When Humza Yousaf tore up a power-sharing deal with the Scottish Greens last Thursday at Bute House, he sought to improve his nationalist party’s prospects by shifting away from the progressive policies associated with the coalition.
Four days later, that political miscalculation boomeranged back on the first minister in historic fashion as Yousaf returned to his official Edinburgh residence to announce he was quitting after barely a year in office.
The resignation of Scotland’s first ethnic minority leader has lurched the country back into political turmoil as the Scottish National party begins another leadership contest — just 14 months after Yousaf’s predecessor Nicola Sturgeon stepped down in the midst of a police probe into the SNP.
The renewed political chaos surrounding Scotland’s largest party, weary after 17 years in power at Holyrood, has also provided the opposition Labour party with an opening to make deep strides back into SNP territory at the UK general election. It has just two Scottish MPs in Westminster, far from its heyday under Sir Tony Blair when Labour had 56.
“The UK government and Scottish government have many parallels, there have been three prime ministers since the last UK election and there will have been three first ministers since the last Scottish elections,” Ian Murray, Labour’s shadow Scotland secretary, told the Financial Times.
“For Liz Truss, read Humza Yousaf; for Nicola Sturgeon read Boris Johnson; for whoever comes next, read Rishi Sunak,” Murray added.
Yousaf’s tenure was a landmark for the UK as the first Muslim leader of a major British political party. It was also marked by crisis after crisis.
He inherited a police investigation into the SNP’s finances. Sturgeon’s husband and former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell was charged earlier this month. Sturgeon herself was arrested last year and released without charge.
But Yousaf has also had to reckon with fatigue over the SNP’s long years in office. The party has been running Scotland’s devolved government since 2007. Under Yousaf, the Scottish opposition has landed blows on the government’s record on core issues, such as declining educational attainment on compared to England.
“The SNP has not come to terms with the defeat of independence 10 years ago,” said James Mitchell, a professor of public policy at the University of Edinburgh. “It simply carried on campaigning, neglecting every day public concerns.”
The SNP has also been divided over whether it has focused too much on social issues — such as legislation making it easier for people to legally change gender, which was blocked by the UK government last year, and a recent controversial hate crime law. Yousaf’s break with the Greens was driven by a belief within the SNP that their influence was distancing the government from mainstream public opinion.
An SNP strategist said the party’s decision to tack towards bread-and-butter issues, such as the economy and public services, would benefit the incoming first minister.
“This new [approach] was created by Humza, who has unfortunately become the pound of flesh sacrificed to that process,” the strategist said.
Douglas Alexander, a former Labour cabinet minister who is standing again in the general election, described the SNP’s woes as the end result of a decade of “performative populism” that had failed to deliver a competent government.
“The SNP has now been in power here in Scotland longer than the iPhone has been invented and yet it’s hard to think of a single aspect of our public life that has improved,” he said.
From 1959, the Labour party regularly won a majority of Scottish seats in general elections, peaking at 56 out of 72 in New Labour’s 1997 landslide victory: it enjoyed almost unrivalled hegemony.
But the rise of the SNP at Holyrood, combined with the close-run independence vote in 2014, galvanised the nationalist vote behind the SNP, leaving Labour with just a single seat in Scotland at the 2019 UK general election. Sir Keir Starmer’s party picked up a second seat from the SNP in a by-election last year. This year, it is predicted to rebound significantly.
Labour party strategists believe its support is more concentrated in key target seats, with the nationalist vote more thinly spread everywhere. One senior Labour figure said the party was on track to get “24, 25, 26 seats” in the general election: “That could be enough to make us the largest party in Scotland in Westminster seats.”
There is undisguised glee among Labour politicians about the plight of their Scottish rivals, the downfall of both Sturgeon and Yousaf, and the challenges facing their successor.
“The problem the SNP has is that the person who would be best at the job may not be the person who can command a majority in Holyrood,” said one.
Whoever follows Yousaf as SNP leader will still have to grapple with the tough arithmetic that brought him down. The SNP secured 63 MSPs in 2021, short of the 65 needed for a majority. Yousaf’s successor will need to not just win the support of their party, but the toleration of the opposition.
One leading contender is Kate Forbes MSP, who was defeated by Yousaf in a bitter leadership race last year. She is regarded as a sharp political operator feared by unionist parties, but her social and economic conservatism is unpalatable for Greens and left-leaning SNP members.
But others warned Labour against overconfidence. Andy Maciver, cofounder of consultancy Message Matters, said the SNP would probably pivot towards a more pragmatic, economy-focused agenda, similar to that Labour has successfully followed in recent years.
“The SNP is inevitably moving towards the people’s priorities, economy, health, education, so the juxtaposition between [Scottish Labour leader] Anas Sarwar and the next first minister will be more opaque,” he said.
“The reality is you want to fight the opponent against whom you have the best chance — and Labour would have fancied pitting themselves against Humza Yousaf.”
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