The final tragedy of ‘Humza the Brief’

The resignation of Humza Yousaf as First Minister of Scotland marks not just the beginning of the end for him, nor simply for the 17-year long SNP government, but for any hopes of Scottish independence happening in the lifetime of most SNP members. Yousaf might even take devolution with him since the Scottish public are at their wits’ end with the behaviour of the politicians – all of them – who have occupied the Scottish parliament like student activists taking over the university court.

Yousaf was always a hopeless case politically. Nice guy – shame about the nous. Not for nothing was he called Humza ‘Useless’ even before he was elected. His SNP leadership rival, Kate Forbes, brutally deconstructed his ministerial career in the party’s leadership TV debate last year, leaving Yousaf speechless. 

Now he is lost for words to explain how he can survive this week’s motions of no confidence without handing the fate of his administration to Alex Salmond’s Alba Party. SNP MSPs cannot, it seems, swallow the idea of his administration being saved by the casting vote of Alba’s only MSP Ash Regan. But by rejecting Salmond’s terms, the SNP have placed themselves in the hands of the very Scottish Green Party who have just been shown the door. They, not Salmond, will now effectively be the king makers, since only their votes can install an alternative to Yousaf.

I make no claims of foresight in having forecast last year that Yousaf would be unlikely to last past the next election. Everyone felt the same – even many in the SNP. Yousaf was over promoted by a party that no longer knew what it was in government for and had harnessed itself to a delinquent party of gender zealots. As a member of an ethnic minority, SNP MSPs perhaps thought Yousaf would get an easy ride from the media. Well, that turned out well. 

The ‘continuity candidate’ was elected at precisely the moment when the SNP needed discontinuity from the ‘woke’ progressive authoritarianism that had taken root under Nicola Sturgeon. The irony is that Yousaf has had to fall on his sword for doing the right thing for once: getting rid of the Greens. If only he had done it sooner many of his worst disasters might not have happened. 

The Deposit Return Scheme that collapsed after a boycott by 4,000 small businesses; the Highly Protected Marine Areas rules that caused a Highland rebellion; the bonkers heat-in-buildings plan to scrap a million gas boilers by 2030; and, of course, the endless genuflection to the dogma that transwomen are women. All these, and many more policy failures, not least the hopelessly unrealistic 2030 climate emissions targets, were Green inspired. 

Of course, Humza added his own cock ups to the inventory of misfortune. The illiberal Hate Crime Act, which he promoted so assiduously, has damaged Scotland’s image abroad as a country that values freedom of speech and lively debate. He persevered with Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill – currently stalled by the UK government – after it was obvious to all that it was dead following the scandal of a trans rapist being placed in a women’s prison. He sensibly abandoned Sturgeon’s daft and undemocratic ploy of turning the next general election into a ‘defacto’ referendum on independence. Then he replaced this with an equally daft notion of declaring a majority of seats the ‘trigger’ for Indyref2.

But Yousaf’s biggest failures were in precisely those areas he now says are his priority: health, education and the economy. One in seven Scots is on a hospital waiting list; Scottish education is in steep decline, and his only answer to the black hole in public finances was to increase taxes on every Scot earning over £28,000 and hand out over-generous pay awards to public sector workers without securing any significant productivity gains. Since Yousaf was in government with the Greens who oppose economic growth in principle, it was perhaps unsurprising that the productive economy got lost in the thickets of ‘wellbeing’. 

The final tragedy of ‘Humza the Brief’, as Alex Salmond calls him, was that he has resigned after scrapping the Bute House Agreement. This after Green co-leader Patrick Harvie refused to accept the scientific validly of the Cass report on gender services with its call to pause the prescription of puberty blockers.

Unfortunately, Yousaf didn’t think through the arithmetic. Or at any rate, his MSPs could not accept the risk of letting the hated Alex Salmond hold the SNP government to ransom. Could he really have expected SNP MSPs like Nicola Sturgeon to hand the party back to their nemesis? Mind you, history may judge that the SNP should have held its nose and stuck with Yousaf and the Alba party’s Ash Regan this week – because the alternative is even worse. The SNP government is now effectively hostage to the very Green MSPs who have contributed to the government’s downfall. Regan’s vote in the confidence motion is the only thing keeping the Greens from effectively deciding the next leader of the SNP.

Lorna Slater and co are certainly not going to support the ‘socially conservative’ former finance secretary, Kate Forbes, even though she is arguably the most competent candidate. If Harvie gets his way, it will probably be the education secretary, Jenny Gilruth, who’ll take over after an interregnum in which someone like John Swinney, the former deputy First Minister, acts as caretaker. Gilruth is a Sturgeon clone who supports the Gender Bill and wants a ban on trans ‘conversion therapy’. She also happens to be married to the former Scottish Labour leader, Kezia Dugdale. 

So it is back to continuity with the disastrous Sturgeon era. And continuity with electoral decline. Gilruth will not prevent the SNP from crashing even further at the forthcoming general election. But then there is probably no politician alive who could salvage this divided, discredited and directionless political party. The SNP has gone from landslide victory to pariah status in less than a decade. As recently as the 2010 general election, the SNP returned only six seats against Labour’s 41 in Scotland. Who’s to say that history is not about to repeat itself?

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