jerusalem. But judging by Yousaf’s popularity which has slumped to minus 20 the Scottish voters have already made their excuses and left.
Comments