Humza Yousaf has announced his resignation as First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party. His time was short, but he’s overseen a dramatic change in the party he’ll now cease to lead: a discipline once revered by opponents has given way to a party in open dissent.
As he prepares to leave the political stage what can Scotland remember him for?
- Yousaf, who became an MSP in 2011, rose quickly to the top job in Scottish politics. He first served as a minister under Alex Salmond within a year of his election. He was subsequently transport minister in 2017 when Nicola Sturgeon launched the Glen Sannox ferry onto the Clyde with no interior and painted on windows. But Yousaf will be out of office before the Sannox completes her sea trials making him Scotland’s second shortest First Minister in terms of time in office. Salmond has already described him as ‘Humza the Brief’.
- For the first time in 17 years of power the SNP’s policy failures and political mishaps are catching up with them in the polls. Yousaf’s predecessor Sturgeon saw near limitless success for herself and her party before the police came knocking on her and her husband’s door. Now Labour have overtaken the nationalists in some polls for the first time since the 2014 referendum. Perhaps more remarkable than this dip though is how resilient the core SNP vote has remained, with most surveys suggesting they’ll still take the most votes in a future Holyrood election. Support for independence remains fairly high too. Whether that's because of, or despite, his leadership is open to debate.
- Yousaf served nearly two years in the Health brief before taking on the leadership and it’s fair to say it wasn’t a happy time. The pandemic and the SNP government’s response certainly hasn’t helped with huge rises in long A&E waits, worsening cancer waiting times and a growing treatment backlog now endemic in Scotland’s health service. A poorly performing NHS is hardly unique to Scotland or the SNP given the equally dire health system presided over by Labour in Wales and the Conservatives in England, but it’s harder to stomach when nearly £300 more is spent on health per Scot compared with England. During Yousaf’s stretch as Health Secretary, Health Board CEOs warned the Scottish NHS was at risk of ‘falling over’ too.
- Scotland’s terrible record on drug deaths – worse than anywhere else in the UK or Europe – is something more associated with Nicola Sturgeon given how long she had to tackle the problem. But a report from the World Health Organisation released last week showed Scottish teenagers were more likely to smoke cannabis than any other country surveyed. There’s no signs Yousaf has done anything to tackle Scotland’s drug problem during his time in office.
- The Hate Crime and Public Order Act will be what most remember Humza Yousaf’s time in the Scottish government for. The Act was shepherded through Holyrood by Yousaf as justice secretary and finally implemented by the police just weeks ago. It’s already been ridiculed around the world and has been widely abused putting unprecedented pressure on Scotland’s already stretched police force. Over 9,500 alleged hate crimes have been reported to police so far this year and it’s already having a chilling effect. April has seen more ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’ recorded than any previous year.
- If there’s one thing Humza Yousaf deserves credit for it’s his reversal of the 2010 decision to remove the country from the international Timms and Pirls education studies. Removing Scottish schools from these international comparison tables was a cynical attempt to hide the problems faced by what was once an education system the world envied. Still, Yousaf refused to apologise for the latest PISA results which showed Scots pupils fell the equivalent of one year of learning behind their English counterparts, something described at the time as ‘catastrophic’ by the country's leading educationalist.
- Ditching the Greens has cost Yousaf the keys to Bute House but the agreement with Scotland’s hard-left party was cheered on for much of his premiership. Green policies that he supported included extending the rent cap and bringing forward legislation for future rent freezes. That rent cap was intended to help ease the cost of living but, as all of economic history might predict, the opposite came true. The property listings site Zoopla says it led to rents being set higher at the start of tenancies and as a result Scotland has seen the highest rental inflation in the UK. It’s even worse in suburban Scotland with Midlothian, Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire all seeing rent inflation of over 12 per cent – well above the regional average.
- The outgoing First Minister’s biggest contribution to Scotland’s economic fortunes has been what he called his ‘progressive income tax’. In practice that meant introducing an ‘advanced rate’ at 45p – bringing the number of bands to six – and increasing the top rate by 1p. But the Scottish Fiscal Commission (McOBR) said most of the increase would be undone by ‘behaviour change’ – people crossing the border to escape higher taxes. Earlier tax changes under Sturgeon led to more than 1,000 higher rate tax payers moving out of Scotland according to a Treasury analysis released last week. Kate Forbes, a possible successor, has questioned whether this approach to tax is right, calling continual tax raising: ‘counter-productive over the long term’. Could she be about to take Scotland’s economy in a different direction?
As Scotland approaches a quarter of a century of devolution it’s striking how hard it has been to hold its to account. The Scottish government famously has more press officers than the BBC has reporters, the country is near devoid of think tanks and the third sector is so reliant on government cash that it has become supine. Numbers can change that though and as Scotland enters the next 25 years of devolved government we’ll be tracking policy outcomes, demographic change and economic impacts on a special Scotland section of The Spectator’s Data Hub. Stick it in your bookmarks!
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