Scotland

Wednesday

Iain Macwhirter

Is Humza Yousaf destined for Liz Truss’s fate?

We knew that Humza Yousaf wasn’t the sharpest tool in the ministerial box but no one expected him to mess up quite so spectacularly on his first day.  It only took the new First Minister a couple of hours to undermine his own authority and provoke a potentially ruinous split in the Scottish National Party. Way to go, Humza!  Forcing his rival Kate Forbes out of his cabinet by making her an offer she couldn’t accept – demotion to rural affairs – Yousaf has deepened the divisions that emerged during the leadership campaign. He has also exposed as false his claim to be a unifier; has lost the most capable minister in the Scottish

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Humza’s latest gaffe has cost him a finance secretary

Dear oh dear. It seems the newly-elected gaffe-prone First Minister of Scotland has blundered once again. Shortly after announcing that former social justice secretary – and Sturgeon’s old chum – Shona Robison would be his deputy, Humza Yousaf spoke to Kate Forbes about her place in his new cabinet. Widely expected to give her a top job, if only for appearances, the former finance secretary was said to be less than happy when he proposed to, er, demote her to rural affairs. She was so displeased in fact that she reportedly told the FM ‘where to stick it’, and promptly quit the government thereafter. So much for party unity. Yousaf’s

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Kate Forbes quitting is a nightmare for the SNP

Kate Forbes has reportedly quit the Scottish government after new SNP leader Humza Yousaf offered her the job of rural affairs secretary. Given that Forbes has been finance secretary for the past three years, and a junior finance minister for two years before that, it’s a fairly transparent play: humiliate her into quitting government altogether.  After all, it would be the equivalent of Rishi Sunak reshuffling Jeremy Hunt to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Arguably it’s worse, because Forbes spent years rebuilding relations with the business community, which had been good under Alex Salmond but fell off a cliff once Nicola Sturgeon took over. It is widely understood that

Lucy Dunn

Kate Forbes quits government after Humza Yousaf’s job snub

Humza Yousaf announced on Tuesday, after being voted in by 71 MSPs as Scotland’s First Minister, that Shona Robison would be his deputy. The long-term friend of Nicola Sturgeon will now help Yousaf decide who he will appoint to his cabinet, a decision that will set the tone for the next year and a half of his leadership.  While earlier it was unclear what Yousaf would offer Kate Forbes, it was on Tuesday evening revealed that Yousaf’s main competitor has been offered the rural affairs portfolio. Rejecting this offer, Forbes has now quit government and will go to the back benches.  Now it has been confirmed that Ivan McKee, Forbes’s original campaign

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will Kate Forbes’s attacks come back to bite Humza Yousaf?

Humza Yousaf is now officially the First Minister of Scotland, after Holyrood voted in favour of him taking over from Nicola Sturgeon. Yousaf secured the votes of all his 71 SNP colleagues and Scottish Greens.  The process in Holyrood allows other candidates to nominate themselves for the role too, so the party leaders of the Scottish Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats each put themselves forward and gave short speeches in favour of their candidacy. In practice, this was largely an opportunity for those three MSPs to set out their attack key lines on a new First Minister. All of them declared the SNP as being past it. Liberal Democrat

Jawad Iqbal

Humza Yousaf and the myth about Britain’s diversity problem

Humza Yousaf, the new First Minister of Scotland after his victory in the SNP leadership election, deserves his moment in the sun. Yousaf is Scotland’s first ethnic minority leader and the first Muslim leader of the governing party. Legitimate questions about whether he is up to the job must wait while credit is given for the scale of his achievement in reaching the top of Scottish politics at the tender age of 37. Yousaf’s triumph heralds another significant milestone in the rapidly changing political complexion of the United Kingdom: the barriers to progress for those from non-white backgrounds are disappearing, a remarkable development that would have been implausible just a

James Esses

Humza Yousaf’s election should concern us all

Scotland has been deprived of the opportunity for a fresh start. Humza Yousaf has been elected leader of the Scottish National party, and he is set to be confirmed as first minister today in the Scottish parliament.  Yousaf defeated runner-up Kate Forbes by 52 to 48 per cent on second preference votes. The margin of victory is somewhat ironic, considering that, when the UK voted to leave the European Union by the same ratio, the SNP argued this was not a sufficient mandate and there should be another vote. Despite this, Scotland will now have to prepare for life under a new first minister. And Yousaf’s election should concern us all. 

Monday

Lucy Dunn

Can Humza Yousaf unite the SNP?

It was announced to a particularly tense room at 2 p.m. that Humza Yousaf had won the SNP leadership race. The contest was expected to be close and many people assumed that if second preferences were accounted for, Kate Forbes would most likely prevail. Ash Regan’s voters didn’t quite manage to swing it in Forbes’s favour and Yousaf won by just over 2,000 votes. He is set to become both the youngest first minister of Scotland, and the first Muslim leader in the UK. For him, this election win means breaking records and perhaps Yousaf thought this pattern would continue when he made his first move as leader of the

Andy Maciver

Why Humza Yousaf should make Kate Forbes his deputy

Five weeks ago, Kate Forbes’ leadership campaign looked to be dead and buried. She had set her campaign on fire, Scottish political commentators said, by launching her socially conservative views on gay marriage on the nation. Today, despite the widespread opprobrium by her party colleagues, nearly half of the SNP membership voted for her to be their leader, and the country’s First Minister. Over half, though, voted for Humza Yousaf, and tomorrow he will be elected as Scotland’s First Minister. What then? Perhaps Yousaf can use the closeness of this result to his advantage. The so-called ‘best of both worlds’ is much sought after in politics and this may now be

Iain Macwhirter

Humza Yousaf won’t be celebrating for long

Humza Yousaf has a reputation for being a bit of a crowd-pleaser and, true to form, everyone seemed inordinately happy at his installation as SNP leader – especially the opposition parties. The Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross purred like an overstuffed tabby cat. Yousaf had just scraped home by 52 to 48 per cent – a less than wholehearted endorsement from the SNP membership after a leadership election in which independence somehow got lost in the hustings. Sir Keir Starmer sounded over the moon too and the sigh of relief from No. 10 could be heard all the way from Murrayfield. Perhaps Forbes thinks she’s dodged a bullet this time Kate

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Is Humza Yousaf up to the task?

As expected, Humza Yousaf has won the SNP leadership election and, barring something extraordinary, will become the next First Minister of Scotland. Yousaf may have been the bookies’ choice but that’s about as far as the favourability extends. Yousaf had a -20 rating with the general public of Scotland and only +11 with his own party (just 33 per cent of the party’s 72,000 members voted for him). Yousaf is widely regarded as incompetent, gaffe prone, and charmless. His much-tweeted speech on the ‘whiteness’ of Scottish society, which seemed designed to annoy the 96 per cent of Scots who are Caucasian, is one of the most controversial in the inglorious

Lucy Dunn

Humza Yousaf wins the SNP leadership election

Humza Yousaf has won the race to become the next leader of the Scottish National party. Yousaf defeated his rival Kate Forbes by 52 per cent to 48 per cent after Ash Regan was eliminated in the first round of voting. Yousaf has been the SNP establishment’s preferred candidate from the outset; he received the backing of senior party politicians, including Westminster leader Stephen Flynn and outgoing deputy first minister John Swinney. While Yousaf is Sturgeon’s continuity candidate, the former health secretary has a lot of work to do to convince the people of Scotland he is up to the job. The margin of his victory was much narrower than

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

Ten yardsticks to judge Humza Yousaf by as first minister

Humza Yousaf is the new leader of the SNP and in the coming days will be sworn in at the Court of Session in Edinburgh as the county’s sixth first minister. He inherits a bickering party and almost a decade of electoral stalemate over independence. It is far from clear what legacy his predecessor leaves in her wake. She took the SNP Alex Salmond built and cemented it as Scotland’s natural party of government, winning election after election with seemingly little effort. But many would argue she has left the country in no better shape than the day she took over in November 2014. For Yousaf to be a success he surely

Lucy Dunn

What happens after the SNP leadership results are announced?

Shortly after 2 p.m., the results of the SNP leadership election will be announced at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium. Three candidates are vying to succeed First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, though it is widely accepted that the race is really only between the two frontrunners; the winner is expected to be Humza Yousaf or Kate Forbes. While it’s still uncertain which candidate will win, today’s announcement will come as a relief to many politicians and party members who have followed a contest that has, at many points, proved damaging to the SNP’s reputation.  Last week saw a heated exchange between the leaders of the opposition parties and the current First Minister during

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What does today’s SNP leadership election mean for Scottish Labour?

Unionist politicians are warming up for what they hope will be one of the biggest opportunities of the past two decades to undermine the independence cause. Whoever wins the SNP leadership contest today is taking over a party that doesn’t know its own kind any more – and a government that’s struggling to blame its record entirely on Westminster.  That’s one of the reasons Anas Sarwar has called for a snap Holyrood election. The Scottish Labour leader today argued that the new First Minister would have to seek their own mandate, saying: This is an SNP that screams about mandates: let’s be honest, the next SNP First Minister will not

Sunday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Scotland is better off without the Greens in government

Just who do the Scottish Greens think they are? They provide a mere seven seats to the SNP’s 64 and they won 1.3 per cent of the vote in the constituency section of the Holyrood elections in 2021 (they had 8.1 per cent in the regional section). In return for that meagre offering they think they have the right to end economic growth in Scotland. No wonder at all then that Kate Forbes and Ash Regan are unbothered by the prospect of the Greens leaving government – maybe even pushing them out should they win the SNP leadership – and only Humza Yousaf has signed up to their ‘non-negotiable’ demands

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Why Kate Forbes is still the SNP’s best hope

They have thrown everything at Kate Forbes. She has been subjected to a secular inquisition marked by triviality and partiality. Journalism is a trade neither teeming with religious believers nor one well-equipped for Biblical exegesis, and it shows.  ‘Gotcha’ interrogation has focused on scriptural provisions offensive to progressive attitudes pervasive among journalists (e.g. on homosexuality and fornication) and not other teachings with as much potential bearing on policymaking, such as the iniquities of the rich and powerful or the superior virtue of the poor and meek.  Contemporary norms against judging a professional woman by her husband’s views or actions have been suspended to weaponise the attendance of Alasdair MacLennan, Forbes’s spouse, at

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The SNP candidate that could be Sunak’s secret weapon

In less than 24 hours the winner of the SNP leadership contest will be announced. Yet it’s safe to say that whoever triumphs, the growing consensus is that the result will be a net plus for the SNP’s political opponents. Over the course of the short contest – sparked by Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation – the party has given way to in-fighting as Humza Yousaf, Kate Forbes and Ash Regan have torn chunks out of one another. There has been collateral – with Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband, resigning as SNP chief executive along with communications director Murray Foote over an alleged cover up over a fall in the party’s membership

Iain Macwhirter

Is Alex Salmond behind the SNP’s implosion?

Only six weeks ago the Scottish National Party seemed unchallengeable. Its leader, Nicola Sturgeon dominated Scottish politics at every level, was fêted by the metropolitan liberal elite and feared by Tory ministers in WhatsApp messages. Now she’s history, her party is in chaos and her key lieutenants including her husband, chief executive Peter Murrell, have fallen on their swords. One of Europe’s most successful political parties, which until recently threatened to break up Britain, has now broken itself in the most spectacular fashion. It’s hard to think of anything outside political fiction that equates to the self-inflicted misfortune that has engulfed the SNP since Sturgeon resigned, out of the blue, on

Saturday

Lucy Dunn

What is Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy?

Whatever your thoughts on the SNP, the Union or indeed Scotland, it cannot be denied that Nicola Sturgeon will leave a permanent mark on Britain’s political landscape. Whether that mark is good or bad will no doubt be the focus of intense debate for years to come. Making her 286th and final First Minister’s Questions closing speech this week, the usually immovable First Minister was close to tears. This resignation is to her likely bittersweet given she did not end up achieving Scottish independence. And this raises the question: after holding the first minister position for eight years, what actually changed in that time?  Soon after she became first minister